Kvæði (Kvaedi; ''at kvøða'': "to sing a tune or ''kvæði''"; ''kvæði'' also means ''verse'' in Icelandic, also sometimes used to mean

stanza In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have eit ...

) are the old

ballad A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French ''chanson balladée'' or '' ballade'', which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and ...

s of the

Faroe Islands The Faroe Islands ( ), or simply the Faroes ( fo, Føroyar ; da, Færøerne ), are a North Atlantic archipelago, island group and an autonomous territory of the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. They are located north-northwest of Scotlan ...

, accompanied by the

Faroese dance The Faroese chain dance ( fo, Føroyskur dansur, da, Kædedans) is the national circle dance of the Faroe Islands, accompanied by kvæði, the Faroese ballads. The dance is a typical mediaeval ring dance. The dance is danced traditionally in a ...

. Kvæði can have hundreds of

s plus a

chorus Chorus may refer to: Music * Chorus (song) or refrain, line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse * Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound * Chorus form, song in which all vers ...

sung between every verse.

History

It is generally thought that Faroese ballads, as elsewhere in Europe, began to be composed in the Middle Ages, but very little medieval Faroese writing survives, so the ballads' medieval history is obscure. The subject matter of Faroese ballads varies widely, including heroic narratives set in the distant past, contemporary politics, and comic tales. The most archaic-looking layer, however, is the heroic narratives. It was once thought that these derive independently from Viking-Age oral narratives, and this may be true of a few, but it has since been shown that most derive directly from written Icelandic

saga is a series of science fantasy role-playing video games by Square Enix. The series originated on the Game Boy in 1989 as the creation of Akitoshi Kawazu at Square. It has since continued across multiple platforms, from the Super NES to the Play ...

s or occasionally ''

rímur In Icelandic literature, a ''ríma'' (, literally "a rhyme", pl. ''rímur'', ) is an epic poem written in any of the so-called ''rímnahættir'' (, "rímur meters"). They are rhymed, they alliterate and consist of two to four lines per stanza. T ...

''. The traceable origins of Faroese balladry, then, seem to lie between the fourteenth century (when the relevant Icelandic sagas tended to be composed) and the seventeenth (when contacts with Iceland diminished). Faroese ballads began to be collected by Jens Christian Svabo in 1781–1782, though Svabo's collection was not published in his lifetime; the most prominent of Svabo's successors was

Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (March 25, 1819 – April 8, 1909) was a Faroese Lutheran minister who established the modern orthography of Faroese, the language of the Faroe Islands, based on the Icelandic language, which like Faroese, d ...

. The Danish historians

Svend Grundtvig Svend Hersleb Grundtvig (9 September 1824, Copenhagen – 14 July 1883, Frederiksberg) was a Danish literary historian and ethnographer. He was one of the first systematic collectors of Danish traditional music, and he was especially intereste ...

and Jørgen Bloch began the process of a complete, standard edition of the ballads, which eventually gave rise to the ''Føroya kvæði/

Corpus Carminum Færoensium ''Føroya kvæði: Corpus Carminum Færoensium'' (CCF) is a scholarly edition collecting traditional Faroese ballads, or '' kvæði''. The songs were collected by Svend Grundtvig and Jørgen Bloch, and published by Napoleon Djurhuus and Chri ...

'', published between 1941 and 2003. In the last volume, Marianne Clausen presented a large collection of music transcriptions of kvæði melodies, based on sound recordings. In the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the period for which scholars have information about how ''kvæði'' were performed: 'the family-oriented '' kvoldseta'', in which aurally memorized texts of family ballads were sung to pass the time, and the village dance, in which the memorized texts of the kvoldseta were performed by ballad owners who might add or delete stanzas in order to suit the mood of the dancers'.Patricia Conroy,
Oral Composition in Faroese Ballads
, ''Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung'', 25 (1980), 34-50 (p. 50). Ballads took an important role in the development of Faroese national consciousness and the promotion of literacy in Faroes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the most famous of all ''kvæði'' is '' Ormurin langi'' written by Jens Christian Djurhuus and today played by the Faroese

folk metal Folk metal is a fusion genre of heavy metal music and traditional folk music that developed in Europe during the 1990s. It is characterised by the widespread use of folk instruments and, to a lesser extent, traditional singing styles (for exampl ...

band

Týr (; Old Norse: , ) is a god in Germanic mythology, a valorous and powerful member of the and patron of warriors and mythological heroes. In Norse mythology, which provides most of the surviving narratives about gods among the Germanic peoples, ...

Example

References

External links

*The digital edition o
Føroya Kvæði/Corpus Carminum Færoensium
at snar.fo
Heimskringla.no - Føroysk kvæði og vísur
*N. Kershaw, ''Stories and Ballads of the Far Past'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921)
https://archive.org/details/storiesballadsof00chadhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33471

Fotatradk.com, kvæði (text) on the website of ''Fótatraðk'', which is a Faroese Chain Dance Association in Copenhagen, the members are mainly Faroese students, who study in Copenhagen.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kvaedi Faroese music Faroese literature Faroese folklore Ballad collections