Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music (Extreme Sounds Studies: Global Socio-Cultural Explorations) 1666917567, 9781666917567

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Ancestral North

Extreme Sounds Studies: Global Socio-cultural Explorations

Series Editors: Niall W. R. Scott, Nelson Varas-Díaz, and Bryan Bardine Music and sound do not take place in a social vacuum. They manifest themselves, and are a reflection of, particular social contexts. They are grounded in geographies, people’s lived experiences, and specific events. Therefore, when we conceptualize music and sound as “extreme,” we do so in recognition of this contextual anchoring, and as an acknowledgment that contexts are both produced and reflected through them. Metal music studies have used the terminology of “extreme music” to describe sounds, aesthetics, and practices that are usually interpreted as distant from, and challenging of, the societies in which music is created and consumed.

This book series aims to explore how the idea of “the extreme” might serve to understand the roles of sounds in our lives. It aims to address the following questions: What makes some kinds of music and sounds extreme? Is there an aesthetic of extreme in music and sound to be unpacked that can be encountered elsewhere, for example, in the analysis of noise or other forms of experimental music, even in the extremity of the mundane? How do diverse people and communities think about the extreme when referencing music and sound? In other words, it is not always clear what the term extreme refers to, and yet it is all around us. This book series aims to fill this gap.

Recent Titles

Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music, by Ross Hagen and Mathias Nordvig Passport to Hell: Critical Studies on Peruvian Metal, edited by José Ignacio López Ramírez Gastón On Extremity: From Music to Images, Words, and Experiences, edited by Nelson Varas-Díaz, Niall Scott, and Bryan Bardine Heavy Music Mothers: Disruptive Narratives, Extreme Identities, by Julie Turley and Joan Jocson-Singh

Ancestral North

Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music

Ross Hagen and Mathias Nordvig

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-66691-756-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-66691-757-4 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Mathias Nordvig

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Chapter 1: Paradoxes of Ritual Folk Music: Enchantment and Escape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 Mathias Nordvig and Ross Hagen Chapter 2: Anglo Fascinations: A Cultural History of Borealism . . 33 Mathias Nordvig

Chapter 3: The Music of the North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Ross Hagen Chapter 4: World Music of the Ancient World . . . . . . . . . . 105 Ross Hagen

Chapter 5: Individual Musical Approaches: Ancient Enchantments, Modern Technology, and Putting Away “Viking Things” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Ross Hagen Aftermath: Final Libations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Ross Hagen and Mathias Nordvig

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Contents

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Wardruna performing at the Viking Ship Museum, April 9, 2009. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 Figure 3.1. Hardingfele. Narve Skarpmoen, c. 1899–1930. . . . 72

Figure 3.2. Johan Christian Dahl, Vinter ved Sognefjorden. . . 81

Figure 3.3. Ole Bull and Fossegrim statue in Bergen. . . . . . 89 Figure 5.1. Screenshot of Heilung, Norupo. . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Figure 5.2. Heilung, “Traust”—Removing the spear and freeing the warrior. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Figure 5.3. Einar Selvik with Kravik lyre. . . . . . . . . . . . 165

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Preface Mathias Nordvig

Darkness envelops the trees. A dim light grazes the curved roof of the Viking hall that stands beside the site where, a few days before, scores of revelers paraded past the idols of ancient gods, splattering them with sacrificial animal blood from a bowl. The crowd next to the hall is simmering with anticipation, a few voices are heard here and there. A cool breeze flowing over the crowd from the nearby burial mounds touches the back of my neck. A whisper from the depth of history on a rocky Norwegian coast in 2019. The tension of anticipation is torn asunder by a deep, primal scream in an indiscernible language. The final ritual has begun. Drums in the dark. Suddenly, the stage lights up. The shaman, with horns and a threaded mask covering his eyes, chants indiscernible words and growls like a Siberian throat-singer. The Völva in white compliments his dark mystique with an angelic voice. Muscular drummers pound our ribcages with sonic impressions of the past. Nude warriors armed with spears and drenched in black dye flood the stage. Their screams, menacing grimaces, and martial exercises evoke the spirits of the Harii, Chatti, Batavi, and Bructeri who once leveled a Roman legion in the cold, humid forests of the North. As the shaman mimes cutting the throat on a young, bare-breasted woman, no doubt as a performance of a sacrifice to Odin, we are reminded of those nameless people who left contorted and shriveled human bodies for their descendants in the bogs of southern Scandinavia. Bathed in light, the Völva’s soprano voice revives the woman in Valhöll. Odinic names are extatically chanted in the dark corners of the stage as if they were coming from the arboreal hinterland of civilization. Droning reverence is

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given to Tīwaz, the lost ruler of the gods, and the soul of my ancient Erilaz ancestors is awakened. The runes that they carved on weapons and stone beat in my mind like the dripping rain from this northern sky. A rush of feral, northern Germanic frenzy seizes the audience, and a tribal dance is revived in the twenty-first century. I am a scholar and a heathen. Born in Denmark, with a measure of prepubescent tenure in Greenland, I was raised by parents whose perspective on the world gravitated toward the pre-Christian cultural heritage of Scandinavia. In my early teens, I was given a copy of the Poetic Edda, an anonymous collection of poetry about the Nordic gods from thirteenth-century Iceland. Soon after, in the last half of the 1990s, I discovered that the way of life informed by the pre-Christian cultural material from Scandinavia and Iceland was called Ásatrú or heathenry, and that adherents to this life-perspective had congregated in a national organization in Denmark called Forn Siðr (ancient custom). These experiences have profoundly shaped my life trajectory, inspiring me in my twenties to study Old Norse literature and Viking Age history at the university. I graduated from Aarhus University in Denmark in 2014 with a PhD dissertation on the interaction between Old Norse mythology and the Icelandic environment in the early period of the Icelandic settlement. My personal experience with cultural expressions attached to Nordic-aligned neopagan phenomena is that they were peripheral in public life in Scandinavia in the 1990s and early 2000s, but that they have since grown in prominence and popularity, both in the North and globally. Musical experiences attached to the distant, Nordic past in Scandinavia were limited to the popular Viking reenactment markets in Scandinavia, which take place in the summertime. Viking markets in Scandinavia are akin to the Renaissance fairs in North America, yet they are often associated with museums and public education institutions, who demand the appearance of authenticity. This means that the public is presented with an experience of “Viking life,” not least “Viking” musical performance, that is perceived as authentic, but nonetheless a result of a collective imagining of what the Viking Age must have been like. That collective imagining, despite any attachment to public institutions charged with disseminating historical knowledge, is no less fictive than x

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North American Renaissance fairs. It feigns authenticity and, at best, presents an image of how things could have been in the past. As a member of, and actor in, those spaces where interest in “how it could have been” flourished, I have accumulated nearly thirty years of experiences as a fan, as a spiritually involved person, and as an academic trained to discern the cultural history that shapes our longing for the past. This unique perspective, weaving the emotional, the spiritual, and the academic together, is not unproblematic. It blurs the lines between subject and object and compromises the notion that the scholarly self is detached from its field of study. However, I do believe that as a scholar one is hardly capable of fully performing that detachment anyway. Scholars of the humanities are commonly driven by their interests, which, if nothing else, hints at sentiments of taste, aesthetics, the exciting, the comfortable. Our personal histories are woven into the objects in the world that we choose to study, and to deny that would be to ignore the full range of our perspectives on a cultural phenomenon. My opening impression of an experience with listening to the band Heilung at the Viking-themed festival Midgardsblot in Norway is the result of these considerations. I don’t remember when I first heard of Wardruna, but I do remember that when I had moved to Colorado in 2015 and heard peers in the heavy metal scene in Denver talking about the band as something new, my reaction was “oh those guys.” At that time, Wardruna had already made an impression in the Scandinavian music scene, and particularly with pagan-aligned audiences. The first time I saw Wardruna perform was in 2017, when they played at the Boulder Theater. On that occasion, I invited the lead singer, Einar Selvik, to give a talk at CU Boulder. I have since kept in personal contact with Einar and the band, interviewed them for various podcasting and YouTube projects, and spent time with them either in Colorado or in Norway. My relationship with the band Heilung is of a similar nature. I first saw them perform in Denver in 2018 and that moment led to establishing personal ties to several of the band members, too. This means that the analyses I present of both bands’ artistic expressions are also colored by my personal knowledge of the artists.

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From Ross Hagen: I first witnessed Heilung’s ritual at their concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in October of 2021, a special one-off event that had been delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic. Although my years of participating in metal and metal-adjacent music scenes as a performer, fan, and academic have made me well-acquainted with musicians and bands who frame their concerts as rituals, the theatricality, drama, and intentionality of this performance was new to me. I attended at Dr. Nordvig’s invitation after a friend of his offered a spare ticket, and it became my first real extended interaction with the spiritual community around this music. I had been introduced to Mathias at the Fire in the Mountains festival in Wyoming in 2019 and had kept in correspondence with him ever since. At this particular performance, Heilung were joined by four members of American Indigenous communities, including a child, who performed a sage blessing of the stage prior to the ritual and joined the final circle dance, all in their finest powwow fancy dancing dress. The importance of the ritual element was made plain to me during an extended power outage mid-concert in which the drummers, singers, and dancers all continued for what seemed like an eternity as the PA system gradually came back in fits and starts. There was no pause or break in the ritual, apart from a moment when the lead singers clearly paused to reassure each other, and eventually the crew and sound techs revived the sound system so the rest of us could once again hear what was going on. As a musicologist, I am not often able to turn off the scholar part of myself, so I came away from that evening brimming with questions. During the power outage, I turned to Dr. Nordvig’s friend Kelly, who had provided my ticket and introduced me to a number of his friends and remarked that they would surely have to stop and fix the problem. He replied that they couldn’t, that once the ritual had begun, they had to see it through. In almost any other imaginable performance scenario on this scale, full failure of the PA system would have been a minor catastrophe; at the very least, the performers would certainly stop to let the crew fix the issue and then regroup to either start the song over or move on to another one. Of course, I can’t say how long Heilung might’ve kept going

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had the problem remained unresolved, and in hindsight, I imagine their stage manager must have been providing updates to the performers, but it proved to be a powerful moment underscoring the seriousness of the performance. That evening, I was also rather ambivalent about the presence of the powwow dancers. I wondered if they might have been used as props for a kind of Indigenous authentication, that it might all be just a reboot of twentieth-century primitivism masquerading as solidarity. Yet I also could not deny that the presence of the powwow dancers in the finale was palpably powerful, and I reminded myself that the dancers’ intentions and motivations were their concerns alone. Indeed, if the dancers weren’t having a positive experience, I can’t imagine they would participate in the first place. This inner debate was heightened by the fact that Heilung’s costumes, set, and theatrical ritual winds up being very reminiscent of the original 1913 production of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s famous Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) in Paris. The Rite of Spring is well-known as a concert piece, but the original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky was reconstructed in the 1980s by the Joffrey Ballet, with several productions currently available on YouTube. The ballet centers on a pagan tribe in ancient Russia, and it presents a series of discrete tableaux without a clearly defined plot, complete with a blessing of the earth, mock battles, and a final circle dance with a sacrificial victim. Heilung’s performances include many of these archetypal ritual ideas, but with the performance is staged as a serious and intentional ceremony rather than aesthetic entertainment. I also came away from the concert questioning many of the ritualized elements that I had seen in previous performances by various black metal and “Viking metal” bands, which I had usually interpreted as merely dramatic staging, fantasy role-playing, or anti-Christian shock tactics. Certainly, that is often the case, but Heilung reminded me that such things also coexist with metaphysical, spiritual, and transcendental intentions. One of my consistent scholarly interests is the ritual efficacy of music, both in formally structured formats like a Christian Mass and in its myriad uses in everyday life. In late 2020, I began asking myself, and then Mathias, whether music like Heilung and Wardruna was ritually efficacious for neopagans, and how the somewhat curious mix of xiii

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traditional Nordic folk music, world music, metal, and electronica factors into it all. After more extensive discussions, we determined that this ritual and spiritual aspect was a significant lacuna in scholarship about modern heathenry and extreme music styles, and this book is the result following several reorientations and delays. Following Mathias’s lead, I should also give readers a sense of my positionality relative to our subject. I would not identify myself as a practicing heathen, neopagan, or Ásatrúar, although the broader animist worldview and use of metaphorical archetypes is increasingly compelling to me. I’ve never been a part of a heathen or Ásatrú organization, or really any religious or spiritual community after the Presbyterian church I attended in my hometown in Oklahoma. In hindsight, my first exposure to Viking revivalism also occurred in my Oklahoma adolescence when we once visited the Heavener Runestone, a large carved stone in a mossy mountain glen near the town of Heavener. Locals claim that it dates from the Viking Age, which lends it a certain cool mysticism even though all evidence and reason points to it being the work of a nineteenth-century Scandinavian immigrant. Thinking on it now, the Heavener Runestone and several others like it in Oklahoma seem to me to be artifacts of a diasporic population attempting to reorient itself by relocating its romanticized ancient homeland to its new environs. The runestones also assuage lingering colonial guilt by suggesting that we’ve been here before and therefore belong here now. I first became aware of neopagan practices through my love of death metal and black metal, all of which was generally frowned upon in the Bible Belt, particularly in the waning years of the Satanic Panic. For a period in college in the late 1990s, I wore a pewter Mjolnir necklace that I’d purchased at a Renaissance fair largely because I recognized it from the cover of Amorphis’s 1994 album Tales from the Thousand Lakes. At one point, a visiting performer on campus (who was not visibly “metal” at all by my recollection) pointed to it and asked me if I was Ásatrú, and I had to sheepishly admit that I had no idea what he meant. As one did back then, I went to the library to look it up and was enlightened to the significance of my little amulet, both in terms of its connections to neopaganism and its use by neofascists. I didn’t wear it after that. However, xiv

