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If Eigil had his way, such a man as Napoleon Nolsøe would
never appear in Faroese literary history. He simply had no
place there. Not that he was against giving authorial villains
their due in histories or reference works or even naming
streets and ships after them. Not at all. One of his great
skaldic heroes was the Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun.
And without authors such as the Marquis de Sade, Céline,
and Jean Genet, the French literary mouth would loose
much of its bite.
But Dr. Napoleon was no Genet, and he had done nothing
worthy of literary acclaim.
Sure, he might have contributed to the development of
Faroese orthographic rules, but that was about it.
Otherwise, the man had recorded songs and ballads, but
had not actually composed anything himself, and what he
did write down had already been collected and documented
by others. All he had done was transcribe transcripts, that
was his achievement, and to fill literary history with
transcribers would be both unfitting and ridiculous.
At an Authors’ Society meeting, Eigil declared that the
names that appeared in literary history were just as
randomly chosen as the names on the society’s membership
roster. One man belonged because he had translated two or
three minimalistic children’s books some twenty-five years
back. Another had taken part in a short story contest
launched by well-meaning pedagogues just as many years