Towards a Monolingual Canon

Towards a Monolingual Canon Faroese and Danish on the Faroe Islands « Malan Marnersdóttir » The focus of this article is links between literature written in Faroese and in Danish. These lang uages have coexisted on the Faroe Islands since the Lutheran Reformation in the fifteenth century. As the title of this article indicates, the relationship between the two languages has changed: whereas Danish was the official language and the only written language on the Faroes, it is now considered the first other language. Faroese took over the role of main language with the institution of Home Rule in 1948 which also stipulates that Danish has to be taught well. At that time, a Faroese literary canon had been under construction for about a century and a half, beginning with the collection of traditional oral poetry. The crossing of language boundaries has been vital in the construction of a Faroese literature in terms of both new forms and new ideas. Background The Faroes are a group of 18 islands covering an area of 1,399 km2 in the North Atlantic. Today the population is almost 50,000, which is three times as large as it was in 1901. Norwegian farmers settled on the Faroes in the ninth century, and in the fourteenth century the country came under Danish rule, together with Norway. The Lutheran Reformation of 1537 meant that Danish became both the language of faith and the official language on the Faroes. The most influential literary transfer has been the Danish Bible and the new hymns of the Reforma tion. The official Faroese Bible was first published in 1961 and the official hymn book in 1960. Despite the fact that for centuries all reading on the Faroes was in Danish, the spoken language has always been Faroese. 134 Malan Marnersdóttir The colonial hegemony also included economic regulations. The Danish crown com missioned Faroese trade to different commercial companies.1 From 1709 to 1856 the Royal Danish Monopoly was responsible for all imports to and exports from the Faroes, which meant that the Far oese were not allowed to trade with anybody else. In the last decade of the eighteenth century these restric tions provoked the first literary opposition towards the colonial hegemony when Poul Poulsen Nólsoy (1766-1808) composed his satirical dance ballad Fuglakvæðið [The Bird Ballad]. In the century that followed there was rising opposition, inspired by the ideas of Romanticism, to the linguistic hegemony. Providing Faroese with an orthography was an important step towards being able to answer back to the centre of the empire, which is an important goal in most postcolonial literatures, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths andHelen Tiffins have described in the book The Empire Writes Back.2 The struggle to install Faroese as the language of the country was successful, and this was due in no small part to literature. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the idea arose that the language was the main defining characteristic of a nation and this formed the basis for the struggle for indepen dence. Literature has played an important part in preparing for the nation-building which has taken place since the late nineteenth century, and literature in Faroese was a particularly efficient means in this struggle for an independent position within the Danish kingdom. The Faroese language has survived and Faroese literature is a fact. How it will develop in the future will depend on its ability to adjust to new situations in the global culture and the media of communication. Most influences from abroad on the Faroes came and still come from Denmark, and are principally related to the administrative, social and cultural organization of society. Global philosophical, artistic and literary trends and movements arrive somewhat late on the Faroes, often after a process of Danish filtration through television, radio, film distribution, books, magazines and library systems. On the other hand, with modern media direct global influences have increased and made it a more simulta neous process. Faroese literature shows a number of postcolonial characteristics. First, there is an effort to replace Danish as a medium with Faroese. However, Faroese literature has found inspiration and taken on forms from Danish and 1 Cf. Joensen, J.K., Mortensen, A. and Petersen, P., Føroyar undir fríum handli í 100 ár (Tórshavn, 1955); West, J.F., Faroe. The Emergence of a Nation (London, 1974), chapters 2-4. 