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through graduate school and on into my academic career I continued cultivating my love of Nordic metal and Nordic folk music, deepening my understandings of their nuances and contradictions, and ultimately making that milieu central to my published research. My scholarly activities with black metal also led to serendipitous meetings and correspondences with scholars in adjacent fields studying Northern European folklore, religion, and Old Norse literature, particularly Thomas DuBois, Terry Gunnell, Jósúa Hróðgeir Rood, Jenny Butler, and of course Mathias, all of whom helped me better understand the practices and problems within modern heathenry. Indeed, the first ritual I ever participated in was led by Mathias at the 2022 Fire in the Mountains festival: an intimate and therapeutic late-night bonfire that focused on remembrances and post-pandemic reaffirmations of community. To paraphrase Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, I may have been brought up to be a musicologist, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.

xv

Acknowledgments

Before proceeding, we must acknowledge the valuable assistance we received over the years working on this project from readers, interlocutors, colleagues, and friends who offered comments and discussions at academic conferences, concerts, festivals, bonfires, and other gatherings. Many of your ideas and comments helped to shape this book in uncountable ways. Thanks especially to Owen Coggins for his commentary on the book’s draft. Hails also to Jameson Foster for his indefatigable enthusiasm for this music, his festival fellowship, and his valuable work as an interviewer and archivist of the musicians and craftspeople in this scene. Thanks also to the editors of the Extreme Sounds Series, Niall Scott, Nelson Varas-Díaz, and Bryan Bardine for believing in the project and to Courtney Morales at Lexington for being patient with us through it all. Naturally, thanks also to the many people who have created this music along with all those who have supported it, written about it, and contextualized it over the years, including (but not limited to) Einar Selvik, Ivar Bjørnson, the members of Heilung, Folket Bortafor Nordavinden, and the people behind Fire in the Mountains, Cascadian Midsummer, Midgardsblot, and the Midgard Vikingsenter Museum. Ross Hagen adds a special thanks to his father Bill Hagen, who made it possible to experience the Norwegian coast and the Midgardsblot festival in 2023. Finally, we would like to thank our partners Erica and Nicole, whose love, patience, and support made all this possible.

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Chapter 1

Paradoxes of Ritual Folk Music Enchantment and Escape

Mathias Nordvig and Ross Hagen

In April 2009, the Norwegian ensemble Wardruna gave their debut concert at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo in front of the museum’s famous centerpiece: the Oseberg Viking ship, a finely decorated burial ship dating from around 834 CE. The performance was an intimate concert associated with the Inferno Music Conference, an annual metal festival and music industry gathering. Although Wardruna is far from a metal band, its founders Einar Selvik and Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal were well-known then as members of the notorious black metal band Gorgoroth. With the austere backdrop of the Oseberg ship and the bare white walls of the exhibit hall as a suitable backdrop, a fan video from the concert shows the black-clad ensemble perform the song “Bjarkan” (“Birch”) from their recently-released debut album Runaljod—Gap Var Ginnunga.1 The song opens with a throat-singing drone performed by Espedal and Selvik, accompanied by a munnharpe (mouth harp) player and a backing recording of chirping birds. Selvik begins playing a rhythm on a birch log with a pair of branches (in reference to the song’s title) while a percussionist plays a horizontal bass drum with his hands and marks time with a bunch of beads mounted on a hi-hat stand. Selvik and Espedal are soon joined on vocals by the third vocalist Lindy-Fay Hella, creating a three-part choral texture of chanting vocals, from which

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Hella breaks into high-pitched vocalizations reminiscent of shepherding calls. As the song reaches its climactic point, a fiddler can be seen standing behind Selvik playing a hardingfele, a Norwegian mountain fiddle notable for having sympathetic strings in addition to the four bowed strings. Although the hardingfele is typically used as accompaniment for folk dancing, in this context the player is helping to maintain the drone underpinning the vocal ensemble as the song reaches its coda (see figure 1.1). In the years since this debut, Wardruna has become an incredibly successful ensemble, with a career that has included headlining performances at major European rock festivals, albums that topped Billboard’s World Music charts, commissions from the Norwegian government, and contributions to hit television series and video games. Wardruna’s stated artistic vision is to create musical renditions of ancient Nordic traditions, using a variety of archaic instruments along with field recordings to create music that evokes an ancient and mystical past. To this end, many of their songs are interpretations of individual runes from the Elder Futhark, a

Figure 1.1.Wardruna performing at the Viking Ship Museum, April 9, 2009. Front row fom left: Lindy-Fay Hella on vocals and bone percussion, Einar Selvik on bukkehorn (ram’s horn), and Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal. SCREEN SHOT FROM “WARDRUNA—DAGR,” BY VICTHOR VIKING, HTTPS:​//​YOUTU​.BE​/ UMETV9OQGSI​?SI​=GMSRJXRVF0IQ0UZB

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Paradoxes of Ritual Folk Music

Germanic alphabet in use prior to the ninth century, an esoteric intention evident even from the name Wardruna, which roughly means “guardian of secrets.” “Bjarkan” is a representative example, taking the rune ᛒ and its associations with birch trees as inspiration for new lyrics musing on natural cycles of death and rebirth, with suitably woodsy accompaniment. The performance in the Viking Ship Museum, however, also makes several rhetorical assertions regarding Wardruna’s music and the subcultures and spiritual practices that birthed it. Performing alongside the Oseberg ship imbues the music with a certain archeological aura, enhanced by the austere museum hall itself, which has a hushed and quasi-religious atmosphere even during normal exhibition hours. It also draws a clear connection between this music and Norwegian history and identity; the Oseberg ship is one of the most recognizable Viking Age artifacts and its distinct carvings and bow have graced all manner of souvenirs, including Norwegian currency. It also evinces an alliance between groups like Wardruna and the government bodies that maintain museums and similar cultural institutions, if only because booking a private musical performance in front of the Oseberg ship undoubtedly required numerous signatures from high-level officials because of the value and fragility of the vessel. As of this writing, in fact, the ship’s exhibit hall is being redesigned in order to better protect it from degradation due to the vibrations of visitors’ footsteps, so one imagines that the museum probably won’t be hosting further performances of amplified music. While numerous metal bands and “Viking” ensembles wear Viking reenactment garb or include ships as a part of their artwork or stage sets, it is also worth considering that Wardruna laid claim to an unparalleled level of authenticity by playing their debut performance alongside the actual real ship. Beyond establishing the essential Norwegian-ness of the music and setting, the performance also connects meaningfully with practitioners of various Nordic neopagan spiritualities. These connections are borne out by hundreds of comments on the YouTube video of the performance, in which numerous commenters report feeling a connection to their Nordic ancestors and Norse gods such as Odin, along with comments that unambiguously classify Wardruna’s songs as hymns. In this single example, it is possible to see the interactions and layers of Nordic national 3

Chapter 1

identities, musical subcultures, antiquarianism, and modern neopagan religious movements that helped propel music like this from a niche interest into something of a global phenomenon.

Entering the Viking Age

Of the musicians working in or alongside the Germanic-Nordic neopagan movement, easily the most prominent are Wardruna and the group Heilung, whose names translates to “healing.” Heilung is a sprawling ensemble with multiple drummers, singers, and stage performers. The three founding members, Christopher Juul, Maria Franz, and Kai Uwe Faust, are Danish, Norwegian, and German, but the performing group is multinational, with members from France, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ecuador, and several other countries. Wardruna was founded in 2003 but didn’t release any music until 2009, while Heilung debuted in 2015 with their self-released album Ofnir. However, both ensembles were created by musicians who were already well-established and successful in underground metal and gothic music scenes. As noted, Wardruna’s founders had previously been members of the black metal band Gorgoroth, while Heilung’s multi-instrumentalist Christopher Juul and singer Maria Franz had, from 2005–2015, led the gothic electronic rock band Euzen. Stylistically, Wardruna, Heilung, and similar ensembles fall into something of a gray area, at least in terms of existing musical genre and subgenre terms already in common use. As noted earlier, Billboard placed Wardruna on its World Music chart, and it will become evident over the course of this book that these groups draw significantly on both world music as a concept and older musicians and ensembles who worked within the world music industry. The users of the record-collecting site Discogs.com typically categorize these bands’ releases under the stylistic genres of folk, ambient, experimental, and neofolk, along with the geographic catch-all “Nordic.” They also sometimes place them in the novel category of “Rune Singing” in reference to the oral poetry traditions in Western Finland and the Baltic region, a tradition which isn’t strictly applicable to either Heilung or Wardruna. “Neofolk” comes close in that it highlights the reuse and refashioning of existing folk music traditions 4

Paradoxes of Ritual Folk Music

and it acknowledges connections with punk and industrial music, but the term also sows some confusion due to its associations with both somber guitar-based acoustic music and the outer reaches of avant-garde industrial music. Neofolk music also has a long history of association with far-right musicians and white supremacist organizations, and we want to avoid any misunderstandings on that aspect. For our purposes in this book, we’re going to refer to this musical style as “Nordic ritual folk,” which we’re intending to encompass music specifically in the vein of Heilung and Wardruna. The “ritual folk” aspect acknowledges the importance of spiritual practices to much of this music, while also noting the use of various archaic folk instruments associated with the Nordic region. As with all musical genres, the name is not quite adequate and the edges often get blurry, particularly concerning older folk revival ensembles like Folque, Garmarna, Hedningarna, and younger folk-rock bands like Gangar and MíO. Both Wardruna and Heilung also intentionally make music for neopagans, and several members in both bands consider themselves Ásatrú, heathen, or pagan, making them important cultural pillars in the growing global neopagan movement. To this end, we initially considered writing about these ensembles as “Ásatrú Music,” but ultimately decided against that as it is too narrow and risks mischaracterizing and pigeonholing these musicians and their fans. This chapter introduces Ásatrú as a Nordic-based neopagan movement and explains its historical background as well as the complexities involved in both artistic, musical, and religious revival of the pre-Christian Nordic past. Some of the central issues in the revivalist movements, whether they are religious or cultural, derive from the lack of easily accessible sources from the Viking Age, the prevailing politico-cultural stereotypes associated with both racism and environmentalism, and fundamental problems involved in creating ethno-spiritual identities as a result of disenchantment with the modern world. We begin this chapter by providing a historical background to Ásatrú and music associated with it. Following that, we discuss identity construction in the context of Ásatrú, Germanism, and Nordicism. We conclude this chapter by accounting for the subcultural foundation of heavy metal and neofolk music, which fostered bands such as Heilung and Wardruna. 5

Chapter 1

Pre-Christian Nordic beliefs and religions are hard to define in a historical sense. Contemporary scholarship prefers to discuss multiple religions of the North rather than using the outdated terms “Norse religion” or “Viking Age religion.” This is largely due to the major variations one finds in religious activity in the archaeological material in Scandinavia in the period c. 200 BCE to the twelfth century CE and the realization that the Nordic pantheon was never as uniform as it is represented in later literature.2 While scholarship may largely focus on Germanic-speaking communities when they analyze pre-Christian Nordic religions, the historical involvement of Sámi, Finnish, and Balto-Slavic ethnicities in this religious complex and the Scandinavian landmass should not be underestimated. Neither should the direct and imposing influence of the Roman Empire from c. 50 to 400 CE be overlooked. Interactions between Germanic, Celtic, and Latin-speaking peoples in the Rhineland area in the first centuries CE generated lasting impact on religious forms in Scandinavia.3 Similarly, the post-Roman Frankish kingdom that emerged in the 500s CE in western Europe also had defining influences on the religious and ideological developments in Scandinavia, even without initially forcing conversion to Christianity.4 Despite this rich history of pre-Christian Nordic religions, most of the written source material that furnishes our understanding of these belief systems is Old Norse literature produced in Iceland in the medieval period, centuries after the conversion to Christianity.5 The primary sources are Snorri Sturluson’s Edda from 1220, the collection of Eddic poetry in the anonymous Codex Regius from 1270, Saxo’s Latin work Gesta Danorum from 1190–1208, and the Icelandic saga literature, especially the íslendingasögur, the fornaldarsögur, and the konungasögur, which was written in the period from late 1100 to early 1500.6 The Scandinavian polities converted to Christianity in the Viking Age between c. 960 and 1090 CE, beginning with Denmark in 960–65 and ending with Sweden in the period 1080–90. A few observers in the Viking Age, mostly from western Europe, have detailed aspects of the pre-Christian beliefs of the Scandinavians. In 1070 CE, Adam of Bremen described the temple in Uppsala, Sweden, in his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum. A century-and-a-half earlier, in 921 CE, an emissary from Baghdad 6

