Jacobsen had previously been known to the Danish public as the author of two books on the Faroe Islands in addition to a large number of articles in the newspaper Politiken on Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and other Scandinavian subjects, and through these articles he achieved a reputation as a gifted and original journalist with a distinctive style, a man who tackled his material with authority and complete honesty, but writing in an artistically fascinating, amusing manner. Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen was born in 1900, the son of a grocer in Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. He was of an outgoing and positive nature and was gifted in many fields, and people rightly had great expectations of him. He would undoubtedly have been able to make an important contribution both as a scholar (historian) and as a politician if stubborn ill health had not prevented him from developing to the full extent of his ability. This illness, tuberculosis, already made its appearance when he was only twenty-one years old, living as a student in Regensen, the hall of residence in Copenhagen, and it made its mark on the rest of his later life.
