VU Hammershaimb

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VU Hammershaimb (1819–1909), pastor and philologist, 1867 Provost of the Faroe Islands. He created the modern Faroese written language, one of the prerequisites for the Faroese national movement from the end of the 19th century.

Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (better known as VU Hammershaimb or Venzel Hammershaimb ; born March  25, 1819 in Sandavágur , Faroe Islands , †  April 8, 1909 in Copenhagen ) was a Faroese pastor and philologist and is known as the founder of the modern Faroese written language .

Life

origin

Hammershaimb's family goes back to Georg Smendein , who was born on September 11, 1642 in Vienna by the German Emperor Ferdinand III. when von Hammersheimb was raised to the Bohemian nobility. His son Wenceslaus Franciscus de Hammershaimb (1645-1696) was expelled as a Protestant from Silesia around 1674 and settled in Denmark as an engineer and mathematician . Among other things, he worked in Copenhagen as a cartographer and in 1685 married the Danish Annika Knudsdatter Tved. Their son, Jørgen Frans von Hammershaimb, was born on October 21, 1688 in the parish of St. Peter's Church in Copenhagen. Wenceslaus Franciscus died in 1696. When the then governor (fúti) on the Faroe Islands, Diderich Marcussen (1670–1723), died in 1723 , Jørgen Frants de Hammershaimb was offered the position on the remote islands and accepted it. As was customary at the time, he married the widow of his predecessor that same year. When she died four years later, Elisabeth Kristine Samuelsdatter Weyhe, the daughter of Løgmaður Samuel Lamhauge , who was born in Sandavágur in 1712 , became his wife. With her he had no fewer than 13 children. One of these children was Wencelaus Hammershaimb (1744-1828). When Jørgen Frants died in 1765, his son Wencelaus took over the post of governor. In the following year Wenceslaus Hammershaimb married a sister of Jens Christian Svabo named Armgard Maria Svabo. With her he had six children, including the later lawyer Jørgen Frantz Hammershaimb (1767-1820). He was appointed Løgmaður in 1806 and had his official residence on the farm á Steig ( Danish Stegaard ) in Sandavágur on the Faroese island of Vágar . He married Armgard Maria Egholm in 1813 and she gave birth to a son on March 25, 1819, who was named Venceslaus Ulricus. However, Jørgen Frantz Hammershaimb died the following year and the widow could not stay in her husband's former official residence. So she moved with her two children to Tórshavn, where she lived on a widow's pension and spent the rest of her long life.

Life path

Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb spent his childhood in the alleys of the old town of Tórshavn. Directly opposite the apartment at Nýggjustova lay Fútastova , the site of action of his grandfather Wencelaus. This also taught him to read. He learned to write, however, from Jens Davidson, the secretary of the bailiff. In addition, he received private lessons from the Tórshavn parish priest, Pram Gad, who recognized his talents and recommended that his mother send her son to Denmark for further training. As early as October 1831, the widow Hammershaimb traveled with her twelve-year-old son to Copenhagen to take care of his further education. After wintering in Norway , they arrived in the Danish capital in February 1832. Hammershaimb then attended the Borgerdydskole in Christianshavn until 1839 .

He then began studying at the University of Copenhagen , where he worked as cand.phil. continued his studies in theology and Nordic languages , especially Icelandic . He also maintained closer contacts with Icelandic students and became friends with Svend Grundtvig .

Although his family on his father's side was of German-Danish descent, V. U. Hammershaimb felt deeply connected and committed as a Faroese and thus to the Faroese language, which was the language of his mother and his childhood. He saw it as a necessary and urgent task to write the Faroese language in a suitable way in order to preserve the culture of the country and to counter the further decline of the language. As early as the summer of 1841 he paid a brief visit to the Faroe Islands, during which time he traveled from village to village for his linguistic research and at the same time kept a diary. The Faroese philologist Christian Matras published this diary 100 years later, in 1941, under the title Færøsk Dagbog 6.7–16.8 1841 .

Kvívík on Streymoy around 1900. V. U. Hammershaimb lived and worked in this place from 1855 to 1862.

After passing the theological exam, Hammershaimb returned to the islands in the North Atlantic in 1847 as a trained theologian for a whole year. He continued the work he had begun in 1841 to sift through and collect Faroese language certificates and to deal with the various dialects of his mother tongue, which at that time was only handed down in spoken form. In the summer of 1853 he made another trip to the Faroe Islands for on-site research. He then reported on the results of these trips in several articles in the Antikvarisk Tidsskrift .

