Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Page 436
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Michael Chesnutt
a written context unless we envisage a manuscript copy that was physi-
cally defective. This leaves us with the picture of a written fragment
that ended somewhere around the division between the second and third
cantos of Bevusar tættir, and of a reciter who had read or heard the frag-
ment but was unable to devise a coherent ending. That reciter’s ad hoc
realisation of the last few stanzas became fossilised, as it were, in
memorial reproduction.
6.
If Bevers saga was versified as a cycle of nmur towards the end of the
Middle Ages and adapted into Faroese before the Reformation,68 the
amputation of the original Faroese text could have antedated the oral
hyparchetype of A and B by up to a century and a half. From that re-
latively early stage in the life of the text until the writing down of
Maren Danielsdatter’s version on Sandoy we have a spån of three or
four centuries, and it has to be accepted that the text could have sur-
vived memorially for most of that length of time without significant
additional deterioration. This is not an exaggerated claim when com-
pared with the life histories of other Faroese poems such as Sjurdar
kvædi. At the other end of the chronological scale we have a record
from the mid-twentieth century of isolated stanzas of Bevusar tættir
and matching refrains sung by Albert Djurhuus (1912-1999), a man
bom in Sumba at the south tip of SuSuroy who knew these lines from
his uncle, Niklas Djurhuus. This Niklas was in tum the grandson of a
certain Mikkel Samuelsen (Mikkjal å Li5a, 1817-1891), also bom in
Sumba, and according to local tradition Mikkel Samuelsen was the last
man on Sufiuroy who really knew the ballad. Since the few lines sung
by Albert Djurhuus share all the substantive variants of the version
written down by Hammershaimb, the Djurhuus family must have ob-
tained the text directly or indirectly from Hammershaimb’s SuØuroy
informant, Peder Poulsen.69 Here we find ourselves in a period of ex-
68 The Icelandic evidence for a lost cycle of Bevussrtmur and the alterations that may be-
long to its original Faroese adaptation are succinctly discussed by Sanders in Bevers
saga, introduction cxxxv, cxxxvii-cxxxix.
69 Cf. FK VIII 315-16, ballad no. FKL 112,1-2; Nolsøe (as n. 51) 47. For ballad copying
in the Djurhuus family see Eivind Weyhe, I midjum grasgardi. Rannsoknir t kvædaupp-
skriftum ur Suduroy, Annales Societatis Scientiarum Færoensis Supplementum 38 (Tors-
havn 2003), 157, 170.