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to the Volga Bulgars in Russia named Ahmad ibn Fadlan described his encounter with the Viking Rus.’ In the late 900s and early 1000s, the French historian Dudon de Saint-Quentin wrote Historia Normannorum. As descendants of Scandinavian migrants, the Normans took a seminal interest in their pre-Christian past, which Dudon recorded.7 Aside from these works, our other literary source material from the Viking Age consists of sporadic mentions of Vikings in western European and Byzantine chronicles, as well as Scandinavian rune carvings on rocks, in wood, bone, and metal. This eclectic source background to the Viking Age and especially the lack of comprehensive sources for the beliefs and customs that may have been part of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion makes it difficult for scholarship to reconstruct pre-Christian religions in the North. The Viking Age is historically defined as the period 700–1100 CE and is largely a modern construction by Scandinavian scholars.8 In a Scandinavian historical context, the Viking Age signals the period in which Scandinavia became included in the European community, primarily through Christianization but also through the adoption of distinct western European cultural modes, institutions, and feudal hierarchies, which had their origin in western Europe.9 Prior to the Viking Age, Scandinavia partook in the Migration Period by supplying populations to central and southern Europe, and, in turn, receiving some as well.10 This means that the Viking Age did not just appear out of nowhere and Scandinavia was not, in any sense or at any time, disconnected from mainland Europe. Instead of perceiving the Viking Age as a special event in European history, it should be understood as a step in a millennia-long process of interactions between northern and southern Europe along with northern Africa and western Asia. The role of music in all this is even harder to parse since no music from Scandinavia survives from the Viking Age or before. Until very recently, music was one of the most ephemeral aspects of human life, resulting from the simple fact that “music” has generally been an activity rather than a physical object that is capable of being preserved. Indeed, there is very little information on music dating from the Viking Age or before from anywhere in the world. What does survive mostly consists of paintings, writings about music, a few instruments, and occasional 7

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fragments of written music notation. But even the existence of written notation only offers a partial glimpse because many musical techniques and stylistic conventions are unwritten and passed down as an oral tradition. Musical instruments themselves also don’t preserve particularly well since they’re typically made of skin, wood, and hair, and the most fundamental musical instrument, the voice, necessarily dies with its owner. So the vast majority of past music-making remains inscrutable to us today, accessible only in fragmented forms. It’s only been within approximately the last hundred years that actual performances could be captured via audio recording technology, and then only in a very limited capacity for most of the twentieth century. The situation is all the more tantalizing and frustrating because we all know the importance of music to our own lived experiences, although we currently use and consume music in ways that would be unfathomable to ancient peoples. It should be noted that we do have written music that intersects at least partly with the end of the Viking Age, beginning around 900 CE and blossoming from there into a diverse written repertoire that forms the basis for many later forms of classical music. The majority of the available repertoire consists of Gregorian chant and other liturgical music used for Christian worship, along with some standardized forms used for secular poetry and music. By the late Middle Ages, this liturgical written tradition had become fully polyphonic, with multiple independent parts and in some cases a staggering amount of rhythmic and melodic complexity. Although these medieval musical traditions could potentially be adapted for use in neopagan movements, doing so would be ahistorical and likely also ritually incoherent. While sacred music in general is often rather omnivorous regarding borrowed melodies and other material, drawing from the religious tradition that supplanted pre-Christian Nordic religion might not sit right. Beyond the simple fact that the music was written for Christian worship, the repertoire was also cultivated largely in the affluent cosmopolitan centers of Christian religious and royal authority on the continent. At the time, the Nordic region simply didn’t have the resources to indulge in similar luxuries. Thus, the earliest extant notated music from the Nordic regions dates from well after the Viking

8

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Age, beginning with two lines written at the end of the Codex Runicus (c. 1300) in the square “neumatic” notation used for Gregorian chant. While the situation is frustrating in some respects for the historically- and archeologically minded, it is also potentially liberating for modern neopagans and musicians. The lack of information about pre-Christian Scandinavian religions results in a modern artistic milieu in which there are relatively few dogmas associated with Nordic neopaganism. The lacunae around pre-medieval Nordic music open up a tabula rasa for musicians who can fill the gaps with their own interpretations. The musical component of the practice is then mostly released from concerns about historical authenticity or tradition, relying instead on what works for twenty-first-century practitioners.

Nordic Neopaganism

Nordic neopaganism draws on the available medieval literary material from Iceland and northwestern Europe that describes life in the pre-Christian era. As such, none of the literary material that the Nordic neopagan movement uses as a repertoire for creating a modern revival of pre-Christian religious ideas can be attributed directly to the pre-Christian era of Scandinavia. Along with medieval Icelandic literature, histories and other texts from mainland Scandinavia, the British Isles, and northern Germany play a role too. The same is the case with Roman histories mentioning northern Europe and Germanic-speaking populations, as well as archaeological material that is continually being discovered in northern Europe. The historical and archaeological material attached to the pre-Christian era of northern Europe forms the basis for Nordic neopagans’ religious ideas, but it is received through the lens of contemporary reception and is reflected in social and societal trends present in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A common term for these Nordic-aligned neopagan movements is “Ásatrú.” This term is commonly used in different versions in Scandinavian languages, but it is most often used in English in its Icelandic form. In Icelandic the word means “belief in the Æsir,” named so after the primary family of gods in the pre-Christian Nordic religions. It is a neologism that originally entered the Icelandic language from Danish, 9

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where the pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) used the term asalære (doctrine of the Æsir).11 In the 1960s and 1970s, Ásatrú communities emerged in Iceland and North America under influence from the nascent Wicca and Druidry movements.12 From the 1980s, such groups also emerged in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. While Wicca is a neopagan belief system that borrows from multiple pre-Christian mythologies, often centered on goddesses, Ásatrú and Odinism have often emphasized connections to Nordic ethnicities and a masculine ethic.13 These attitudes have been formed in contrast to the perceived universalism and gynocentrism of the Wicca movement.14 Although there are many detractors from the ethnocentric, masculinist perspective in Ásatrú,15 a form of white patriarchalism has, as a result, dominated the movement’s discourse in the last half of the twentieth century.16 A sense of authenticity is extracted from the notion of being an ethnic spirituality. Other terminology that is often used for these movements include “Norse paganism,” “Nordic heathenism/heathenry,” or “Nordic-Germanic heathenism/heathenry.” Practitioners will often refer to themselves simply as “Heathens.” There are political outlier groups, too, which associate with the far right. These are often referred to as “Odinists” due to their relationship with the Odinic and Wotanist movements of the early twentieth century. Definitions are a problem for this Nordic-based neopagan movement. Certain groups will steer clear of using the word “Ásatrú” due to perceived or real differences from other groups. Some maintain an exclusively Scandinavian affiliation, while others identify more broadly with Germanic culture, or more narrowly with local tribal and national regions, such as Frisians, Anglo-Saxons, Saxons, etc. As a global movement, differences in attitudes and ideas can also be detected between Scandinavia and continental Europe, as well as Europe and North America, between individual countries, and internally in every country. This makes it difficult to make broad statements about Nordic neopaganism as a modern religious revival movement. In Nordic neopaganism, beliefs vary greatly. Some recognize all the deities mentioned in medieval literature and featured in archaeological evidence, while others are exclusive to only some. Some groups and individuals maintain a strong polytheistic belief that is hostile to henotheist 10

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ideas, which focus on a single primary god while acknowledging the existence of lesser deities, while other groups practice various forms of henotheism. For example, some groups perceive the worship of Loki as an abomination while others embrace Loki as a necessary trickster. Also included in the broad spectrum of heathen perspectives are a group of practitioners who renounce the Æsir and only worship the secondary family of gods in the Nordic pantheon, the Vanir, or the outsiders, the Jötnar, and other demonic forces. Those who exclusively worship the Vanir often refer to themselves as Vanatrú, while the worshipers of the mythological outsiders call themselves Rökkrtrú or Thursatrú. These definitions largely belong to the North American cultural sphere. The myriad of possibilities for self-identification under the Nordic-aligned neopagan umbrella (and in defiance of it) attests to the movement’s status as a contemporary public venue for cultural critique of the modern world. In Nordic neopaganism, adherents find a space for criticizing the malaises of the modern world, whether they are perceived to be globalization and immigration or environmental destruction and capitalist exploitation of humanity. Undoubtedly helped by contemporary media franchises such as the History Channel’s Vikings and Marvel’s Thor and Avengers, Nordic mythology finds a broad audience in the Western world. A portion of those fans trickle to neo-religious movements such as Nordic neopaganism, where they may find some respite from the modern world and cultivate new communities. Several observers have noted that it is at this crux of disenchantment with the modern world and fantasies about the past that one finds the majority of Nordic neopagan adherents. In 1992, the German scholar Stefanie von Schnurbein made observations of the strong countercultural movements in Nordic neopaganism in her book Religion als Kulturkritik: Neugermanisches Heidentum im 20. Jahrhundert. She observed that adherents of Germanic-Scandinavian aligned paganisms tend to criticize modernity and fantasize about ancient matriarchies, ecologically sustainable communities, along with racially pure populations. In her follow-up book from 2015, Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism, von Schnurbein observes that these patterns are still present and, arguably, race and ecology could be said to be the most imposing subjects in Nordic neopaganism. Von Schnurbein 11

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deals particularly with the subjects of race and ethnicity, explaining the internal debates in the movement concerning the divide between folkish and universalist heathens. Nordic neopagans identifying as folkish Ásatrú claim that Europeans have a predisposition to worship the Nordic gods due to a spiritual tie to them in their blood. This concept is called “metagenetics” and is as pseudoscientific as it sounds. The term “folkish” is an Anglicized version of the term for the politico-cultural Germanist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Völkisch, which eventually spawned many elements of the German National Socialist movement’s ideas about race and territory in the 1920s and 1930s. Von Schnurbein also treats the subject of ecology and Nordic neopaganism as a pathway to creating a more sustainable modern lifestyle. Adherents to Nordic neopaganism generally assume that polytheism—in opposition to monotheist religions—is closer to nature. These beliefs have their origin in primitivist neo-romantic ideas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Nordic-aligned neopagans, whether in Europe or North America, habitually express thoughts about encountering or interacting with their gods in nature or through natural phenomena. In a broader cultural sense, early twentieth-century German and English tourism to Scandinavia fostered a set of postulates about the landscape and Nordic mythic heroism, which created stereotypes about the authenticity and sublimity of Nordic nature. Not only do these ideas influence contemporary pop-cultural perceptions about Scandinavia; they also have a strong hand in defining neopagan views of Scandinavia, both inwards and outwards. While ecology-centered neopaganism is mostly aligned with the political left, there is also a prevalent far-right ecological movement.17 Regardless of whether individual neopagan groups reject or embrace white supremacy, it can be argued that the encompassing doctrines of this modern religion often incorporate tacit ideas of white patriarchalism along with ideas of the sanctity of nature and notions of a magical self that prescribe the power of the individual spirit. In Ásatrú, this foundational gnosis has been inherited from the earliest revivalists, such as the Austrian founder of Ariosophy, Guido (von) List (1848–1919), whose anti-Slavic, pro-German doctrine purported that ancient Germanic 12

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religion was centered around racial purity as a law of nature. List’s Ariosophy was heavily reliant on Blavatsky’s Theosophy. He claimed that the Ario-German race was the fifth Atlantean root-race, one of the original carriers of spiritual and racial purity in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1897–1901), whose ancient cultural sediments, according to Blavatsky, could be detected across the Eurasian continents.18 While modern Nordic neopagans do not necessarily subscribe to List’s occult gnosis or consider themselves racist—they may in fact be either a-racist or anti-racist—von Schnurbein observes, there is still a considerable influence from Ariosophy and romanticism in mainstream Nordic neopaganism. Nordic-based neopaganism is also difficult to assess in terms of generating good statistics on membership. As a modern spirituality and religious group, Nordic-based neopaganism is decentralized, the terminology used by practitioners varies, and individual adherents describe and define both their group affiliation and personal beliefs in varying ways.19 Formalized Nordic-based neopaganism seems to cluster around political ideologies, creating groups that either align with or reject the Völkisch heritage in the contemporary belief system. In the United States, three large groups represent a segment of Nordic-based neopagans who have formed around ideologies. The Asatru Folk Assembly is a neo-Völkisch, far right Ásatrú group,20 while the Troth21 and The Asatru Community22 are groups that define themselves as “inclusive” and “anti-racist.” Practitioners also gather in local groups called “kindreds” that may be unaffiliated with larger national organizations and often avoid formal representation toward the public.23 It is likely that the number of non-affiliated practitioners and believers exceeds that of those who are organized in national and small, local groups because of disagreements with how organizations and groups are organized and a spiritual perspective that gravitates toward solitude.24 Runes have long played a role as important symbols in the Nordic-aligned neopagan movement. As Guido List popularized runes as exotic symbols that reveal a supposed gnostic truth about the mysteries of the world, these letters in the northern European writing system entered the mainstream of alternative spiritualities already in the late nineteenth century.25 After List’s death, runes continued to play a role 13

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in the symbolism and constructions of sacrality of the Völkisch movements in Europe,26 and were eventually adopted by early proponents of the Odinist movement. Stephen Flowers, known under his pen name as Edred Thorsson, published the book FUTHARK in 1984, based largely on List’s runic symbological system.27 Flowers also drew from List’s protégé, Jörg Lanz, whose eugenicist pseudo-spirituality “Theozoology” is likely to have given the German Nazi party their ideas for the Holocaust and operation Lebensborn.28 With his books on rune mysticism, Stephen Flowers popularized runes as sacred symbols in the New Age movement and is largely responsible for their heavy association with Viking Age history in popular culture today. Along with runes, early modern demonological symbols from the Icelandic Galdrabækir have also emerged as important neopagan symbology. Symbols such as the Œgishjálmur and Végvisir, the “helm of awe” and the “Viking compass” have become commonly used in neopagan popular culture, even beyond those groups that are strictly interested in the northern European region. The demonological symbols that form the Icelandic Galdrabækir have their origin in late medieval French grimoire traditions attributed to King Solomon and Jewish magical traditions. Their entry into neopaganism can be traced back to the French mystic Éliphas Lévi, whose Dogme et Rituel del la Haute Magie (1854–56) and Clefs majeures et clavicules de Salomon (1895) popularized the pentagram and Solomonic magical sigils. The Icelandic versions of Solomonic symbols have been popularized by Flowers,29 whose books can be found in Icelandic tourist shops and at the visitor store at the Icelandic National Museum. Flowers’s writings do not explicitly support List’s and Lanz’s gnostic, eugenicist neopaganism built on white patriarchalism, but nonetheless promote their basic tenets as a continuation of their symbology and philosophy. This means that Nordic-aligned neopaganism has inherited elements of white patriarchalism from List and the Völkisch movements, not only as a set of attitudes that may or may not circulate among various groups, but also as an inherent aspect of commonly used sacred symbols, which are accompanied by constructions of meaning through names and qualities attributed to the runes and other magical symbols.