In August 1855, VU Hammershaimb married Elisabeth Christiane Augusta Gad in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Copenhagen, the daughter of his former teacher and former Tórshavn parish priest Pram Gad, who was born in Tórshavn in 1829 and had been parish priest at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Copenhagen since 1846. The newly married couple then moved to the Faroe Islands, where Hammershaimb had received a job as parish priest on Streymoy , who lived in Kvívík . His New Year's Eve sermon there on December 31, 1855 went down in the annals; for he read from the Gospel in his mother tongue, which at the time seemed unthinkable. It was not until 1939 that Faroese replaced Danish as the church language.

The following year, 1856, his eldest son Hjalmar was born in Kvívík in May, who would later become Sorinskrivari in the Faroe Islands for a short time .

Nes on Eysturoy, where Hammershaimb lived and worked since 1862.
The then newly built rectory in Nes on Eysturoy, where Hammershaimb had lived since 1863. The house originally had a grass roof.

In 1862 Hammershaimb became pastor in Nes on Eysturoy . However, the old house of his predecessor was in such poor condition that he immediately started building a new rectory, with his wife drawing the plans for the new building. The financing of the new building was also taken over by a woman: An orphaned and single, but apparently wealthy cousin from Hammershaimb (Jomfrú Schrøter) lived with him in the rectory. She was the daughter of Mariane Sophie Hammersheimb (1773-1828), a sister of Hammershaimbs father, who had been married to pastor Johan Henrik Schrøter , who had died in 1851 . Hammershaimb borrowed almost 4,000 Danish riksdaler from her for the new building at an interest rate of 6 percent annually for 28 years. The new house with over ten rooms was very spacious for the conditions at the time, so that it is said to have been the second largest residential building on the Faroe Islands after the seat of the bailiff. Hammershaimb's wife had even given each room its own name. By November 1863 the house was ready and ready to move into. Today this farm is known as Gamli Prestagarður á Nesi . It was bought by the land in the mid-1990s and serves as a museum and event location.

In 1867 Hammershaimb finally became provost of the Faroe Islands with his seat in Nes. He had been sitting in Løgting since 1866 , where he worked as a politician for three legislative terms. As provost, he was an ex officio member of parliament and did not have to be specially elected. For the same reason he was also a member of the school management and in this context he contributed to the establishment of a teachers' seminar in Tórshavn in 1870 and that in the communities from 1872 all children over seven years of age received an adequate education, which was not yet a matter of course at the time. In 1878 he moved back to Denmark, where he worked in Lyderslev and Frøslev on the island of Zealand . In 1893 he returned one last time to the Faroe Islands and was warmly welcomed there, an expression of the appreciation that has now been shown to him. A few years later he retired and moved with his wife to Copenhagen (Ryesgade 110) in 1897 , where he died on April 8, 1909.

VU Hammershaimb and his wife had eight children, including the shipbuilding engineer Gunnar Hammershaimb (1862-1947).

What is striking about his life is that there are many parallels to the eminent Danish theologian, philologist, poet and politician NFS Grundtvig . And indeed: they both not only knew each other, they were good friends and were in constant correspondence. His friendship with Svend Grundtvig , the son of N. F. S., who u. a. wrote the three-volume Lexicon Færoense .

Linguistic work

In 1846 Hammershaimb wrote down his Faroese orthography , which is still valid today with minor changes (first published in book form in 1891). Like that of the Brothers Grimm , its orthography is based on etymological principles and is heavily based on the original Norse language. Hammershaimb himself called it etymologizing normal spelling . He created a compromise that is acceptable to the speakers of all existing Faroese dialects on the one hand and is still so familiar to the speakers of the other Scandinavian languages ​​that the traditional Faroese texts can be made accessible to them.

As a result, he began with the systematic publication of old ballads such as the Sigurdlieder and the Faroese saga in the New Faroese language, with which he created the basis for modern Faroese literature .

The first volume of the Færøsk Anthologi published by Hammershaimb in 1891

His thousand-page Faroese anthology (Færøsk Anthologi) in two volumes from 1886–1891, where he (together with Jakob Jakobsen ) summarized his work, was particularly valuable . The 120-page introduction is half a general book about the Faroe Islands and the other half a language teaching. The largest part of the work is a collection of texts with traditional ballads, sages and prose in the Faroese language, including Hammershaimb's Folkelivsbilleder (pictures from popular life) and two essays on the orthography and phonetic transcription of Faroese. The second volume, with an extensive Faroese-Danish glossary and an index of persons and places, not only makes the first volume accessible, but also Hammershaimb's earlier ballads collection.

The spelling of place names in the Faroe Islands is also based on Hammershaimb's specifications. It was established in Copenhagen in 1873 in the Ny Matrikel for Færøerne . The newspaper Dimmalætting (founded in 1877) has another important influence, using Hammershaimb's orthography in its features section from the start .

