Iceland Imagined by Oslund Karen

Author:Oslund, Karen. [Oslund, Karen.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295990835
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In 1846, another pastor and Faroese linguist, Venceslaus Ulricus Hammers-

haimb, published several articles on Faroese language and literature.26

While the first few decades of the nineteenth century saw the begin-

nings of publication of materials about the Faroese language and in Faro-

ese, the odd situation was that a standard written Faroese did not actually

exist. When Lyngbye published the Faroese ballads, which tradition held

originated in the Middle Ages, he could only attempt to phonetically tran-

scribe the sounds he heard, and there was no standard method for phonetic

transcription at this time. In 1823, Schrøter translated the Gospel of Mat-

thew into Faroese, by following the classical rule that a language should be

written as it was pronounced. This rule, however, ran against the theory

of most nineteenth-century language scholars that a language should be

reading BaCk Ward 137

written so that its original, historical morphemes could be seen. These two

principles clashed directly in the dispute over Faroese orthography.

the PolitiCal Context oF Faroese

language study

This small group of Faroese religious men and language scholars were

working in a situation that differed in two important respects from the

other, much more famous nineteenth-century language scholars located in

the German and French metropoles. First, and most obviously, they were

geographically remote and outside of the intellectual milieu of the philo-

logical seminars and university life. Most of the participants in the Faroese

language debate were pastors or local officials, only one of them held a doc-

torate, and they were in no position to obtain professorships or receive state

funding for their linguistic work. More importantly, however, their chief

concern was an oral language without a written tradition. While other lan-

guage scholars busied themselves with Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, or

Old Norse texts, this group worked with a language that, by the standards

of many other European language scholars at the time, did not exist at all,

or, if it did, was not of any interest. This circumstance oriented the con-

cerns of the Faroese group quite differently from their more privileged con-

tinental colleagues, and it lent the Faroese language debate a specifically

practical dimension, grounded in immediate political realities.

Considering the political circumstances in which the Faroe Islanders

found themselves in the nineteenth century, their concern with protect-

ing their language and culture should not surprise us. Compared to Ice-

land, or even to Norway, the Faroes were marginalized within the Danish

kingdom. Following the Danish loss of Norway to Sweden in the Treaty of

Kiel in 1814, the Faroese Løgting (a local representative council similar to

the Icelandic Alþingi) was abolished in 1816. At the representative coun-

cils convened in Copenhagen in 1835, a Danish official nominated by the

king represented the Faroe Islands, although native Faroese officials were

elected to serve there after 1844. And in the Education Act passed in 1845

(Provisorisk Reglement for Almueskolevæsenet paa Færøerne), a system of

board schools was introduced in the Faroes, in which Danish would be the

language of instruction. During the discussion in the councils preceding

the passage of the act, Faroese was defined as a language dialect ( mundart),

138 reading BaCk Ward

rather than an independent language ( kultursprog), because of the lack of

a written literature.27 When the new Danish

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