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The romanticized idea of the Viking Age relies on popular portrayals of the Viking Age defined in part by medieval English chronicles and Alcuin of York’s writings on the famous attack on Lindisfarne in July 793. Both the Chronicles and Alcuin stereotype Scandinavians as heathen barbarians from the North, a portrayal that has very little to do with the historical reality of Anglo-Scandinavian interactions and everything to do with ecclesiastical narration of these interactions. Due to such shows as Vikings and Viking-themed music from black metal to the “Viking ambience” of Heilung and Wardruna, fan perspectives are largely informed by the pop-cultural narratives about Vikings. This pop-cultural portrayal of the Scandinavian past has, by and large, not left the romanticized historical stereotypes that have circulated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The postulate that there is an intrinsic familiarity between northern European ethnicities and nature is also a well-versed Nordic stereotype, which has been termed “borealism” in academic scholarship. Borealism derives its tropes from modern disenchantment with industrialism, but also intersects with other forms of exoticism that often manage to be simultaneously patronizing and laudatory. It claims that there is an inherent naturalness to Scandinavians and Icelanders thanks to their closer proximity to nature, a feature of the seemingly untamed Nordic landscapes. It is an aesthetic that revels in the contrasts of light and darkness, feminine and masculine, as well as culture and nature. The stereotypes can be detected in Nordic and Nordic-focused literature as far back as the medieval period with aforementioned Adam of Bremen and, perhaps even more so, Saxo, who accentuated the wildness of the North in his prelude to Gesta Danorum. Works of this kind were written by Scandinavians for a foreign audience, mostly to convince intellectuals in the European urban centers that the northern region of Europe was a legitimate part of the civilized world. However, as much as these works sought to do that, they also reinforced stereotypes about the Nordic wilderness and its barbaric inhabitants. Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus from 1555 both accentuated the legitimacy of Swedish civilization as well as the barbarism of other Scandinavians. Arngrímur Jónsson’s Icelandic national history Crymogæa from 1609 had similar purposes. These 15

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postulated barbarisms contrasted with ancient heroisms in the Viking Age were echoed in the English othering of Scandinavians in the eighteenth century. The othering of Scandinavians features most prominently in Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796, but also in the works of Thomas Percy, William Blake, and Thomas Gray. As a result, early Scandinavians and Germanic peoples in northern Europe have historically been compared with Native Americans, both in terms of stereotypes about close relationships to nature as well as the noble warrior- and racial extinction narratives. As an accompaniment to both the political and spiritual movements associated with Germanism and Nordicism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, visual and aural artforms have played decisive roles. Richard Wagner and J. R. R. Tolkien are of course household names when identifying inspirations for Germanic-Nordic Neopagan movements, but the growth of both literary and visual fictions about the Vikings and the Viking Age in the 2010–20s has had lasting impact, too. Aside from the abovementioned show Vikings and Marvel’s Thor-enterprise, a wide selection of literary works have also strongly influenced Ásatrúar’s self-perception; prominent examples are Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories book series about Alfred the Great (both of which have been adapted for television).30 Although von Schnurbein finalized her text on Norse Revival before Cornwell’s books were turned into the TV series The Last Kingdom, she anticipated the effect that the books would have on Germanic-Nordic neopaganism. Further, Robert Saunders notes that Vikings and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels (televised as Game of Thrones) also both center on conflicts between Indigenous polytheism and a new advancing monotheistic faith, but they break with Hollywood norms by presenting the pagans and their beliefs positively.31 The Catholic Saxons in Vikings are dour, vindictive, and prudish hypocrites, contrasting with the hearty, bold, and honorable Vikings, while the messianic and apocalyptic Faith of the Lord of Light in A Song of Ice and Fire is clearly linked with violent and destructive forces, embodied in the sorceress Melisandre. Saunders argues that the richness of these religious contexts provides modern practitioners of Europhilic polytheism with popular media that 16

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underscores the differences they see between themselves and the monotheistic masses.32 The fact that Wardruna’s music was featured several times in Vikings only strengthens the music’s connections to these feelings of belonging. Similarly, both Viking-based fantasy and historically based fiction in local languages in Scandinavia and Germany have further inspired adherents.

Developing Nordic Ritual Folk Music

Although this longing for the ancient past inherent to Germanism and Nordicism is not a new phenomenon, the musical trajectory that birthed Nordic ritual folk music first begins taking shape within the counterculture of post-war America. Indeed, Scott R. Troyer notes that heathenism and the counterculture share a number of ideological and aesthetic qualities, including an oppositional stance toward the values of mainstream society, an eco-centric worldview that venerates nature, and a predilection for premodern ideals in opposition to technocratic notions of progress.33 The counterculture also cultivated a new openness to alternative spiritualities, lifestyles, and aesthetics more generally, perhaps most visibly illustrated by the surging interest in Transcendental Meditation in the late 1960s. Helen Dell argues further that the utopian ethos of the ’60s counterculture was also profoundly influenced by the idyllic pastoralism running through Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, both of which were instrumental in shaping the trajectory of fantasy literature, film, and music for generations to come.34 Back in the real world, the American counterculture cultivated revivals of rural folk and blues music in the wake of Harry Smith’s monumental 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music compilation. Folk revivalists found in this music a refuge from commercial modernity, an attitude that subsequently informed much of the earliest examples of self-consciously Pagan music, such as that by American folk musician Gwydion Pendderwen. The music of the 1973 film The Wicker Man further solidified the connection between folk revival music, especially that of the British Isles, and later musical practices that would self-identify as heathen. Troyer notes that this connection facilitates a blurring between the “folk” and the “medieval,” further buttressed by the influence of the 17

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anthropologist James Frazer, who theorized that folk songs and rural traditions were remnants of pre-Christian practices.35 The countercultural, nostalgic, and fantasy aspects of folk revivalism also hint at one of the fundamental paradoxes that haunts the concept of “the folk,” both in musical terms and in socio-political arenas. Specifically, “folk culture” itself could be considered primarily a creation of the modern imagination, brought about through the act of being named and then defined essentially as the mirror inverse of everything that might be considered modern.36 As Ross Cole explores at length in The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination, this renders folk music and folk culture as something of an empty vessel to be filled with all manner of discontentment with the current circumstances of life. Indeed, he argues that the fundamental quality of modernity might be a belief in this point of rupture and alienation from an unattainable and unknowable past, which then drives the nostalgic desire for alternatives that has animated folk revivalisms of all types. While the new religious and ritual practices of the twentieth century opened up creative space for musicians, the twentieth century was also a period in which many centuries-old works of Christian sacred music began to lose some of their original context and became less tied to worship practices. Recording technologies, in particular, likely accelerated sacred music’s “un-enchantment” by making it possible to listen to these works at home, outside of their usual church milieu. On the one hand, recordings of church music obviously foster personal devotion for many (if not most) listeners, but they also open the door for the music to be appreciated for reasons that may have nothing to do with worship. For example, one need only look at the trends in recordings of early music from the medieval and Renaissance periods beginning in the 1960s. The introduction of long-playing records offered many possibilities, so by the 1970s early music groups were compiling unrelated pieces of medieval music into bricolage “concept albums” unified by a theme or a dramatic narrative. In the 1990s, Gregorian chant music famously had a brief resurgence essentially as new age music for relaxation, spearheaded by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’s wildly popular 1994 compilation album Chant. Around the same time, the first albums 18

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by the German artist Enigma featured samples of Gregorian chant in songs that were otherwise steeped in eroticism, backed by languid hip-hop beats. Enigma’s later hit single “Return to Innocence” similarly uses a Taiwanese chant to evoke exotic spirituality, which will be detailed in a later chapter. More recently, film and video game composers have also come to regularly use choral compositions and Gregorian chant as musical signals for “epicness” or “creepiness” rather than reverence. Beyond the European tradition, the world music industry of the 1990s brought ritual and religious music from all over the world to Western listeners, who often found in it the same rustic authenticity that earlier generations found in rural American folk music. Because of this decontextualization, the specific meanings and symbolisms of these sacred music traditions often became relatively muted in favor of an ambient aura of nebulous and exoticized spirituality. The music of twenty-first-century groups like Wardruna and Heilung owes much to this convergence of countercultural folk music revivals and the un-enchantment of sacred music in general. It is partially in the intersection between the white patriarchalism of Nordic neopaganism and extreme boreal heavy metal music as a space for white hegemonic masculinities37 that certain genres of music emerge as a medium to mitigate the spiritual experience.38 Heilung and Wardruna present their audiences with an idealized Nordic alternative aural experience, which may be reinforced by personal narratives among their listeners. As such, the bands construct and convey Nordic cultural symbolism and ideology, lending voice and soundscape to what the audience receives as an ancient power that collapses time and space and transports them to a bygone era in which they may feel that they can experience an authentic and validating form of pre-Christian spirituality.39 This situation provides both a model of sorts and an audience accustomed to listening to all types of sacred music without necessarily identifying with or even understanding their ritual purposes. In the absence of any defined music tradition specific to Nordic antiquity, these musicians are also able to simply “make it up” in many respects. They do this by using an eclectic mix of existing musical styles and sonic signifiers that their audience already understands. Crucially, the resulting music maintains its efficaciousness and specificity for 19

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Nordic-aligned neopagans while also communicating more generally to a wider listenership. To this end, twenty-first-century Nordic ritual folk music draws heavily from the darkwave and gothic styles popularized in the 1980s and ’90s by the record labels 4AD and Projekt, and particularly the more ethereal groups like Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, and Cocteau Twins. Dead Can Dance and similar groups not only worked within styles of gothic rock and post-punk, but also expanded their musical palette into choral music, non-Western musical traditions, and medieval music. Dead Can Dance’s singer Lisa Gerrard’s distinctive vocal style takes a number of cues from Irish unaccompanied singing traditions and the sharp and quivering timbres of Bulgarian choral music as heard on the famous 1975 Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares album featuring the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir. Gerrard was not alone in her fascination with Le Mystère, as the album has exerted a profound and lasting influence on many other singers and songwriters following its 4AD/Nonesuch reissue in 1987. The vocal techniques and harmonies of Nordic ritual folk music still sometimes evoke Bulgarian choral music, albeit in a simplified fashion, as in Heilung’s “Norupo” (2019). These musical gestures signal vague visions of pre-modernity and cultural alterity for many listeners, being just exotic enough while remaining uncannily familiar. The musical and cultural pastiches of Dead Can Dance and similar groups were also mirrored by developments in the world music industry, which increasingly cross-pollinated modern rock and pop music with traditional music forms, along with an eclectic array of other musical fusions. Although such practices raise questions of exoticization and cultural appropriation, such musical cosmopolitanism also potentially works to foster a diverse and inclusive community, offering a rejoinder to folk music’s history of chauvinistic nationalism.40 In the 1990s, several Scandinavian and German bands began creating similar sorts of musical fusions between traditional music and modern styles, but often with more specific references to local music and traditions than would be found in the darkwave scene. As with Dead Can Dance and other world fusion ensembles, the music of these bands is often an omnivorous pastiche of musical traditions hailing from around 20

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the globe, employing a wide variety of instruments including Arabic and Brazilian percussion, Australian didgeridoos, and Celtic harps along with modern rock and electronic elements. Jason Pitzl-Waters uses the term “ethno-Gothic” to describe these bands, noting that the definition remains rather amorphous and elastic concerning musical style and affect.41 Along these lines, Scandinavian groups like Garmarna and Hedningarna recorded versions of nineteenth-century folk ballads that reimagined these stark and austere melodies in rock and electronica contexts. Hedningarna also uses a number of archaic, if not exactly ancient, traditional Scandinavian instruments like Swedish bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy, and nyckelharpa (a fiddle with a key mechanism) in their music, along with traditional Sámi joik singing. In a similar vein, the music of German darkwave act Qntal combined medieval-era lyrics in Latin, medieval German, and other languages with electronic and industrial music production. One of their more popular tracks was a setting of the thirteenth-century crusade song “Palästinalied,” one of a handful of non-liturgical songs from that time for which a complete melody exists. Germany also cultivated a robust scene of “Mittelalter” bands like Faun, In Extremo, and Corvus Corax, who all regularly combine archaic instrumentation and medieval-era lyrics with rock instrumentation. These bands also have roots in medieval and Renaissance fairs and markets, which often mix historical reenactment with elements of modern medievalist fantasy literature and film. The musical and subcultural scene around medieval fairs has also become quite accommodating for neopagan musicians and other participants. There are also several Nordic-aligned bands and individuals in the heavy metal and neofolk scenes whose influences can be detected in the Nordic neopagan communities. The Swedish black metal group Bathory pioneered Viking- and heathen-themed metal in the early 1990s. The integration of Viking and heathen themes in the music of other black metal groups such as Dimmu Borgir, Ensiferum, Amorphis, and Enslaved added to the increasing popularity of Ásatrú in the 1990s. In the early 1990s, a series of notorious church burnings committed by musician Varg Vikernes (1973–) and a group associated with the band Mayhem in Norway increased the global visibility of Neopagan-aligned black 21

