Jens Christian Svabo’s Glossary: The Oral Tradition at the Beginning of Faroese Lexicography

The rediscovery, in the second half of the 18th century, of the Faroese language is strongly connected with the interest for the heroic ballads which had been transmitted orally over the centuries in the North Atlantic Islands. It was only thanks to the desire of collecting and making accessible for comparative purposes this ancient cultural heritage, in fact, that the Faroese language appeared in writing for the first time after it had been prohibited in schools, churches and official documents in 1536. The first collector of Faroese ballads was the Faroe-born scholar Jens Christian Svabo (1746-1824), who, not surprisingly, also compiled the first Faroese dictionary, the Dictionarium Faeroense, which was published some two hundred years later by Christian Matras in 1966-70, and developed the first systematic and consistent orthography of his mother tongue. In this essay, I will focus on the Collectio Vocum et Phrasium ex Carminibus Færoënsibus antiquis (1780s), a work epitomizing per definition the close connection between Svabo’s literary and lexicographic activities. In this, particular attention will be paid not only to the selection of lemmata, to the structure of their bilingual (Latin-Danish) interpretamenta, but also to the interaction between this glossary and the Dictionarium Faeroense and, through this, later Faroese lexicography