Søtur er sjalvgivin biti.

- Steinbjørn B. Jacobsen -

The first thing I noticed when I got up one Saturday morning was the smell.

It was the unmistakable odour of fresh pilot whale meat, but how could this be? I didn't remember hearing of a whale drive recently, but then - of course - you don't hear anything about ut on the radio nowadays until after the whales have been beached.

I followed the smell down into the cellar, and there, sure enough, was a full tub - a good 50 kilos - of fresh whale meat and blubber. My first thought was that I didn't have any dry-salted blubber in the house, and this blubber was perfect for salting down.

As I stood wondering how all this food had got into my cellar, my eldest daughter appeared behind me, laughing.

"Well, what do you think?" she asked.

"As my mother used to say: "Gud giver sine både føde og klæder mens de sødelige monne sover"2, I replied, and realised at once that she and her boyfriend must have just been in a whale drive in his boat.

"You see? Women these days are not for nothing. Now it's the women who bring the whale meat home."

"You must take after your great-grandfathers sister," I remarked quite casually.

She had obviously thought she could shock me, but now she was the one who stood gaping in amazement.

"What do you mean - did she join in whale drives too?", she asked, astonished.

"Yes", I explained, "she held the gaff and waded out up to her armpits - they used to say her bosoms kept her afloat - she was well over seventy then. But once she stayed in too long, caught a chill and ended up with pneumonia. That's how she died."

My daughter stood by watching for a while as I started getting this great mass of food put away.

"If this had been in the old days, we'd be rich," she said thoughtfully. "Still, we could certainly do with such a nice lot of tasty food", she added.

"Søtur er sjalvgivin biti"¹, I said to myself, and began to tell her about her grandfather.

"Early one summer morning as he sat drinking his tea, Grandma told him that 80 crowns were missing from the account book. He answered quietly: "With God's help, that can soon be put right." Grandma was also a God-fearing woman, but she answered: "That may well be, but God won't give you 80 crowns in the hand, just like that!"³

"Without answering, Grandpa picked up a stick and a pail and headed off down to the beach to gather some limpets to feed to the ducklings. When he got down to the embankment he saw four bottlenose whales just off Whale Gorge.

"As the reward for spotting the whales he got the heads, and the oil alone from them was worth more than twice the 80 missing crowns.

"Wasn't that the same grandmother who lost both her brothers in a pilot whale drive?", my daughter asked.

"Yes it was. Her brothers, and 12 other men with them, died in the disastrous pilot whale drive of February the 15th, 1915. There was a storm, and two boats capsized."

There was silence for a moment, and the she said, "It's been a while since we've had so much whale meat and blubber."

"Two years", I answered. "There were three of us and we were going out to catch some young fulmars4 that day, but everything seemed to go wrong. The motor in our boat wasn't working properly, and when we'd finally found another boat we could use, the breeze had picked up so much that it didn't seem likely we'd catch anything. But I was keen to go anyway, and I tried to encourage the others by reminding them of the old proverb: "He who rows out will eventually catch something".

"We managed to catch enough fulmar for one decent dinner before the breeze rose to a strong wind. Once we'd come back around the southern point of the island and in towards Torshavn, I went into the deckhouse to get out of the cold head wind.

"A moment later one of the others called in to me: "We can see Torshavn now - what was that you said about the one who rows out catching something?"

"I didn't answer, but came out of the deckhouse and looked over in the direction of Sandagerdi.⁵ "What do you call that!"

"They were just about ready to drive a group of pilot whales into the bay, so we got our fulmar, and we got a good share of whale meat and blubber as well. I'll never forget that day."

She went upstairs to make herself a cup of tea, and I went to take a potful of fresh whale meat and blubber to the next-door neighbours.

When they saw it, one of them said with a smile: "That's strange, I heard on the radio that some whales had been beached, and I was just this minute standing here wishing that someone would give me some. We'll put it on for dinner right away."

Notes:


1. Søtur er sjalvgivin biti - a Faroese proverb which translates roughly to English as : "Sweet is the food one can provide for oneself".
2. This is a line form a 17th century Danish psalm, a literal translation of which is: "God gives his children both food and clothing while they are sweetly sleeping." It is adapted from verses in Mathew, Ch. 6, of the New Testament.
3. 80 crowns (kronur) today is worth around 7 pounds sterling or 11 US dollars, At the turn of the century, however, it was roughly equivalent to a whole month's wages. In those days, the daily wage was 2 crowns.
4. Young fulmars (natungi in Faroese) are caught at sea from boats while they are still too young and heavy to fly. A small net attached to a rod is used to catch them. They are them salted and eaten either boiled or fried.
5. Sandagerdi is the small sandy cove in the west of Torshavn which is the authorized whaling location in the capital.