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metal. After going to prison for the church burnings and the murder of his bandmate Øystein Aarseth (Euronymous) in 1993, Varg Vikernes founded the anti-Semitic, Ariosophic movement Norwegian Heathen Front, which spawned chapters in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.42 However, it is worth noting that Viking metal and black metal musicians in the twenty-first century take a variety of approaches that typically have little to do with violence or political extremism. Enslaved’s more recent albums tend toward esoteric and mystical interpretations of particular runes, for example, and for many Viking metal bands, the religious and spiritual aspects may be peripheral to a more generalized interest in history, mythology, and Nordic identity.43 In the neofolk scene, front man of the band Blood Axis, Michael Moynihan (1969–), has been a prominent figure in shaping heathen-themed artistic experiences for Nordic-aligned neopagans.44 Aside from being a musician, Moynihan is also the co-author of Lords of Chaos, a 1997 book about Mayhem, the Norwegian church burnings, and Varg Vikernes.45 As the first English-language book on Norwegian black metal, Lords of Chaos solidified connections between black metal, heathenism, and far-right extremism in popular imagination. Influence on Moynihan’s spirituality, as expressed in his literature and music, comes from early twentieth-century völkisch ideas. The relationship between neofolk and right-wing Ásatrú in America can be detected from the 1970s with Robert N. Taylor’s band Changes. Taylor has been involved with the far-right vigilante group The Minutemen as well as both the Ásatrú Folk Assembly and the Ásatrú Alliance. Similarly, the widely published American Ásatrú rune-occultist, Freya Aswynn, was a central figure in the 1980s London to whom Death in June’s Douglas Pearce, Sol Invictus’s Tom Wakeford, and David Tibet from Current 93 all flocked. In 1991, David Tibet collaborated with the current alsherjargoði (high priest) of the Icelandic Ásatrú organization Ásatrúarfélagið, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson (1958–), on the album Island, for which the singer Björk provided backing vocals. Björk’s tenure as a Nordic musician who combines music, environmentalism, and national identity—maybe even a form of Icelandic nationalism—has also been well documented by 22

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Nicola Dibben.46 Indeed, there are numerous connections between the Ásatrúarfélag and alternative music scenes going back decades; Hilmar has a long history of collaborations with other groups like Psychic TV and Sigur Rós and is a well-regarded film composer. The first alsherjargoði of the Ásatrúarfélag, Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson (1924–1993), was acquainted with the Icelandic punk rock band Purrkur Pillnikk. He also released solo recordings of portions of the Eddic poems Völuspá, Hávamál, and Sigurdrífumál sung in the style of Icelandic rímur, a distinctively Icelandic style of epic poetry recitation dating back at least to the 1500s. The first of these, Eddukvæði, was released in 1982 on Gramm Records, a label that would become central to Iceland’s alternative music scene, while a second collection was released in 1990 on David Tibet’s label as Current 93 presents Sveinbjörn ‘Edda.’ While these aspects of music and Ásatrú overlap in various ways and intersect with political groups and various ideologies, one should be careful with making assumptions about their aims, interests, and current political opinions. Although Nordic ritual folk music is closely connected with these threads in metal and neofolk music, there are several notable musical differences. Neofolk music, as performed by groups like Of the Wand & the Moon and Sol Invictus, often tends toward acoustic guitars and traditional song structures, relying on basic chord progressions and meditative rhythms. Their reliance on modern acoustic instruments evinces little of the musical reconstructionism that animates Nordic ritual folk music, even as it conveys a certain archaic and pastoral aura to listeners. Viking metal bands frequently take a similar path in that they evoke the ancient past with familiar folk instruments like accordions and fiddles, along with sounds of fire, hooves, and waves that situate the listener in imaginary time and space. Sea shanties are also a frequent point of musical reference, possibly stemming from depictions of early sailors and Vikings in mid-twentieth-century film and television programs.47 However, in both the cases of neofolk and Viking metal, the effectiveness of their evocation of the past relies on its generalized nature and lack of historical context. Nordic ritual folk music exploits the same gap in information but uses it to construct a more specific musical experience. Notably, the prominence of music by Wardruna and Einar Selvik in The History Channel’s Vikings 23

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series and in the score of the video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has also established new musical tropes for specifically invoking ancient Scandinavia. The semiotic cycle continues to churn onward in this regard.48 As a result of all this, groups like Wardruna and Heilung create their music to serve modern purposes and conceptions of what ancient music sounded like. Although not specific to ritualistic music or Viking metal, this modern-period interest in ancient music has sparked a lot of scholarly inquiry into “medievalism,” referring to the use of the medieval period (including the Viking Age) as a source of creative inspiration. This phenomenon dates back to the Enlightenment and became especially prevalent as a response to the dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution. One of the main currents within medievalism of all types is a sense of longing and nostalgia, with ancient times becoming almost an object of desire and a sort of reservoir for feelings stemming from disenchantment with one’s current times. As we have seen with most aspects of Viking culture, however, the ancient world cannot be resurrected but instead has to be constructed. Simon Trafford notes that the medieval or ancient world is one of several other popular fictive domains, including the pastoral and the exotic, that serve as sites of authentic experience and alternatives to the dominant culture.49 In this, medievalist music shares much with the opposition to mainstream commerciality found in other alternative and underground music scenes. Finally, one important note here is that while many listeners seek novelty and authenticity in music from an exotic culture far removed from modernity in time and/or geography, for many, this music also fulfills a desire to connect with one’s own cultural roots. It is mainly in the intersection between cultural stereotypes and the search for one’s roots that we find the contemporary Nordic ritual folk music that has been popularized by Heilung and Wardruna. These northern European bands who are playing a type of music that postulates a close relationship between European ethnicities and nature offer a welcome beacon for identity construction, especially among white Americans, whose previous unifying narratives of being grounded in wilderness and nature have been supplanted by narratives of race, gender, and ethnicity. For many white audiences, this genre of music becomes a haven 24

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of sorts from demographic and political changes, which has undoubtedly contributed to its more troubling aspects. Yet these stereotypes of borealism that romanticize both the Scandinavian peoples and landscapes also helped create a subcultural space in which this modern religious revival movement, and its music, can flourish. The following chapters will explore how this music interacts with threads of regional and national identity, exoticism, nostalgia, and Viking-themed media in order to paint a more complete picture of this music and its cultural milieu. Assessing the role that popular music plays in a non-centralized belief community is particularly difficult with Nordic-based neopaganism because of the heterogeneity and eclecticism of adherents and groups. The only study to date, which has investigated aspects of the spiritual relevance of Heilung’s music, was conducted in an informal Facebook group setting in 2019 by Heilung performer Ruben Terlouw. Terlouw, who is one of Heilung’s “warrior” performers, is a bachelor of science in archaeology from the Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede in the Netherlands. As part of his studies, Terlouw conducted fieldwork on how music and sound enhances audiences’ experiences of objects displayed in museums. In context of that, Terlouw researched how Heilung’s self-narration as “amplified history” impacted the experience of the band’s music among their fans. In his survey of fan experiences, Terlouw allowed for respondents to make comments. Of the survey’s 5256 respondents, 10.05 percent commented that Heilung’s music imparted the feeling of being “transported to the past,” and 2.6 percent explained that they identified as Nordic-based neopagans.50 No similar study of the religious affiliations of Wardruna’s fan base exists, but since both bands play at many of the same venues and festivals in Europe and North America, it can be assumed that there is a sizeable overlap in their audiences. Heilung and Wardruna both have close ties to the Viking Age-fantasy Midgardsblot festival in Borre in Norway and the medieval-fantasy festival Castlefest in the Netherlands, which hosted Heilung’s 2017 debut performance. Their performance at Midgardsblot that year was described as a “pagan rave” between the Viking Age burial mounds, which Heilung founder Christopher Juul described as an intensely “binding experience” 25

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involving not only the performers and the audience but also the people “under the hill.”51 Wardruna’s Einar Selvik and Enslaved’s Ivar Bjørnson also debuted their project Skuggsjá at Midgardsblot in 2015, a collaboration born of a commission from the Norwegian government.52 If medieval and Viking Age fantasy festivals like Castlefest and Midgardsblot are important venues to bands like Heilung and Wardruna, one may perhaps also assume that their audiences attend such festivals for the ambience of antiquity that is attached to them. As Terlouw’s survey shows, it is not just individuals who are religiously or spiritually aligned with Nordic-based neopaganism who feel “transported to the past” when they listen to Heilung’s music. This is an experience that ten percent of the respondents to the survey report that they have. What this means is that a spiritual and religious connection to the pre-Christian Nordic past is not required for members of Heilung’s audiences to experience what the band calls “amplified history.” Amplified history may be understood as a kind of reception of the distant past that is aware of its receptive component as it attempts to revive the past. It is in that sense not a claim to authentic representation, and both Heilung and Wardruna create their music as a kind of reconnection to the past, knowing and admitting that it is not authentic per se. Nonetheless, audience members still generate that feeling of authenticity from listening to the music. In a number of ways, Nordic neopaganisms all engage with a desire to create a ritual space that reenchants the present by offering a temporary escape to an imagined other place and time. Music plays an indelible role in conjuring this experience, even as it also can do so independently of any feeling of spiritual connection. For ensembles like Wardruna and Heilung, the exotic and wild ancient world they invoke is also woven through with centuries of western European and American conceptions about the Nordic and Arctic regions. This common cultural currency is one of the means by which this music conveys a sense of authenticity to listeners, and which also bestows its spiritual efficacy. The following chapter deals specifically with the cultural legacies of “borealism,” which exoticizes the Nordic region and its inhabitants while also often trafficking in a romanticized identity politics that fetishizes whiteness and masculinity. Although Nordic neopaganism is not necessarily limited by 26

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these conceptions, they have clearly exerted an indisputably significant and lasting influence for many generations. Further, these fantasies of wildness and masculinist virility have animated many of the ways in which the amplified history of the boreal-ized past has manifested in cinema, video games, and music. The rest of this volume explores the world of Nordic ritual folk music with a particular focus on developments over the first few decades of the twenty-first century, a period that has seen the musical and cultural products of Viking reenactment reach a much wider audience. We approach this from multiple angles to illuminate how this musical subculture has been influenced by historical trends in culture and in music, and how it builds upon them. Although we do engage in conversation with some participants in the Nordic ritual folk scenes, our study is not a detailed ethnography of the scene. Instead, our focus is on the scene’s cultural history in the Nordic region and around the world, along with persistent aspects of its music that assist its spiritual efficacy for musicians and other participants. The following chapter focuses on long-lingering exoticized stereotypes about the Nordic region dating back centuries, particularly among European and American audiences. One result is that the Nordic regions become a repository for a variety of cultural and psychological notions, particularly involving wilderness, masculinity, and whiteness. The legacies of colonialism and religious conversion in the Nordic region provide additional complexities to the situation. Chapter 3 focuses in on specific musical idioms, tropes, and instruments that have become associated with Northern-ness, in some cases due to folk music revivals and other nationalistic movements. Within modern Ásatrú music, many of these musical touchstones continue to be salient tropes associated with Northern-ness, often with purposeful ties to landscape, wilderness, and folklore. Chapter 4 follows this thread into the realms of world music, exploring the musically omnivorous aesthetic of groups like Heilung and Wardruna alongside broader ways in which musical signifiers of ancientness are often drawn from existing foreign, marginalized, or otherwise distant cultures. The fifth chapter takes these ideals onboard for deeper dives into the music of selected ensembles and individual musicians, with a special focus on the interplay between music, text, and theatrical 27

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presentation. Our concluding final libations offer closing thoughts on some developing threads and trends within these subcultures and their gatherings, exploring ongoing debates over white supremacy and cultural appropriation, while also suggesting possibilities for positive growth within this subcultural milieu.

