Jacobsen, Jørgen-Frantz

(1900-1938)

   A Faroese and Danish novelist and essayist writing in Danish, Jacobsen was a cousin of the well-known Faroese writer William Heinesen, who edited some of Jacobsen's letters after his death. Jacobsen became an internationally known writer on account of a single novel, Barbara (1939; tr. 1939), which retells a Faroese legend of an evil woman named Beinta, who caused the death of her three husbands, all of them pastors. In Jacobsen's version of the story, the woman becomes an embodiment of immediacy as well as of the erotic. Barbara's husband in

   Jacobsen's novel is the priest Poul, who, when leaving Copenhagen, renounced the world and its attractions. Alas, his meeting with Barbara changes all that, but her utter amorality and lack of principles bring him to the end of his wits.

   Denmark's rule over the Faroe Islands was a griefto Jacobsen, and he tirelessly worked for greater freedom for the islanders. His journalism in Denmark served this purpose, as did his topographical and cultural work Færøerne: Natur og Folk (1936; The Faroes: Nature and People).