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Goðan dagin eg eita Hjördis Hammer úr Skúoy Kjærgaard

Hello, my name is Hjördis Hammer úr Skúoy Kjærgaard

I am halfbreed, half of me is from Denmark and the other half from the Faroe Islands.
The Faroese language was once spoken in York, because it is old Nordic - the Viking language.
It is rather interesting that the Faroese language has been without any outside influence since the 1200s.
The Faroese people were forbidden to speak their language under the Danish and Norwegian crown. Faroese was first written, by the Danish gentlemen V.U.Hammershaimb, as late as in the middle of the 1800s. Doctors and lawyers and pastors have all been Danish over the last three hundred years, and still you have to speak Danish at exams if you can’t get a Faroese examinator. Like in the old days you thought that God only understood you if you spoke Danish, because the pastors spoke Danish in the church.
As an intro, I sang a Faroese song:’ Ì Búri’, which can be translated to:
‘In the cage’. The song is about a bird sitting in its cage dreaming of the Faroese mountains and the fjords . And I think that it is the soul of the Faroese: free as a bird but captured in a golden cage. A free people but first captivated by the Norweigian, then the Danish and the English during the second world-war. The English who built the airfield so that the German couldn’t find it - nobody has found it ever since! The world’s smallest airfield, where you have to help the pilot, when he lands his plane. To break, you sit in your chair and push your feet into the ground. Then you have landed in the most beautiful place in the world - but as the young Faroese say:
‘Small islands is not for human beings, but for birds who can fly away.’
Life is quiet on the Islands. There was no television in my childhood. It should be interesting for sociologists to find out which impact the development of television has had on isolated countries.
But you can still visit each other in the small towns in the same way as before. You do not lock your door, and the big kitchen is the first room in the house and where everybody sit, especially in the dark and long winter. It is so amazingly Faroese: you walk in, without knocking, and then you just sit down in the kitchen and don’t say a word. Because if you don’t have anything important to say, you don’t. The old people usually rock their body and say whispering: ‘Oh Jesus’. Or they say: ‘This is what I mean’ - and they haven’t said what they meant!

The Faroe Islands are very windy, and it rains a lot. The weather shifts all the time. Especially the light is beautiful and the reason for so many Faroese being artists trying to capture the shifting light. There are hardly any trees, but grass all over feeding the sheep, which counts to 70,000 among the 45,000 people. No vegetables grow on the islands except for potatoes and turnips, and that is why vitamins have to be taken from the sea. The fish and the whales and the birds are the delicatessen. Because the islands are somewhat isolated, you can’t just pop into the shops to buy whatever you want.

Even isolated, the Faroese soul is not melancholy. I think it is because they live on the edge, they have to live with the stride at sea, the Atlantic ocean, and they live in big and very close-knit families with all the generations. This keeps you aware that you one day are going to die - not many people seem know that! Or people seem to forget it along the way. But the awareness of death means that you have to live with it and love your one and only life and make the most of it.

My last words will not be mine but those of the Faroese writer Jørgen Frantz-Jakobsen, who was dying of tuberculosis, when he wrote these amazingly words:

‘Der er jo det ved mig, at jeg ikke har talent for den absolute tristesse, den totale solformørkelse. Bliver verden mig gram, da kommer straks funkerne flænsende gennem mørket og jeg lever åndeligt op. Falder sørgmodigheden over mig, da kommer samtidig Bellmann og Mozart. Ens hjælpekilder er enorme. Alt hvad man i ungdommen har drømt og falbuleret, det ligger som en uudtømmelig reserve af glæde. Jeg forbliver dybt taknemmelig mod livet og vil fremdeles være forsonet med dets kår, for det giver mig mere end det tager, ja, jeg har allerede fået så meget, at jeg aldrig vil kunne få berettiget grund til at klage. Det er jo netop denne vældige spænding mellem sorrig og glæde, der gør livet så stort. Mine største øjeblikke har jeg haft når gnisterne er sprunget mellem sorrig og glæde. Og døden er baggrunden for livets geniale relief’.

The last sentence reads: ‘Og døden er baggrund for livets geniale relief’. That is life - be grateful.