The Faculty of Faroese Language and Literature has its own Place Name Corpus and place name research is one of our tasks. This Faculty is relatively new and several of the archives and corpora in our custody were previously in the hands of other institutions, such as the Historical Museum of the Faroe Islands  , the Name Research Section at the Department of Scandinavian Research (and the Place Name Committee) at Copenhagen University, as well as the National Survey and Cadastre (“Kort-og Matrikelstyrelsen”,   previously Geodætisk Institut, a state-run cartographic institute) in Copenhagen.

The Corpus contains records of names (lists), citation slips, maps and images. The oldest material in the Corpus are records drawn up by V. U. Hammershaimb, or made by others on his behalf, dating back to around 1850. There is also material from the 1890s by Jakob Jakobsen and from Den danske Generalstab’s  work with maps of the Faroes (topographical ordinance maps).

In around 1915 the youth association Sólarmagn organized an effort to record place names, as did the Danish Place Name Committee (Det danske Stednavneudvalg) as of around 1920. Christian Matras was linked to this registration effort and one result of his work became the doctoral thesis about place names in the Northern Islands of the Faroes. The registration drives by Sólarmagn and Stednavneudvalget never reached the whole country, attempts were therefore later made to resume them and make them more comprehensive.

During the Second World War the Faroese Parliament appointed a committee, “Fornrannsóknar- og Staðanavnanevnd Føroya Løgtings”, which once again started recording place names throughout the country, and in the years following 1945 it received material from most villages. Between 1953 and 59 Napoleon Djurhuus travelled around the Faroes collecting names for the Danish Place Name Committee visiting every village. In the 1950s and 60s Mortan Nolsøe (in cooperation with Institutt for folkeminnevitskap in Oslo) recorded the names of fishing grounds. When Geodætisk Institut (now Kort- og Matrikelstyrelsen) in the period between 1983 and 98 redrew and republished its ordinance maps, the Faculty of Faroese Language and Literature participated in the work and a wealth of place name material was obtained and placed on the maps.

The Faculty has independently collected complimentary records when older records were incomplete, as regards the number of names or the locations on maps or images. Many private individuals have contributed valuable records, particularly for the mapping of names onto aerial images, such as images of bird-cliffs. The Faculty has regularly cooperated with place name informants in the Faroes. Student theses are also part of the corpus.

The Tape Archive contains several recordings of informants talking about place names.

Parts of the corpus have been digitized.