Literature on the Faroe Islands – Trap The Faroe Islands

In the period 1967‑2020, Faroese book publishing was characterised by large fluctuations in an overall strongly growing trend. It is very clear that the publication of children’s books took off in the mid-1980s and that the number of works of fiction was low during the crisis years of the early 1990s and then almost reached the level of children’s books. Textbook publications are relatively constant, while non-fiction has increased considerably during the period. HAGSTOVA FØROYA

The first book with Faroese text was published in 1822. In this book and the following seven, which were published until 1892, there were explanatory texts in Danish. The first book written exclusively in Faroese was published in 1892. Since then, modern Faroese literature has grown, and now around 200 books are published annually, of which about half is fiction and children’s literature, and the other half is non-fiction and textbooks.

19th-century folk songs and national romanticism

Jens Christian Oliver Djurhuus wrote his poems in Faroese. These are new ballads, i.e. long, narrative poems in folk song style with the main emphasis on Faroese history as told in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. The son, Jens Hendrik Djurhuus, followed in his father’s footsteps, but found his sources with Saxo. These poems were used in the chain dance, as were the orally handed down and anonymous ballads. Through collection, they were written down, and they made up the majority of 19th-century Faroese fiction. In the late 1840s, the tradition of writing Faroese based on pronunciation was replaced by the Hammershaimb orthography. The same Hammershaimb also collected and published folk songs.

In the late 1800s, the national movement boosted the use of the Faroese written language and spawned a large number of national romantic songs, tales and plays. With a single precursor in 1850, Faroese contemporary poetry began in 1876, when Faroese students at the residential college Regensen in Copenhagen met for a Shrovetide party and sang patriotic songs. These songs were released as Føriskar vysur (Faroese songs) with titles, lyrics and comments in Faroese. They were in the philologist Jakob Jakobsen’s new alternative written form, which, however, never caught on. At the turn of the century, the national romantic tone sharpened towards the political in poems by Jóannes Patursson and the religiously high-flown in e.g. the poem by Símun av Skarði, which later became the national anthem of the Faroe Islands, Tú alfagra land mítt from 1906. The poems, songs and other texts published in the late 1800s defined and located the Faroe Islands as a country with its own independent culture.

1900s

The first novel in Faroese, Bábelstornið (The Tower of Babel) from 1909, is a naturalistic family novel describing the arrival of national ideas in the mid-19th century and the break between traditional thought patterns and new currents. The novel’s author, the folk high school founder Rasmus Rasmussen, wrote under the pseudonym Regin í Líð and also published the first Faroese collection of short stories in 1912. In 1914, Jens Hendrik Oliver Djurhuus published the first modern collection of poems, Yrkingar, which is influenced by symbolism and where the national appears in grandiose metaphors in contrast to sharp criticism. With his poems, songs, nursery rhymes and fairy tales, the brother, Hans Andrias Djurhuus, became known and loved by everyone and still is.

Realism

The author and visual artist William Heinesen achieved international fame and was a key figure in Faroese cultural life in the mid-20th century. PER PEJSTRUP/RITZAU SCANPIX, 1970

The political polarisation between Danish unity and independence made it progressive to compose and write in Faroese. The internationally bestknown author, William Heinesen, wrote in Danish, which was interpreted as a loss for Faroese. In 1935, the linguist and poet Christian Matras published the first Faroese literary history, in which he omitted William Heinesen, who at that time had published four poetry collections and his first novel, Blæsende Gry (1934, Stormy Dawn). Heinesen’s breakthrough novel was the satirical description of the war The Black Cauldron (1949), which was followed by the imaginative tale from Tórshavn The Lost Musicians (1950). In 1965, he received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for The Good Hope (1964). Heinesen’s writing includes seven poetry collections, seven novels and seven short story collections, but he was not widely read in the Faroe Islands until a number of his works were translated into Faroese on the occasion of his 75th birthday. These translations were part of the movement that strove to make Faroese literature monolingual.

At the same time as William Heinesen wrote his first realistic novels with a socialist edge in the 1930s, Hans Jacob Jacobsen first appeared under the pseudonym Heðin Brú with the development novel consisting of the two volumes Lognbrá (1930, Deception of Sight) and Fastatøkur (1935, Firm Grip), which depict a peasant boy’s break with the old village society. Brú’s main work, Feðgar á Ferð (The Old Man and His Sons) from 1940 (in Danish: Fattigmandsære, 1963), contrasts the traditional and the modern Faroese mentality in humorously grotesque contrasts between the generation of parents, who live in a subsistence economy, and their adult children, who live on money wages. Brú’s short stories are stylistically reliable classics, and in the mid-1900s, they had great significance for the development of Faroese prose.

