Palimpsest, Memory and Agency in Faroese/Danish Memory Politics

In this paper I will analyse the creation and the dynamics of memory seen through the canonization of a 19th Century writer in Nólsoyar Páll as a national hero in the Faroe Islands. Combining approaches from cultural nationalism studies (working with literature), memory studies and imagology. We will investigate the use of cultural saints and national hero’s. I will argue, that narratives of hero’s recycle earlier forms of remembrance and images as in the metaphorical palimpsest figure seen through monuments and places of memory. Here is the question, how did we proceed from the mangrove swamp of different ethnic self-images to a instrumentalization of an image of the Faroe Islands? How did the use of the literary archive and the memory of the Faroe Islanders relate to a canonization of literature and national hero’s in a time of historical and political change?