Anthony Olsson

Anthony Olsson

Faroese and Irish/Scottish-Gaelic balladry: motifs and intercultural connections

The Faroese and the Scottish-Gaelic ballads share forms of seinn dúthchasach [culturally-rooted singing], displaying traditional acapella styles, embedded in locality and place. They developed in vernacular non-written languages, far from their respective colonial capital powers. The importance of Faroese heroic tradition is widely acknowledged, yet the lack of translation means that close study has been largely restricted to Scandinavia. A comparative analysis of the two traditions aims to negotiate and navigate the gap between the two realms.

The Phd will investigate the heroic journeys to Lochlann and Bretland as tropes and explore what are the joint motifs and intercultural connections between the fantastic exploits of Faroese and Irish/Scottish-Gaelic balladry?

The research will expore oral and literary representations of Bretland/Skotland in the Faroese ballad corpus, with comparative examples, from Scottish-Gaelic balladry of representations of Scandinavia (Lochlann). It will also present and translate several Faroese ballads in English, making them available for the first time, for contextualised study, for an English-speaking and non-Faroese audience.

Anthony is a full-time PhD student, supported by a University of the Highlands and Islands Studentship Award through the UHI Graduate School – INS Scholarship scheme.

Before he commenced his PhD in Shetland, he was based in Oslo at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) as a visiting researcher. There he undertook a 2 month research stay funded by the University of Bergen led, CAS funded project Ballads Across Border: The Faroe Islands in the Norse Story-Telling World (BARD). He has an MLitt in Island Studies and a BA in Anthropology.

Anthony is supervised by Dr Andrew Jennings, UHI Shetland and Abigail Burnyeat, Head of Research at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI, as well as Dr Alan Macniven, Programme Director for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

He is currently based at the former North Atlantic Fisheries Institute, now UHI Shetland, Scalloway campus.