The transition to a fishing and money society is complete in Martin Joensen’s novel Fiskimenn (Fishermen) from 1946, which, like Fastatøkur, realistically depicts life on board the fishing ships of that time. Martin Joensen’s contribution to the genre is the contrast between shipowners and fishermen and between workers on land and fishermen, which results in strikes and industrial action. The same themes can be found in Joensen’s second novel, Tað lýsir á landi (Dawning on land) from 1952.

The author Jóanes Nielsen in his office in Tórshavn, where he lives close to the water. LARS JUST/RITZAU SCANPIX, 2012

Around 1950, Faroese literature had become monolingual in the sense that the new authors wrote in Faroese. They had been taught Faroese from the first day of school, when it had become a full-fledged school subject in 1938, and the language of instruction thereafter was Faroese. Jens Pauli Heinesen belonged to this new generation and published his first short story collection Degningsælið (Morning Dew) in 1953, which was followed up by a series of novels about artists’ problems, right-wing forces in society and the seven-volume memoir Á ferð inn í eina óendaliga søgu (1980‑92, A Journey Into an Unending Story).

Realism found a new socially engaged form with Jóanes Nielsen. He is one of the great living authors who writes both novels and poems, and was first published in 1978. He was an active participant in the 1970s leftwing political movements and has published ten collections of poems, the first with clear socialist views interspersed with personal reminiscences. These have since gained more space and have been combined with ecocritical themes. His novels depict labour struggles and social conditions in today’s Tórshavn. Glansbílætasamlararnir (2005, The Scrapbook Collectors, in Danish: Glansbilledsamlerne, 2008) is a memoir about the fates of young men in 1950‑70s Tórshavn and Copenhagen and a vivid depiction of the challenges of masculinity in late modern Faroese society.

Modernism

Christian Matras wrote poems about the Faroese landscape since his debut Grátt, kátt og hátt: yrkingar from 1926. But he definitively moved poetry out of national romanticism towards modernist formal features and existential themes, which were also seen with Regin Dahl and became more prominent with Karsten Hoydal. Karsten Hoydal made his first appearance as a writer with the collection Myrkrið reyða (The Red Darkness) in 1946 which was influenced by the horrors of World War II and demands for reorientation. Fully modernist is Guðrið Helmsdal’s poetry collection lýtt lot (mild breeze) from 1963, which is made up of original image-creating poems. Steinbjørn B. Jacobsen made his debut with Heimkoma (Homecoming) in 1966, and his later poetry collections indulge in the ultra-short, sometimes concrete modernism. Rói Patursson successfully entered the scene in 1969 with an untitled collection of poems, and in Líkasum from 1985, for which he won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize the following year, he combines a modernist form with the political and cultural views of his time. Heðin M. Klein, who in his own low-key way participated in the modernist upheaval of the 1960s, examines the possibilities and limitations of poetry in depictions of life’s small and large challenges with the long poem Tað orðið (2020).

Postmodernism and ecopoetry

Postmodernism and deconstruction characterise poetry and novels in the last decades of the 20th century. Here, the familiar meanings of the language are dissolved to be filled with new ones. During the 1980s, the modernist breakthrough of the 1960s was replaced by the act of writing, intertextuality and self-reflexitivity, in the lyrics; an orientation that Tóroddur Poulsen and Carl Jóhan Jensen in particular are exponents of. Tóroddur Poulsen’s poems have a distinctive subtle tone, where the words are twisted in and out of context and constantly change meaning; Carl Jóhan Jensen’s poems challenge the reader with ambiguous references to other texts or the etymology of words. After a few years mainly as a lyricist, he threw himself into prose and published large novels, including the grotesquely burlesque Ó -, søgur um djevulskap (2005), which depicts events in the Faroe Islands over several hundred years and is filled with notes that make the reader more curious rather than more enlightened.

Alongside the systemic approach in the poetry, a social psychological realism has been developing in short stories by Hanus Kamban, Oddvør Johansen and Gunnar Hoydal. Unlike the realism of Heðin Brú and Martin Joensen, this one is more individualoriented. Oddvør Johansen’s first novel Lívsin summar (The Summer of Life) was published in 1982 (in Danish: Livets sommer, 1985), and with her light prose, she immediately gained many readers. In short stories, novels and essays, she has since maintained her position as one of the most widely read Faroese prose writers. Hanus Kamban’s short stories often have a retrospective perspective, unfolding the past from a contemporary situation; in addition to his own prose, he has translated foreign fiction into Faroese and published monographs on other authors. Gunnar Hoydal quickly moved from the short stories to the novel genre. A recurring motif in his writing is the journey and the relationship between the small country in the North Atlantic and the wider world. The novel Í havsins hjarta (In the Heart of the Sea) from 2010 (in Danish: I havets hjerte, 2010) is a grandiose attempt to write the history of the national movement of the Faroe Islands as a family history, beginning with the arrival of the Danish vicar Jørgen Falk Rønne to the islands in 1889. The departure, the arrival and the stay in the foreign land are found as motifs in many short stories and novels from the second half of the 20th century, including in Bergtóra Hanusardóttir’s novel Burtur (2006), which depicts her study years in Copenhagen.

