Ormurin Langi - History

History

Around 1800 there was an increasing amount of attention paid to the store of Faroese folk ballads (kvæði), which survived in the oral tradition and were sung as an accompaniment to Faroese dancing. Even before 1800 Jens Christian Svabo had recorded ballads, but collecting got under way seriously after 1800, and names like Johan Henrik Schrøter, Jóannes í Króki and later on, V. U. Hammershaimb can be mentioned in this regard.

The old ballads were seen as having special historical value, but there was also interest in more recent ballads, e.g. comic ballads (táttur), and new ballads were composed in the old style. One poet who attracts particular notice is Jens Christian Djurhuus (1773–1853), who was a farmer in Kollafjørður. The most famous of his works is Ormurin Langi, "The Ballad of the Long Serpent". His most individual work, however, is perhaps Púkaljómur (‘The Devils Ballad’), a religious epic based on a Danish translation of ‘Paradise Lost’ by the 17th-century English poet John Milton.

Otherwise he mainly takes the subject matter for his ballads from the Norse sagas, e.g. ‘Heimskringla’ (‘The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway’) and ‘Færeyinga Saga’, the story of how the Faroes were converted to Christianity under Sigmundur Brestisson and with the resistance of Tróndur í Gøtu. This was the Romantic Age, and Norse literature was very much in vogue. Everything indicates that the Faroese immediately took his poetry to their hearts. In an account of a journey written in 1847-48 the ballad collector and clergyman V. U. Hammershaimb writes:

"The old farmer Jens Christian Djurhuus of Kollafjørður has composed many ballads based on the sagas. They have been very successful and are sung everywhere with pleasure, since their language is pure and they are very much in keeping with the old style; his ballad about Olaf Tryggvason or the battle at Svolder, the ballads about Sigmund and Leif, and his version of Milton's Paradise Lost with its unusual metrical structure are particularly worthy of note."