The clergyman Johan Henrich Schrøter (Tórshavn 1771 – Tórshavn 1851), one of the early-19th-century intellectuals who put the Faroe Islands on the world’s cultural map, was appointed curate at í Leirum, Hvalba, on Suðuroy in 1797, and pastor in 1804. He was relieved from his duties in 1826, officially for reasons of health, but in fact because of his irregular conduct. He had an illegitimate son (Óli Jespersen, 1810–1882, who became a popular teacher and a collaborator in Schrøter’s text collections), conducted trade on the tax-avoiding black market, and practised as a healer (in Copenhagen he had studied medicine before he turned to theology).
In Faroese literary history Schrøter is famous for his translation of the Gospel of Matthew – commonly called Føroyska bók (“The Faroese book”) and published in 1823 by the Danish Bible Society. It met with strong criticism because of its homely vocabulary and its phonetically-based spelling, developed by Jens Christian Svabo (1746–1824) for his collections of Faroese ballads. Consequentially, Schrøter’s proposals for further Bible translations were rejected, and it was not until 1937 that a complete translation of the New Testament from Greek was undertaken by the clergyman Jákup Dahl (1878–1944).
Schrøter also helped to complete the Færøiske Qvæder om Sigurd Fofnersbane og hans Æt (“the Faroese Sigurd ballads”), which the Danish botanist and priest H.C. Lyngbye had collected on a journey to the Faroes in 1817. In 1822 the ballads were published together with a Danish translation – the first book published in Faroese. On the initiative of Rasmus Rask, Schrøter also translated Færeyínga saga (“The Faroe saga”) from Icelandic into Faroese; this book was seen into print by C.C. Rafn in 1832. The ballad editions not only profited from the interest shown by prestigious philologists like Rask, Rafn, and Jacob Grimm, but also from growing nationalist sentiment in Scandinavia generally.
Schrøter later continued to develop a Faroese spelling standard on the basis of folklore material collected by Óli Jespersen in the early 1840s. This material was used to devise an improved phonetically-based orthography by Schrøter and Jens Davidsen (1803–1878). This spelling norm was sidelined, however, by a more complicated, etymologically-based spelling, created mainly by the Icelander Jón Sigurðsson with some advice from the Dane Niels Matthias Petersen, and ultimately adapted and endorsed by the leading Faroese scholar V.U. Hammershaimb against the objections of the more pragmatic Schrøter. The episode is indicative of how Schrøter, a transitional character with an Enlightenment interest in generalist learning, missed the tide of the new National Romanticism.