Notes

1. bbbnordavind, June 1, 2010, “Wardruna—Bjarkan Live at the Viking Ship Museum,” https:​//​youtu​.be​/bKMDcTnezvU​?si​=IrKLyUmPhGaOHMr6. 2. Stefan Brink, “How uniform was the Old Norse religion?” Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross, ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop, Tarrin Wills (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 105–36; Terry Gunnel, “Pantheon? What Pantheon?” Scripta Islandica 66 (2015): 55–76. 3. Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology. (Stuttgart: Alfred Körner Verlag, 1993), 205–6. 4. Johan Callmer, “Scandinavia and the Continent in the Viking Age.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 439–52; Lotte Hedeager, “Scandinavia before the Viking Age.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 11–22. 5. Peter Orton, “Pagan Myth and Religion.” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 302–19; Terry Gunnell, “Eddic Poetry.” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 82–100. 6. Gunnell, “Eddic Poetry”; Vesteinn Ólason, “Family Sagas.” Old Norse-Icelandic Culture and Literature, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 101–18; Helgi Þorláksson, “Historical Background: Iceland 870–1400.” Old Norse-Icelandic Culture and Literature, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 136–54; Stefanie Würth, “Historiography and Pseudo-Historiography.” Old Norse-Icelandic Culture and Literature, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 155–73; Ármann Jakobsson, “Royal Biography.” Old Norse-Icelandic Culture and Literature, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 388–403; Torfi H. Tulinius, “Sagas of Icelandic Prehistory.” Old Norse-Icelandic Culture and Literature, ed. Rory McTurk (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 447–62; Anthony Faulkes, “Snorri Sturluson: his life and work.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 311–14; Margaret Clunies Ross, “The Creation of Old Norse mythology.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 231–34. 7. Jean Renaud, “The Duchy of Normandy.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 454–55. 8. Stefan Brink, “Who were the Vikings?” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 4–11. 9. Callmer, “Scandinavia and the Continent in the Viking Age”; Stefan Brink, “Christianisation and the emergence of the early Church in Scandinavia.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 621–28; Claus Kragh, “The

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Paradoxes of Ritual Folk Music creation of Norway.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 645–51; Else Roesdahl, “The emergence of Denmark and the reign of Harald Bluetooth.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price, (London: Routledge, 2012), 652–64; Thomas Lindkvist, “The emergence of Sweden.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 668–74. 10. Hedeager, “Scandinavia before the Viking Age,” 11–22. 11. Stefanie von Schnurbein, Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 19–32. 12. von Schnurbein, 2015: 54; Jennifer Snook, American Heathens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 1–9. 13. Snook, American Heathens, 7, 140–5, 162–7. 14. Snook, American Heathens, 113–22. 15. Snook, American Heathens, 122–29, 135–39; von Schnurbein Norse Revival, 243–50. 16. von Schnurbein Norse Revival, 216. 17. von Schnurbein Norse Revival, 123–45 and 180–215. 18. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1980–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 17–65. 19. Stefanie von Schnurbein, Religion als Kulturkritik: Neugermanisches Heidentum im 20. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg, 1999); von Schnurbein 2015: 1–16; Snook 2015: 1–27 and 48–80; Mathias Nordvig, “Neo-paganism.” Handbook of Pre-Modern Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell, and Jürg Glauser (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 728–733. 20. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Asatru Folk Assembly,” https:​//​www​.splcenter​.org​ /fighting​-hate​/extremist​-files​/group​/asatru​-folk​-assembly (Accessed on 10/12/2023). 21. The Troth, “The Troth,” https:​//​thetroth​.org/ (Accessed on 10/12/2023). 22.The Asatru Community,“The Asatru Community,”https:​//​www​.theasatrucommunity​ .com/ (Accessed on 10/12/2023). 23. Snook, American Heathens, 86–95. 24. Snook, American Heathens, 86–9. 25. Goodricke-Clark, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 33–65. 26. Goodricke-Clark, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 90–191. 27. Edred Thorson, FUTHARK. A Handbook of Rune Magic (San Francisco: Wieser Books, 1984), 14–18. 28. Wilfred Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab: Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (Wien: Ueberreuter, 1994). 29. Stephen E. Flowers, Icelandic Magic. Practical Secrets of the Northern Grimoires (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2016). 30. Neil Gaiman, American Gods (New York: William Morrow, 2001). 31. Robert A. Saunders, “Primetime Paganism: Popular-Culture Representations of Europhilic Polytheism in Game of Thrones and Vikings,” Correspondences vol. 2, no. 2 (2014): 121–57. 32. Saunders, “Primetime Paganism,” 134.

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Chapter 1 33. Scott R. Troyer, “Medievalism and Identity Construction in Pagan Folk Music,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, Edited by Stephen C. Meyer and Kirsten Yri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 589. 34. Helen Dell, Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming), 33–34. 35. Troyer, “Medievalism and Identity Construction,” 588–89. 36. Ross Cole, The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 8–18. 37. Karl Spacklen, “‘To Holmgard . . . and Beyond’ Folk Metal Fantasies and Hegemonic White Masculinities.” Metal Music Studies 1, no. 3 (2015): 359–77. 38. Padraic Fitzgerald and Mathias Nordvig, “Spellbinding Skalds: Music as Ritual.” Living Folk Religions, ed. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Aaron Michael Ullrey (London: Routledge, 2023), 200–1. 39. Fitzgerald and Nordvig, “Spellbinding Skalds,” 201–2. 40. Yri, Kirsten. “Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism.” Popular Music 38, no. 3, (2019): 361–78. 41. Jason Pitzl-Waters, “The Darker Shade of Pagan: The Emergence of Goth,” Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music, Edited by Donna Weston and Andy Bennett (London and New York: Routledge), 76–90. 42. Fredrik Gregorius, “The ‘Allgermanische Heidnische Front’ and Old Norse Religion.” Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives, ed. Catharina Raudvere and Anders Andrén (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2006), 389–92. 43. Imke von Helden, “Viking Metal: Obsessed with the Past?” The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music, ed. Jan-Peter Herbst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 120–22. 44. Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 301–3. 45. Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 1997).  46. Nicola Dibben, Björk (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009). 47. Aaron Patrick Mulvany, ‘Reawakening Pride Once Lost’: Indigeneity and European Folk Metal (MA dissertation). Wesleyan University, 2000, 38–45. 48. Sarah Schachner,  Jesper Kyd,  and Einar Selvik, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Selected Game Soundtrack), Ubisoft Music, 2020, compact disc. 49. Simon Trafford, “Viking Metal,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, Edited by Stephen C. Meyer and Kirsten Yri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 565. 50. Fitzgerald and Nordvig, “Spellbinding Skalds, 195; Ruben Terlouw, Ancient Resonance: The Sound of Archaeology and the Role of Audio in Museums. Saxion University of Applied Sciences. 2020 (unpublished BA thesis). 51. Metalhammer, “The 10 best gigs of 2017,” https:​//​www​.loudersound​.com​/features​ /the​-10​-best​-gigs​-of​-2017 (Accessed 10/12/2023).

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Paradoxes of Ritual Folk Music 52. Metalhammer, “Metal and Viking culture combine for Norway’s Midgardsblot festival,” https:​//​www​.loudersound​.com​/news​/metal​-and​-viking​-culture​-combine​-for​ -norway​-s​-midgardsblot​-festival (Accessed 10/12/2023).

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Chapter 2

Anglo Fascinations

A Cultural History of Borealism Mathias Nordvig

A fascination with the Nordics in Anglophone culture, primarily British and North American, can be traced back to eighteenth-century Gothic and Romanticist literature. The interest in Nordic prehistory grew from the preceding centuries’ antiquarian investigations of Old Norse literature and historical documents in Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. The two northern European empires Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland had been engaged in rivalries over regional dominance since the split of the Kalmar Union in 1523. Beyond wars and military dominance, this rivalry materialized in cultural movements with affinity to past military exploits and glory. In Sweden, Gothicism emerged as a significant cultural force. Gothicism romanticized the Swedish past and laid claim to the migrating Goths, who in the 4–500s CE were responsible for the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, as ancestors of the Swedes.1 Denmark did not generate a similar popular movement as Swedish Gothicism, but nonetheless participated in comparable fantasizing about the past in scholarship and popular works. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century, Swedish publications such as Johannes Magnus’s Historia de Omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque Regibus (1554), Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555), and Olof Rudbeck’s

33

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Atland eller Manheim (c. 1702) made dubious, yet tantalizing, claims about the glorious past of the Swedish people. Claims of superiority, natural closeness to God, and being the first tribe of Man, and even that Sweden was the lost Atlantis, flourished in these early scholarly works. In Denmark, the works of Ole Worm (1588–1664) and Thomas Bartholin (1616–80) further added to a sense of ancient mystique surrounding Nordic populations in western European imagination. Especially the latter’s work Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptae a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis from 1689 added to a general image of ancient Nordics as valiant but bloodthirsty warriors. The title translates to “Antiquities concerning the reason the reason for the pagan Danes’ disdain for death,” and in it, Bartholin made a case for a natural inclination in the Danish to have no fear of death in war. What emerged from these musings about the Nordic past was an image of fierce Viking warriors from the North. This image found its place as a trope about Nordic populations in British literature in the eighteenth century. In 1610, the Icelandic antiquarian Arngrímur Jónsson published Crymogœa, which was the first treatment of Icelandic history since Ari Þorgilson inn fróði’s Íslendingabók (Book of Icelanders) from 1130. Arngrímur’s purpose with Crymogœa was to dispel stereotypes about Iceland. The early era of the country before the Norwegian annexation of Iceland in 1262 was represented as a heroic golden age, which was followed by decline and corruption under foreign rule.2 With that, Arngrímur created a patriotic narrative about Iceland, which arguably resulted in new stereotypes about the country and its past in the European public. Crymogœa introduced European intellectuals to Icelandic saga literature and Old Norse mythology, delivering inspirational material about the Nordic past to intellectual environments especially in England, Scotland, France, and the German states. Familiar with ancient Greek and Roman histories relating brief accounts about a northern location called Thule and a nebulous population called the Hyperboreans (People Beyond the Northern Winds), scholars and popular authors of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries frequently fantasized about the Nordic populations as their descendants and Scandinavia or Iceland as the original Thule. This 34

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borealism3 became commonplace in Anglophone fiction about northern Europe. The late eighteenth century through the Victorian Era was the period of most consistent fascination with the North until recently. Thomas Gray’s The Fatal Sisters (1768) and The Descent of Odin (1768) introduced Gothic horror to the image of the Nordic region. William Blake’s watercolors were added to Gray’s Norse Odes in 1797, providing fantastical visuals to these fictions about Nordic culture. With Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), the Anglophone public was introduced to some of the dominant Nordic populations, heavily influenced by Wollstonecraft’s theory of nature’s influence on the human mind,4 a reproduction of Classical Mediterranean tropes about how climate influences human development and mental character. As Britain became a colonial superpower in the Victorian Era (1837–1901), British intellectuals began renegotiating the concept of British identity in contrast to the surrounding world. This process has been described succinctly by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) as an analysis of the Western othering of Middle Eastern cultures. Othering of foreign cultures pervades Anglophone literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in descriptions of people and locations in British colonies. Heart of Darkness (1902) exemplifies an othering of African populations and the African continent, which belongs to the category known as imperial Gothic. Imperial Gothic is a mode of representation of locations colonized by the empire in which they are shrouded in mystery and elements of Gothic horror to display how colonized peoples are degenerated.5 An element of this attitude persists in Anglophone depictions of Nordic populations, as well as other peoples on the European continent.6 British identity was in this era negotiated in relation to space, allowing for a mode of behavior that connected the conquest of space with masculinity. This was a particularly dominant pattern in Anglophone cultures in relation to the Arctic, where penetrating the icy North offered an opportunity to map British values onto that space and test masculinities.7 The Arctic and the North, however, represent a failure in British colonial history to extend its reach and demonstrate the resilience of its kind of masculinity. 35

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Samuel Hearne’s account of his explorations of the Barren Grounds in northern Canada was published in 1796, ushering in an era of Anglophone interest in and exploration of the Arctic.8 Hearne’s success relied heavily on low-tech, light traveling and his use of Indigenous informants, guides, and skills.9 Comparably, John Franklin’s expedition to the same region in 1819–21 was a disaster that descended into starvation, cannibalism, and death, owing primarily to Franklin’s attitude and social identity as an upper-class British man. The British image of masculinity defined men as intellectual and capable but assumed superiority in technology and technological utilities. This led Franklin’s expedition to ignore the skills of the Indigenous peoples who took part in the journey and put trust in their own school and heavy equipment. As a result, Franklin found himself beaten by the Arctic on his expedition, resorting to actions deemed “savage” on his journey.10 If the purpose of entering the Arctic in British imagination was to demonstrate the superiority of the civilized man, he failed spectacularly. Nonetheless, Franklin came to repeat many of the same mistakes in his 1845–48 naval expedition to find the Northwest Passage. On this journey, deemed the Franklin Mystery, the largest and technologically best-equipped expedition with the two for the time highly advanced ships Erebus and Terror perished with Franklin and some 129 sailors in the Victorian Strait.11 This event may be said to be a British technological disaster on par with the sinking of the Titanic in 1910. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, focus shifted to the search for the then North Pole among British and American explorers, followed by French, Italians, Austrians, and Russians.12 It was, however, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who bested them all in 1893 with his Fram expedition. The reception of Nansen’s success by the president of the British Royal Geographical Society as confirming “the conclusions which were to be derived from previous knowledge, including the final and completing labours of the Nares expedition,”13 can hardly be understood as anything but dismissing. Nansen, like the Danish Knud Rasmussen, made use of Indigenous methods such as dogsled teams, traditional technology, pragmatism, and the knowhow that is part and parcel with growing up in Arctic climes. This approach by Nordic explorers in the Arctic, although hardly original, stood in direct 36

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contrast to the highly technologized and perceived civilized approach of many British and American explorers, and should not be underestimated in understanding the development of an Anglophone cultural perception of the Nordics in the Victorian Era. The Nordic populations were perceived with a certain sense of ambiguity. Richard Burton’s Ultima Thule from 1875 exemplifies this ambiguity in its depiction of Iceland. Iceland, here designated “Beyond Thule,” the mysterious northern location known from Greco-Roman literature, is an uncivilized location steeped in stereotypes. However, as Burton’s explorer narrative about Iceland traverses the country, it revels in infatuation with the Viking past and how it connects with the British past. Burton even refashions his own name in an Old Norse version in the book. There is on the one hand a rejection of what is perceived as uncivilized from a British perspective, and, on the other hand, a sense of fascination and familiarity with the Nordics. This can be characterized as an emotion suspended between abjection and admiration, as sense of envy. If the Arctic and the Global North represented a failure of the British to demonstrate superior masculinity,14 it begs the question of what it says about Nordic masculinities in the Anglophone imagination that they are born farther north. The Nordic region is in many respects conceptualized as an exotic borderland in Anglophone imagination and in the self-perception of the Nordic populations whose realm has only recently been included in the civilized world. The northern European borderland toward the Arctic represents an ancient world that persists in modern times.15 The examples of Nansen and Rasmussen navigating the Arctic in a more capable manner seem to have underscored this notion, which was already present with British authors and their audiences in the late eighteenth century. This sentiment relegates the Nordic populations to a status between civilized and uncivilized in a hierarchy that, in the late nineteenth century, was central to anthropological discussions.