Oddfríður Marni Rasmussen has taken modernism in a more personal direction with poems about his own upbringing, friends and parents. With the novel Ikki fyrr enn tá (Not Until Then) from 2019 (in Danish: Først når, 2020) about a man’s reactions to his wife’s battle against a terminal illness, he reached a large readership with straightforward and vivid prose. The personal writing characterises Katrin Ottarsdóttir to an even greater extent. Her debut poetry collection Eru koparrør í himmiríki? (Are there copper pipes in heaven?) (in Danish: Findes der kobberrør i himlen? 2016), was published in 2012 and portrays a deranged mother and a self-destructive father from a child’s perspective.

Hybrid forms

An increased reflection on the national, language and nature was already found in the poetry of the 1980s, sometimes as irony and pastiche. But a new and more serious rethinking of the relationships between people, nature and language can be found in current Faroese poetry, which also seeks a more complex expression in form.

In particular Kim Simonsen has dealt with nature and ecocriticism in his poetry, which in terms of content is closely connected to his work as a literary researcher; and he likes to quote directly from scientific literature in his poems.

Trygvi Danielsen’s debut in 2013 with The Absent Silver King, consists of poems, short prose and a CD, and English appears both in the title and in several texts. The publication is a break with the monolingual ideal and with the traditional view of the poetry collections as a work.

The expansion of the lyric towards the more complex in terms of genre and form became particularly evident with Lív Maria Róadóttir Jæger’s stylistically successful publication Hvít sól in 2015, consisting of short poetic texts about human relationships, cognition and language. She further developed this form in Eg skrivi á vátt pappir (I Write on Wet Paper) from 2020 (in Danish: Jeg skriver på vådt papir, 2021). Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir has written poems about man’s place in the cycle of nature and in 2019 published the form-experimental Psykosudrotningin with the subtitle Hybrida.

With twenty novels, Jógvan Isaksen has had almost an exclusive right to define the popular crime genre. He subscribes to the socially conscious and debating Nordic crime fiction. At the same time, a strong awareness of tradition is expressed, as many of the book titles refer to folk songs, and the novels frequently refer to recent Faroese poetry.

Barbara

Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen’s novel Barbara and its afterlife exemplarily illustrates Faroese literary history in concentrated form. It was published posthumously in 1939 and is based on a story about a woman and her marriages to three vicars. The legend takes place in the 17th century, while the novel is set in the 18th century. The novel is written in Danish and thus belongs to the bilingual period in Faroese literature; a Faroese translation was not published until 1972.

Barbara, however, was soon translated into a number of other languages, and it has been the subject of biographical and historical analyses, just as feminist and postcolonial studies have focused on the novel’s literary devices and multifaceted universe. Last but not least, the novel has been made into a film several times, most recently by Nils Malmros in 1997, which has further contributed to its spread.

On the right is a picture from the Danish director Nils Malmros’ film adaptation of the novel. The Norwegian actor Anneke von der Lippe played the role of the Faroese vicar’s wife and Danish Lars Simonsen played her husband, the young Mr. Poul from Denmark. The film premiered in Copenhagen on 2 October 1997 and was well received by the critics. PER PEDERSEN/RITZAU SCANPIX

Children’s literature in Faroese

At the beginning of the 20th century, called the children’s century, literature in Faroese for children came on the agenda with the first children’s and youth magazine, Ungu Føroyar (The Young Faroes), in 1907. It ran stories and poems with an educational content.

Teachers have been the driving forces in terms of writing and publishing children’s literature. The popular author Hans Andrias Djurhuus wrote the first poetry collection for children, Barnarímur (1915), which not only taught children, but also their parents and other adults, to read poetry. Since the 1950s, translated children’s books have made up a significant proportion of publications.

The great leap forward for children’s literature in Faroese occurred in 1986, when the teachers’ association established a children’s book club with the aim of making it possible to acquire cheap books throughout the country. The book club publishes eight books a year, mostly translated and produced in international co-production, which has considerably increased the range of books for children of all age groups.

The children’s and youth literature is published by BFL (Bókadeild Føroya Lærarafelags – the Faroese Teachers’ Association’s Publishing Company) and the publisher Sprotin, and most of the publications are translations. The authors Bárður Oskarsson and Rakel Helmsdal have been translated into many languages and have won both domestic and international awards; Bárður Oskarsson for his minimalist picture books and Rakel Helmsdal for her imaginative stories.