2 Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. andTiffin, H., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London, 1989). Towards a Monolingual Canon 135 other Scandinavian literatures. The national songs of the late nineteenth century, for instance, were based on similar songs in Scandinavian literature.3 The term ‘mimicry’ in postcolonial studies applies to the ambivalence in the relationship between colonizer and colony.4 In the transfer of literary forms between Denmark and the Faroes there are imitations that veer towards mocking exaggeration in terms of national pride. Most transfer from Faroese literature occurs via Danish, either through works by Faroese authors who write in Danish, such as William Heinesen (1900-1991), or via translations of Faroese works into Danish. The translations into Danish prepare the way for translations into other languages. However, some works by Faroese writers have recently been translated directly from the Faroese, such as the German volume of short stories Von Inseln weiss ich (2006) and the Dutch collection of poetry Windvlinders (2008).5 The history of the development from a culture of an exclusively Danish literature to one of a mixed Faroese-Danish oral and written literature, and then to one of an almost monolingual Faroese literature is complicated and this article will only give a short version of it.6 On the Faroes there has been no attempt to create an official list of the most valuable literary works as has been the case in Denmark, where not only literature but also architecture, music, art, design and theatre each have an official canon mainly intended for the school curriculum. Instead, an im plied or tacit canon of Faroese literary works exists. It consists of the works read and discus sed at schools and universities. The literary histories of Christian Matras (1935) and Árni Dahl (1980-83) list authors and works, as do readers in Faroese, but the evaluation of these works is mainly indirect – that is, the more valuable a work is considered to be, the more is said about it. It is characteristic of these Faroese canons – except for Dahl’s – that they do not include works in Danish by Faroese authors but only the Faroese translations of their works. This is the case for the 3 Sigurðardóttir, T., At rejse ud for at komme hjem: den færøske sangdigtning 1876-1892 som del af og udtryk for færøsk nationalidentitet i støbeskeen (Copenhagen, 1987). 4 Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H., Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts (London/New York, 2000). 5 Stössinger, V. and Dömling, A.K., eds., “Von Inseln weiss ich…” Geschichten von den Färöer-Inseln (transl. by Borchert, R. et al.) (Zürich, 2006); Van Elswijk, R., ed., Windvlinders. Poëzie van de Faerøer (Groningen, 2008). 6 Cf. Marnersdóttir, M., ‘Grænser i færøsk litteratur’, in: Zilliacus, C. et al., eds., Gränser i nordisk litteratur (Åbo, 2008), pp. 65-80. 136 Malan Marnersdóttir works of William Heinesen and Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (1900-1938), which appeared on the school curriculum after 1975 once Faroese translations were available7. Colonial poetry – oral poetry turned into writing The earliest evidence of the transfer of European poetry to the Faroes is in the medieval ballads of the Faroes. This old oral poetry has motifs in common with important European poetry. The ballad cycle of Sjúrður (Sigurd) and the dragon Frænir (Fafnir) was composed by anonymous authors, probably in the fourteenth century. It has common roots with poems about Sigurd in the ‘Older’ Edda, which was written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as with the Icelandic Völsunga saga [Volsunga Saga] from the late thirteenth century. The German Nibelun genlied is another interesting intertext of the Faroese ballad. In the oral tradition, the union of singing the ballad text with dancing in a chain constitutes a unique form which still is practised in the Faroes.8 These oral ballads are the oldest Faroese poetry and they form the basis both for the restoration of Faroese writing and for literature in Faroese. The language of faith, for example reading from the Bible and singing hymns, was already Danish, and sometime after the 1590s the ballad and dance tradition, which had been solely Faroese, became bilingual. This happened when Danish-language ballads were introduced by Anders Sørensen Vedel’s (1542-1616) book of Danish folk songs Hundrede visebogen [The Book of a Hundred Ballads] from 1591 and the philologist Peder Syv’s (1631-1702) extended version, republished in 1695. The Danish folk ballads became very popular on the Faroes as dance ballads to the extent that the politician, farmer and poet Jóannes Patursson (1866-46) wrote in his memoirs that in his childhood in the village of Kirkjubø, Danish-language ballads predominated.9 It is only recently that the Danish ballads on the Faroes have attracted the interest of researchers: the Danish musicologist 7 Ellefsen, A., ‘William Heinesen i undervisningsøjemed’, in: Í Ólavsstovu, V. and Kløvstad, J.N., eds., Tårnet midt i verden – en bog om William Heinesen (Tórshavn, 1994), pp. 153-163. 8 Nolsøe, M., ‘Folkevisa og folkevisemiljøet på Færøyane’, in: Andreassen, E., ed., Kvæðagreinir (Tórshavn, 1988), pp. 3-21. 9 Patursson, J., Tættir úr Kirkjubøar søgu (Tórshavn, 1966), pp. 45. Towards a Monolingual Canon 137 Marianne Clausen has been studying the melodies of the Danish ballads collected in the Faroes.10 Transfer from the Faroes The collection of Faroese oral poetry began in 1639 when Ole Worm (1588- 1654) received some ballads written down on the Faroes.

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