Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1987, Page 21

SANDOYARBÓK
25
the other hand, if Clemensen is wrong
about the specific dates but right about
associating both of his collections with the
promptings of important men, then we
must view him as perhaps more eager to
please than independently interested in the
ballads he was recording.
Although it is unlikely that Clemensen’s
reasons for starting a new collection in 1821
will ever be known with certainty, we are
not wholly ignorant of other facets of his
life, thanks to the autobiography appended
to his »Visebog« (a collection of psalms and
other songs in Danish that he worked on
throughout most of his life), as well as to
later biographical studies by M.A. Jacob-
sen and Ólavur Clementsen.4 We learn
from Clemensen himself that what educa-
tion he had was informal - he learned to
write chiefly by watching his father, who
was at that time sheriff of Sandoy, as he
kept the records required by his job. We
hear also that when he was a boy he
worked as a shepherd for his older brother,
who had obtained one of the royal lease-
holds at í Trøðum.5 Here Clemensen also
got to know the neighboring royal tenant’s
family well, especially the nephew Simon
Danielsen and cousin Hans Johannessen,
both of whom later became informants for
»Sandoyarbók«. In his autobiography
Clemensen often speaks of being ill. In
December of 1817 he came down with
»catarrhal fever«, and he recollects that he
lay seriously ill for eighteen weeks and was
convalescent for the better part of three ye-
ars afterwards. If his memory is reliable
concerning the severity and duration of his
illness, we can conclude that he had not
completely recovered his health at the time
of Hentze’s request for ballads in 1818 or
1819; and that, moreover, he may have
been just regaining his strength when he
started his second collection of heroic
ballads. During the following years he
enjoyed good health and was very active:
he not only collected ballads, but also did
his share of the work on his parents’ land,
served as Hentze’s part-time clerk, and in
1823 married and started a family. But two
years after he completed his 1831 fair copy
of »Sandoyarbók«, he was visited by illness
again, becoming a semi-invalid for the rest
of his life. He continued to be able to earn
a modest living as unofficial town clerk and
later as tithe-man; in 1838 he was given the
job of assembling crews for ferry duty
whenever the need arose, but his ballad
collecting days were over.
The Recording Process
The »Sandoyarbók« register shows that
Clemensen began recording ballads for his
new collection on 28 February 1821, when
he collected »Samsons kvæði« (CCF 113)
from Thomas Hansen, a farm hand who
worked for the royal tenant farmer, Trond
Pedersen, of Trøð in Skálavík. During the
next two months, Clemensen obtained
twelve ballads, among them the two ex-
tremely long cycles »Sjúrðar kvæði« (CCF
1) and »Sniolvs kvæði« (CCF 91). In 1822
he devoted much more time to his collec-
tion, working continuously except for the
busy months of summer and early autumn,
and by the end of December he had amas-
sed forty-nine new texts. He continued his
collecting through January, February, and
March of 1823, finally laying down his pen
on the first of April, after acquiring twenty-
one more ballads. When he married in