Works

  • 1846: Færøiske Sagn (p. 358ff.) And Bemærkninger ved den færøiske Udtale (p. 363–365). In: Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie ( digitized in the Google book search).
  • 1848: Meddelelser fra en rejse på Færøerne 1847–48. In: Antikvarisk Tidsskrift, udgivet af Det kongelige nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab. 1846-1848, p. 258 ( runeberg.org ).
  • 1851: Færøiske Kvæder I ( Sjúrðar Kvæði ), Copenhagen; 2nd edition, Faroe Islands 1969 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  • 1854: Færøiske sproglære af VU Hammershaimb. In: Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab (ed.): Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie / 1854. Copenhagen 1854, p. 233 ( archive.org ).
  • 1855: Færøiske Kvæder II. ( Færøske Kvæder ). Copenhagen; 2nd edition, Faroe Islands 1969 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  • 1884: Føroyingasøga / útløgd úr íslandskum av VU Hammershaimb. Tórshavn (137 pages; further editions 1919 and 1951).
  • 1891: Færøsk Anthologi I. Tekst including historisk og grammatisk Indledning. Copenhagen; 3. Reprint, Tórshavn 1991 (576 p., Description of the islands, Faroese history and way of life, linguistic theory; text collection - ballads, sagas and proverbs -, prose, linguistic considerations, archive.org ).
  • 1891: Færøsk Anthologi II. Ordsammling og Register. edited by Jakob Jakobsen Copenhagen; 3. Reprint, Tórshavn 1991 (467 pages, extensive Faroese-Danish glossary and annotated register of persons and places for Volume I and the works from 1851 and 1855, each with precise references. Archive.org ).
  • 1911: Lesibók. Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb. (Kvoldseta 289-291, Fjallgonga 291-295, Grindaboð 295-314, Samljóð og misljóð 302-304, archive.org ).
  • 1990: Havfrúgv; Nykur. Føroya skúlabókagrunnur, Tórshavn 1990 (22 pages, textbook).

literature

Web links

Commons : VU Hammershaimb  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb  - Sources and full texts
  • VU Hammershaimb on the homepage of the great-grandson Allan Hammershaimb (Danish)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wenceslaus 'Venceslaus' Ulricus Hammershaimb. Retrieved March 24, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Hammersheimb. In: August von Doerr: The nobility of the Bohemian Crown Lands: A directory of those coats of arms and nobility diplomas which are entered in the Bohemian hall books of the aristocratic archives in the KK Ministry of the Interior in Vienna. P. 124 ( archive.org ).
  3. ^ Wenceslaus Franciscus von Hammershaimb , nogn.dk
  4. ↑ Hammershaimb, Jørgen Frans von (1688–1765) , nogn.dk
  5. ↑ Jørgen Frans von Hammershaimb , faroeiceland.ca
  6. ↑ VU Hammershaimb: Meddelelser fra en rejse på Færøerne 1847–48 on p. 258 in: Antikvarisk Tidsskrift , udgivet af Det kongelige nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab 1846–1848, Færøiske Kvæder, henhørende til Hervarar Saga. on p. 57 in: Antikvarisk Tidsskrift 1849–1851 and Forhandlinger i Selskabets Møder on p. 327 in: Antikvarisk Tidsskrift 1852–1854 (Danish).
  7. ↑ In his memoirs, Hammershaimb describes the condition of the house as follows: “At jeg fik en talerken i min seng til at opfange tagdryppet i”.
  8. ↑ Prestagarðurin - søga , nes.fo (in Faroese)
  9. ↑ Bygdasavnið í Nes Kommunu fevnir um fýra søgulig hús - Fornminnisfelagið og Bygdarsavnið ( Faroese ) September 15, 2013. Archived from the original on September 15, 2013.
  10. ↑ The local history museum in the municipality of Nes - Fornminnisfelagið og Bygdarsavnið ( German ) March 7, 2016. Archived from the original on March 7, 2016.
  11. ↑ Allan Hammershaimb: The Hammershaimb family ( English ) Retrieved August 17, 2015.
  12. ^ VU Hammershaimb (1819–1909) , snar.fo
  13. ↑ Hammershaimb, Venceslaus Ulricus . In: Christian Blangstrup (Ed.): Salmonsens Konversationsleksikon . 2nd Edition. tape 10 : Gradischa – Hasselgren . JH Schultz Forlag, Copenhagen 1920, p. 773 (Danish, runeberg.org ).
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 15, 2005 .
personal data
SURNAME Hammershaimb, VU
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hammershaimb, Venceslaus Ulricus (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Faroese pastor and philologist, founder of the New Faroese written language
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Sandavágur
DATE OF DEATH April 8, 1909
Place of death Copenhagen