Proximity to the Arctic: Race and Masculinity in the North

The North became meaningful in the context of masculinism in early twentieth-century European anthropology in debates about the origin 37

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of European culture. After European scholars became acquainted with literature from the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth century, the notion of an ancient central Asian population having had a strong hand in the creation of European cultures dominated academic discussions. Prior to this, assumptions about the origin of European cultures had been dominated by Biblical myths about Noah and the Tower of Babel.16 Theories, myths, claims, and assumptions concerning the origin of European culture in a nebulous population called “Aryans” circulated among scholars of history, culture, race, and religion, from Johann Gottfried von Herder to the race scientists of the Third Reich.17 In the debate about the original “homeland” of these Aryans, two positions emerged: the Aryans either originated in central Asia or in the North, possibly Scandinavia or even the North Pole. Herder was an early proponent of the theory of a northern homeland,18 but it was in the late nineteenth century that the myth of a Nordic homeland for the Aryans and their conflation with Germanic-speaking populations in northern Europe became commonplace and was activated in political ideologies such as fascism.19 The Austrian anthropologist Karl Penka proposed that the Aryans had spread from the North in his two books Origines Ariacae (1883) and Die Herkunft der Arier (1886), and the Hindu nationalist Bâl Gangadhar Tilak lent further support for such theories with his The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), which purported that the Vedic hymns proved that the Aryan ancestors to Europeans and Brahminic Indians lived in the Arctic in an interglacial period between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE.20 Simultaneously with the spread of these pseudo-anthropological theories, race scientists constructed a Nordic race based in phenotypical comparisons. Despite originally having been perceived as uncivilized by European and the emerging American state in the eighteenth century, even to the extent that the Nordics were racialized as part of the “swarthy” and “tawny” populations on the planet,21 the late nineteenth century heralded a shift in attitude to the Nordics. The French anthropologist Joseph Deniker claimed the existence of a Nordic race in his book Les Races de l’Europe in 1899, which could be found in Britain, Scandinavia, northern Germany, the Netherlands, and in the Fenno-Baltic region.22 With the popularization of such theories and myths about the origin of civilization, 38

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the Nordics became closely connected with virility and conquest.23 As Euro-American thinking pivoted toward fin de siècle thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,24 the Nordic race became the embodiment of both cultural and political ideals that would usher in a new era for humanity and rid the world of social degeneracy, ennui, cynicism, and pessimism. There was no shortage of publications heralding the societal decay perceived by conservative thinkers in Europe and North America in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In The Passing of the Great Race from 1916, the American lawyer Madison Grant descended on Deniker’s Nordic race and exalted its assumed qualities as those that would form a bulwark against what he perceived as societal mores that would end civilization. The societal maladies, he argued, were brought about by the presence of other so-called races in North America. In Germany, Oswald Spengler, although skeptical of the race science of his time, expounded his own theory of civilizational decline in Untergang des Abendlandes in 1918 and made the case for a societal pact of blood to counter capitalism and democracy. The Italian radical traditionalist, fascist collaborator, and post-war supporter of Italian far-right terrorist groups, Julius Evola, reacted to the societal pessimism that dominated the 1910s and ’20s with several treatises on the “perfect human” and his will to dominate in the books L’uomo come potenza (1925), L’individuo e il divenire del mondo (1926), and Teoria dell’individuo assoluto (1927), not least Imperialismo pagano from 1928. In France, this reaction to modernity is represented by the writings of René Guénon, whose 1927 book Lord of the World mused about the existence of a spiritually advanced race inside the earth and could be accessed through passages in the Arctic and Antarctic.25 In this mental landscape of pessimism, fascist movements emerged as a response to the perceived decay and degeneration of society,26 often blamed on democracy, feminism, and capitalism. As a fascist esoteric, Evola expressed similar views and held reverence for the ethereal Arctic Aryans, who he believed had created traditional society as a patriarchal hierarchy.27 The fantasies about the absolute man cultivated by scientists, politicians, authors, and mystics alike in the first half of the twentieth century emerged from readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch and 39

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had profound influence on fascism, traditionalist, and conservative ideologies.28 This search for the perfect man as the answer to the perceived decay of European societies led to scholarly and popular debates about gender and governance in early societies. These debates were expressed in German in the dichotomy of Männerbünde versus Mutterrecht.29 From the beginning of the twentieth century, the debates revolved around the question of whether early societies, and thus by implication Aryan society, were governed by patriarchal or matriarchal hierarchies. As time progressed toward the Nazi takeover of German society, the debates became more politicized.30 Medieval and Old Norse literature on pre-Christian cultures in the North formed the basis for these discussions, perceived, as it were, as the purest expression of ancient Aryan culture still in existence in the modern world.31 Human perfection, it was claimed, were to be found in the virile masculinity of the Northern man, the blonde, blue-eyed, physically adept, Aryan aristocrat.32 In Austro-German mysticism, the program to revive this fallen Aryan was devised from the tenets of Theosophy, emanating from the Theosophical Society in New York in the late nineteenth century. The Austrian occultist Guido von List purported to be of ancient Aryan aristocracy and advanced a eugenicist nature-religion centered around runes and solar worship until his death in 1919.33 His protégé Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels expanded on List’s original scheme and created “theozoology,” a religio-political plan to breed the modern Aryan race with brood mothers and stud males, eugenics, and deliberate destruction of what he perceived as inferior races.34 Lanz, who frequented the same social circles in Vienna as Adolf Hitler, seems to have prefigured what later became the Holocaust and the Nazi Lebensborn program in his writings.35 Although he was later censored by Hitler, Lanz had personal influence on his thinking and, through his journal Ostara: Briefbücherei der Blonden und Mannesrechtler, on the entire far-right movement in Germany in the inter-war period.36 At the heart of this psychopathological reverence for the Nordic man were a set of basic assumptions. It was assumed that the position that certain western European countries, and the United States, had achieved as world leaders through colonization in the late nineteenth century was a result of destiny. It was assumed that that destiny was encoded in the 40

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blood of the predominant populations of those countries, who were cast as Nordic and claimed to have distinct phenotypical expressions (blonde hair, blue eyes, etc.). Finally, it was assumed that a certain attitude and mindset was inherent to males belonging to the Nordic race. What changed in cultural attitudes in the Western world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly after World War I and the Titanic disaster in 1910, was that a growing antipathy and pessimism toward industrial technology had taken hold of a greater portion of the population. The answer that was sought in conservative, traditionalist, and fascist circles like the Völkischer movements37 in the German-speaking regions of Europe, to which men like List, Lanz, and the proto-Nazi political movement belonged, was a return to nature. A return to what was perceived as a natural state of existence, where violent, masculine men ruled a strict hierarchy of social eugenics. This program to revive an entirely fictitious ancient Aryan race and its social system was predicated on the idea that inherent to the virile, violent Aryan man was the intuitive will to dominate. This was claimed to be an expression of the natural state of the highest development of humanity in a hierarchical pyramid that placed blonde northern Europeans at the top and everyone else below them according to their skin tones. This created the basis for a Nordic masculinity between wild and civilized.38 Due to the framing of the North as a borderland between civilization and wilderness, which was consistently promoted in literature, scholarship, and art in British, French, and German cultures in the preceding centuries, the fiction of Nordic masculinity between wild and civilized became the preferred ideal. Where previous attitudes to the perceived erratic and sentimental mindset of the Nordic populations had led British authors to cast the Nordics as uncivilized, these characteristics now came to be perceived as the highest form of evolution. The root of this reverence for a grain of savagery in the fiction of the Aryan man is to be found in sympathies for what in German anthropology was termed Naturvölker, “nature peoples.” Indigenous populations and peoples who were perceived as less evolved from a European and Euro-American perspective were rehabilitated from the “savage other” to nature peoples, who 41

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represented what the increasingly urbanized Euro-descended populations felt they had lost.39 In Euro-descended thought, in Europe and North America, Indigenous North Americans, particularly the Plains Indians, gained increasing status as romanticized “noble savages,” whose way of life entailed deep connections to nature. As exotic Naturvölker, they represented what Europeans believed that they once were.40 This “Indianthusiasm” reached such prominence in the German public that it became a propaganda tool in Nazi Germany and in German self-conceptions as northern European tribes, who were once free “nature peoples” who were colonized by southern Europeans, the Romans and corrupted by their decadent civilization.41 Such longing for a “return to nature” and reverence for Indigenous peoples was perhaps less dominant in Anglophone culture due to the United States’ ongoing colonization efforts throughout the nineteenth century until the end of the Indian Wars in 1924 with the last Apache skirmish in Arizona. However, the environmentalist program expounded by Thoreau in Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1846) and the romantic image of Mohicans in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) attests to a prevalence of these attitudes early on in North American societies too.42 In northern Europe, such sentiments did, to an extent, find their way into the academic and popular sphere, particularly in early twentieth-century historical revisions of the Swedish colonial failure in the Delaware Valley.43 Swedish historians’ attempt to recover a sense of dignity in the 1930s’ debates about the political complexities that led to the ousting of Sweden from their colony in Delaware included claims of unique friendships with the surrounding Indigenous populations predicated on the character of the Swedish settlers.44 Qualifying statements about the settlers’ virtues, such as strength, integrity, piety, and hard labor45 mirrored the characteristics attached to Nordic-Aryan masculinities in the era, and were contrasted by Swedish historians with the deceitfulness and political scheming of their Dutch and English peers in the settlement region.46 This can be seen as an example of a similar Nordic attitude to Indigenous North Americans as “fellow tribesmen” or brothers in spirit as was expressed in Germany. Danes, Icelanders, and Norwegians expressed similar sentiments in

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relation to their historical presence in North America, the colonies in Greenland, and the visit to Vinland.47 In the context of the Danish colonization of Greenland, a prominent proponent of this special relationship between the Nordics and Indigenous North Americans was Knud Rasmussen. He held great reverence for Inuit lifestyles and promoted his upbringing in Greenland as a qualitative aspect that had given him masculine abilities unlike his continental European peers.48 However, Rasmussen’s representation of Inuit life and tradition was distinctly appropriative and predicated on the expectation that their “savage” way of life would eventually die out and be consumed by Danish modernism.49 This was fully in line with Danish traditions of representing their colonized subjects.50 In Norway and Iceland, explorer narratives about contemporary figures such as the Arctic explorers Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen, and historical figures of the sagas, such as Leifr Eiríksson and Eiríkr inn rauði, served similar purposes of representing Nordic masculinities between wild and civilized, as rugged men of nature, battling the elements in the North Atlantic. The apparent lack of violence and hostility between North Atlantic Europeans and Indigenous populations in Greenland and Vinland has allowed for Icelanders and Norwegians to represent themselves as friends to colonized peoples. Both Iceland and Norway were emergent sovereign nations in the beginning of the twentieth century. Since 1262, Iceland had been part of the Norwegian kingdom, later to be included with Norway in the Danish North Atlantic Empire in 1397. Norway had been liberated from the Danish empire in 1814 but was quickly annexed by Sweden thereafter. Norway gained full sovereignty in 1905, and Iceland was recognized as a sovereign nation by Denmark in 1918 but stayed in a commonwealth with Denmark until 1944. As a function of their national push to build a sense of self-esteem that could support self-determination, both countries constructed their individual brands of Nordic masculinities as directly reliant on a close relationship to nature. Knut Hamsun’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil) from 1917 brings Norwegian civilization to the natural frontier when the main character, Isak, settles on the almenning, the common lands, outside the village and singlehandedly 43

