Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1978, Page 26

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Sniolvs kvæði
centuries but before that period of decay during which they
were collected in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Not only are we left to our own devices to deduce how old
»young« is, but we are told nothing about the criteria used
to distinguish younger ballads from older ones. A quick survey
of ballads labelled as young by Axel Olrik and Christian
Matras reveals that (1) none of them is believed to reflect di-
rectly a medieval Nordic or northern German narrative tradi-
tion; (2) none of them was collected by the earliest collectors,
Svabo, Schrøter, and Hentze; (3) none of them has been col-
lected in more than two variants; and (4) many of them fea-
ture heroes that originally belonged to separate epic traditions.
Unfortunately, the above features cannot be regarded as cri-
teria for identifying a young ballad because there are other
ballads in Faroese heroic tradition which also share these fea-
tures even though they have not been considered young. The
question, then, of which ballads are young and when and
wnere they were composed remains an interesting one because
of what the answers can tell us about the history of Faroese
ballad tradition as a whole.
The task of adducing the provenance of individual ballads
within Faroese tradition is not an easy one. To begin with,
except in unusual cases, ballads are handed down in oral tradi-
tion without any indication of their original composer or of
their date and place of composition. We are completely at the
mercy of the collector and what he has chosen to record for
what little we do know about them. For instance, when
travelling throughout the Faroes in 1781—1782, Svabo seems
only to have been interested in ballads as stories: he recorded
only the texts — never the melodies — and he gave no indi-
cation of who the singers were and in what villages the bal-
lads were sung. We are equally in the dark concerning the
collections of Pastor Schrøter from 1818 and P. Hentze frorn
1819 — they also were only interested in ballad texts and no-
thing else. However, insofar as Pastor Schrøter lived on Suð-
uroy and P. Hentze on Sandoy, it can assumed that their collec-