During the 19th century, Faroese ballads attracted great interest. They were recorded in detail, but folklorists were interested more in their text than in their melodies. The large-scale Føroya kvæði: Corpus carminum Faroensium (“The ballads of the Faroe Islands”), originally published as part of the collection of Danmarks gamle folkeviser (“The old ballads of Denmark”) started by Svend Grundtvig and Jørgen Block in 1853, did not include the music and melodies; this was remedied only in 2003 by the appearance of an additional volume.

After the development of recording tools, the Danish ethnomusicologist Hjalmar Thuren (1873–1912) began the phonographic collection of ballads and melodies; this resulted in his Folkesangen på Færøerne (“Folk song in the Faroes”, 1908). Later musicologists extended their interest to the Faroese singing of the Danish baroque church hymns, on the assumption that the country’s isolation might have preserved an authentic way of singing these hymns.