Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1987, Qupperneq 19

»Sandoyarbók«:
A Faroese Ballad Collection,
Its Collector and
Patricia Conroy
Johannes Clemensen’s2 career as a ballad
collector began in 1818 when the Reverend
Peder Hentze delegated to his parishioner
the task of meeting a request received from
Professor P. E. Múller of Copenhagen.
Earlier that year, Professor Muller had
learned of H.C. Lyngbye’s discovery of
Faroese heroic ballads treating the Sigurd
legend and had written to Hentze on Sand-
oy, asking that Hentze send copies of what-
ever ballad texts he could find dealing with
this legend and with other ancient themes.
And so it was that Hentze set Clemensen
the task of assembling as many suitable
texts as he could. Clemensen, who was in
ill health at the time, recorded a scant eigh-
teen ballad texts, which were then sent to
Múller in Copenhagen.
Clemensen’s fame as a collector does not
stem from this modest first collection, how-
ever, but rather from his second, larger
one. The manuscript of this larger collec-
tion is known as »Sandoyarbók« (The
Book of Sandoy), a name given it by the
Danish folklorist Svend Grundtvig when
the Community1
he purchased it in 1872 from Clemensen’s
heirs. Clemensen began his second collec-
ting effort in 1821, after he had regained
his health; ten years later, his manuscript
collection had grown to comprise a total of
ninety-three texts. Most importantly,
Clemensen appended to his fair copy from
1831 an explanatory postscript and a re-
gister containing the title of each ballad in
the collection, along with the name of the
informant, the village in which the infor-
mant resided, and the date on which the
text was recorded.
The importance of Clemensen’s »Sand-
oyarbók« cannot be exaggerated. It com-
prises the most intensive collecting effort
undertaken in any one Faroese district dur-
ing the nineteenth century. Furthermore,
the information contained in the »Sand-
oyarbók« register sets this collection apart
as the single most useful source for the
study of the workings of an early nine-
teenth-century Faroese ballad community:
with this information we can not only as-
certain, at least in part, the repertoires of
Fróðskaparrit 34.-35. bók (1986-87): 23-41