Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1975, Qupperneq 46

54
How old is the Faroese grannastevnaf
Septbr. 1798 til Amtmanden over Kiobenhavn Amt, ogsaa her passende
kunde anvendes i det omhandlede Tilfælde. — ....
The Cancelli replied agreeing, in a communication dated 22
November 1836, which the Amt received on 11 April 1837,
and the following day relayed to the landfúti, the sorinskrivari
and all the sýslumenn,1B
It is interesting that for sýslumaður Zachariasen the occasion
was not a grannastevna but »det sædvanlige passerede Politi-
Móde«. The origin of this meeting thus seems to lie in the
annual inquiry of the sýslumaður into how the Reskripter of
1757 and 1775 were being kept, and his duty under paragraphs
1 and 11 of the Forordning af 21. Maj 1777 angaaende Ager-
dyrkningen og Tieneste Folk to enquire each year into the state
of barley cultivation and whether any idle persons needed to
be placed in service. The earliest Sandoy Politi-Protokol (1777
—1838) contains, indeed, little else but entries on these sub-
jects. The name grannastevna, as applied particularly to this
meeting, we appear to owe to its use in this sense by Tillisch
and Ployen.17
The view that to the Faroese, the word grannastevna was at
this time an unfamiliar one, is confirmed by another early use
of the word in a Politi-Protokol entry by sýslumaður Weihe:
»Aar 1841 den 2 og 3 Martii under Omreise i Usteroe-Sysselet,
til Grannastevne blev det oplyst at efterfolgende Huusfædre
havde holdt Dandsestue paa den saakaldte Mishelligdage. . . .«
This is of course ordinary politiret business, and has nothing
to do with the grannastevna in its usually accepted sense.18
On 28 February 1842, Weihe reported to the Amt that cer-
tain householders had absented themselves from the Toftir
grannastevna. Weihe’s phrase for the meeting is now »den sæd-
vanlige grannastevne«, but the obligation on householders to
attend seems not to have been generally understood, and their
absence was due to a misunderstanding. In the end, Ployen
gave Weihe a mild reprimand for reporting the matter before
making a proper investigation. The following year, Weihe re-
cords having lectured the Eysturoy grannastevnur on what the