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builds a homestead. Described as strong, rugged, and with an iron-red beard, who takes matters into his own hands and finds solace in working with nature, Isak exemplifies Hamsun’s disdain for modernity and reverence for agrarianism and primitivism.51 In Icelandic literature from the same period, Halldór Laxness’s construction of female characters who represent Iceland as a country and straddle the conceptual categories of “Madonna” and “whore” express comparable ideas about the intricate relationship between humans and nature. In Íslandsklukkan I-III (Iceland’s Bell), Halldór Laxness’s character Snæfríður is an allegory over Iceland, and her male suitors represent different states of governmental oppression.52 Her relationship with men mirrors Iceland’s geopolitical relationships, and the desired liaison, Arnas, the virile Icelandic male who represents freedom, is out of reach. She marries the oppressive Sigurður instead.53 Arguably, this view of gender and its relationship to nation can be traced back to Halldór Laxness’s first novel with the telling title Barn náttúrunnar (Child of Nature), where the male character Randver returns to Iceland from a lucrative job in Canada to become a farmer and is abandoned by his love, the erratic Hulda, who longs for traveling the world. Comparably, the Danish novel by Johannes V. Jensen Kongens Fald (Fall of the King) from 1900–1901 sketches out the life of a rootless man named Mikkel, who is cast to the winds of existence. His fate is mirrored in the indecisiveness of the Danish king who loses his grip of Sweden and sees the invasion of German dukes strip the Danes of their Nordicness.54 Johannes V. Jensen was an ardent Darwinist who expounded his ideas about evolution and anthropology in a cycle of six novels called Den lange rejse (The Long Journey) between 1908 and 1922. At the heart of his ideal of masculinity, comparable to that of Hamsun and Halldór Laxness, was the idea of the virility of the Nordic man. The fantasies of Nordic masculinities, as they developed in early twentieth-century continental Europe, the British Isles, and North America, were a welcome opportunity for the Nordics to refashion themselves as unattached to the European colonial projects. Icelandic and Norway cultural projects were focused on regaining status as sovereign nations, while Danish and Swedish cultural projects were centered on regaining international respect after the loss of their status as empires 44

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following multiple military defeats in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their failed attempts at becoming colonial powers. Male and female self-conceptions were in that period, at least partially, shaped by internal and external ideas about the Nordics between civilized and wild. The notions projected onto the Nordics by their superior neighbors, the British, the Germans, and the Americans, as inheritors of Aryan virility and provenance were cautiously accepted to the extent that it allowed the Nordics to recast themselves as retreated from the European project of civilization. Proximity to the Arctic, borealism as it were, and extreme climes became a measure of the degree to which individual nations could claim adherence to Nordic masculinity. Iceland and Norway gained the upper hand with their North Atlantic positions, fjords, glaciers, and mountains. Denmark and Sweden are less so, but the Swedish woods and its northernmost Arctic tundra have served to elevate it slightly from the civilizational taint that marks the Danish landscape. Within the Nordic region, Finland, Greenland, and the Sámi inhabit a cultural space set aside from their Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic neighbors. All three populations have been extensively racialized and subjected to oppression by Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians in particular. Swedish imperialism in Finland55 has cast the Finns as culturally and racially inferior to Swedes. The Sámi have been subjected to assimilation and genocide by Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians alike,56 and the Inuit in Greenland have been subjected to similar practices by the Danes.57 Finnish nationalism and revivalism has historically found itself in the borderlands between Swedish civilization and Sámi Indigeneity, making use of both when opportune.58 Sámi revival, on the other hand, has been—and still is—marginalized.59

Wild Whites: The Nordic Region as a Space for Connection with Primal, Natural Forces

The Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schultz characterized the Nordic space in esthetical terms in his book Nightlands (1997) as a realm between light and dark, where the natural light of the sun is broken up by shadows, allowing the imagination to infer magical elements:

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In the North, it is only on winter nights that the sky becomes large, whole. Over the snow-covered earth it vaults, saturated with a peculiar “dark light.” Finally, it is cupola and firmament; a greater order emerges, and we see that the North is truly a midnight world. Such is the northern space: an insurveyable manifold of places without fixed boundary or clear geometric form. It is only night that can cull this diversity to wholeness [.  .  .] The forest is therefore the most fitting image of the northern world. Deep and inscrutable, it is without direction for movement. Its space is tight but nonetheless boundless, its mood the passage from dawn to dusk. The forest’s freedom is the freedom to abandon the path and hide away, and the path itself is a fitting image of northern existence [. . .] When mood and web replace divine character and plastic corporeality, things dissolve. They become dematerialized and fluid, or emerge as trolls, indefinite creatures that belong to no species. In Greece, place was identified with a corresponding mythic god, whereas the northern genius loci is the nisse or tomt, as the Swedes say, a term that also means “site.” Troll and nisse personify natural forces—not those distinct characters that advance in sunlight but occult things that emerge in the darkness of the night. That is why trolls burst when the sun shines upon them.60

This spatial characterization of the Nordics could be said to be epitomic of Nordic self-perception. The natural world in the Nordic space is reportedly imbued with magic as a consequence of its special character. Carefully curated language divulges a Nordic exceptionalism that explains how the Nordic space is separate from other geographical locations, particularly southern Europe, because of its inherent quality as a “midnight world.” The claimed lack of boundaries between light and dark, the dematerialization, plastic corporeality, and fluidity of the natural world in the North, Norberg-Schulz claims, is why the Nordics have occult folklore. Trolls and elves personify natural forces, unlike in the south, he claims. The trolls that emerge among the stones, the nisse and tomte that inhabit farms and fields, the elverpiker who live in trees and the woods, and nøkken who emerges from the waters of course all have relatives in southern European folklore and pre-Christian mythology. Dryads, Panes, Harpies, Gorgons, Daimonae, Kobaloi, Nymphs, Satyrs, 46

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Sirens, and a host of other folklore creatures populate the Greek realm that Norberg-Schulz contrasts the North with. In Italy, Janas, Anguanas, Bella ‘mbrianas, Bufardellos, Gnefros, Mudittus, Mazzamurellos, Lenghelos, Linchettos, and Tummàs are just some regional examples of the same type of genius locii as the nisse, tomte, troll, and other Nordic folklore figures claimed to be unique to the North. Arguably, a similar exposition could be written about the Stymphalian marshes, the towering Olympos Oros, the magic of the Peloponnese forests, the depths of the Orecchio di Dionisio, the stretches of Lago di Como, the jagged cliffs of Sardinia, or any location mentioned in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Tantalizing tales about how southern landscapes deceive perception can be—and have been—written. Their deception has been blamed on mythical creatures just as much and often as in any Nordic narratives. So, the question is, naturally, why the North inhabits this place in popular imagination, even in academic expositions like Norberg-Schultz’s, as a distinctly magical natural space. The answer to that question can be found in the insistence on the North as a location between wild and civilized, the assumptions of borealism, and the construction of the Nordic race. The Greekness of the Greeks, the Romanness of the Italians rests on the undeniable fact that these cultures long ago built civilizations whose monuments still dominate their landscapes. Comparably, northern European civilizations were late to develop anything close to the Greeks and Romans, and when discernible Germanic-speaking culture emerges in northern Europe, its cultural expressions seem to copy those of southern Europe.61 What northern Europe has left, when not the creative force of civilization, is the creative force of nature itself—that which makes Nordic men like Isak in Growth of the Soil or explorers like Fridtjof Nansen: wild whites. The fantasy of the “Nightlands,” “the midnight world,” as Norberg-Schulz puts it, is a fantasy of a wilderness frontier distinct from the southern European world where millions of people over millennia have imposed on nature and carved out civilizational spaces in a once wild realm. By contrast, northern European civilization as an expression of European urbanization only began a little over one thousand years ago, in the period called the Viking Age. Urban spaces, that is, locales mimicking 47

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southern destinations, created for the purpose of facilitating interactions with distant locations, trade, centralized institutions, and a modicum of industry, emerge in the North at the earliest in the 700s CE.62 The Nordic countries were still largely rural until they had their industrial boom in the late nineteenth century.63 Today, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland consistently rank among the world’s top ten in living standards,64 which suggests that the Nordic region has been quick to modernize and organize social systems of a comprehensive magnitude. If “civilization” is understood as a complex system of social institutions that imposes on the natural world for the benefit of human comfort,65 the Nordic countries, with their comprehensive and dynamic66 welfare states and spatial management of the environment,67 may be classified as some of the most civilized countries in the modern world. This stands in stark contrast to the image that borealist fantasies project. The Nordic man, as an image of masculinity, is rather far from being a “wild white,” yet this is the romanticized image that is broadcast. In the case of Norberg-Schulz’s eco-cultural definition of the Nordic realm, the blurred lines between light and dark, reality and fantasy, science, and magic that he identifies in the landscape are hardly present in the daily lives of Nordic populations. In the Nordic welfare states, socio-cultural paths are generally clear, and societal organization offers a safety net that was never afforded “natural man” as that wild figure of antiquity was coined by Rousseau in Du Contract Social;68 the natural man whom Nietzsche said had only the choice of imposing his will on the world and becoming an Übermensch. Nonetheless, the Nordics are globally known for their supposed deep connection to nature. This can be demonstrated by examining a neologism that has recently entered the English language: friluftsliv. In the Nordic region and abroad, practices such as friluftsliv (open-air life) are heralded as products of Nordic culture. The Norwegian tourist site Visit Norway explains to foreign visitors that this concept is a Norwegian invention and that it is inherent to their culture: The expression friluftsliv was invented by the famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in the 1850s, who used the term to describe the

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value of spending time in remote locations for spiritual and physical wellbeing. But the concept of being in nature for purely recreational purposes has been part of Norwegian culture for centuries.69

An early book in English, Simple Life “Friluftsliv”: People Meet Nature by Roger and Sarah Isberg, introduced friluftsliv as a Nordic concept to the Anglophone public in 2007.70 The cover of the book aptly projects borealist ideals with an image of a group of people standing in an Arctic landscape covered in white snow. Since then, several books have been published in English, claiming invariably that friluftsliv is a Nordic invention. The Open Air Life by Linda Åkeson McGurk from 2022 claims that the concept is the outdoor parallel to hygge,71 and Oliver Luke Delorie’s Friluftsliv from 2020 encourages its Anglophone audience to “connect with Nature the Nordic way” as part of the book series called “The Nordic Way.”72 The traction that this supposed Nordic cultural invention has gained over the years can be measured by consulting the popular platforms that have written articles on friluftsliv. In 2017, BBC published the article “Friluftsliv: The Nordic Concept of Getting Outdoors;”73 in 2019, Forbes heralded friluftsliv as the key to a happy life in the article “Friluftsliv: The Key To Living a Happy Life In Norway;”74 and in 2020 National Geographic made friluftsliv the answer to getting through the winter in the article “What is ‘Friluftsliv’? How an Idea of Outdoor Living Could Help Us This Winter.”75 These articles attest to the intention of authors and publishers to reproduce borealism as the primary expression of Nordicness, and the willingness of their audiences to consume such stereotypes. The origin of the concept of friluftsliv, however, is neither Nordic nor particularly Norwegian. Its origin is to be found in European philosophy on nature and its role in human life from the Enlightenment. The high status that nature is given as a space for freedom in Rousseau’s literature is well-documented and comes to the fore in his works Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes from 1754, Du Contrat Sociale, and Émile ou de l’éducation, both from 1762.76 Rousseau 49

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influenced those Romantic authors and thinkers who defined the Sturm und Drang period in Germany. His contributions to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, Herder’s, and Friedrich Schiller’s understanding of nature and human-nature relationships are well-known.77 It was indeed the Romantic writers in Germany who devised a reverence for nature as a space for freedom in a public sense.78 It was their reverence for nature in prose and poetry and their insistence on its importance for human feelings of freedom that inspired the general public in northern Europe to consider leisure in natural spaces relevant. The Norwegian author and playwright Henrik Ibsen uses the term friluftsliv in his poem Paa Vidderne from 1859,79 and may well have been the first Nordic author to have committed the word to writing, but he was hardly laboring with a deeply rooted cultural concept that emerged from the Norwegian people itself. Ibsen belonged to the Romantic school of writers and was, as such, heavily influenced by the German Sturm und Drang movement.80 And while Ibsen certainly had care and consideration for the Norwegian common folk in mind when he wrote his literature, he belonged to the upper classes, and the Norwegian elite was his primary audience in the nineteenth century, not the farmers in the fjords or the laborers in the harbors of Bergen, Trondheim, and Oslo. In fact, the close connections between bourgeois lifestyle and friluftsliv are evident in the occurrence of a related term friluftsnydelse (enjoyment of nature) listed in Ordbog over det danske sprog (Dictionary of the Danish Language) from 1924, where it is cited as a word used by the prominent author on bourgeois lifestyle Emma Gad.81 Emma Gad was an influential writer on bourgeois etiquette in the early twentieth century in Denmark, mostly known for her book Takt og Tone: Om Omgang Med Mennesker (Etiquette: How to Deal with People) from 1918.82 As a staple of elite etiquette in Nordic societies, reverence for nature and practices such as friluftsliv were taught to the general public rather than sourced from the common folk. It was indeed Fridtjof Nansen who cemented friluftsliv as synonymous with Norwegian public identity,83 and, in his role as diplomat of Norway, promoted the sentiment that the character of Norwegians was intricately linked with nature.84 What this means is that the sentiment that nature carries inherent value to the Nordics was born not from the depths of the 50

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Nordic peoples themselves but from bourgeois writers and elite individuals in France and Germany by way of their counterparts in the North. What the example of friluftsliv illustrates is that such ideas that have come to represent the essence of Nordic peoples were not the result of long-held cultural customs but rather a manufactured identity promoted by agents in the Nordic public with specific cultural and political goals. Ibsen’s goals were to generate a distinct Norwegian identity after the liberation from Denmark, and Nansen’s goals were similar in character during the autumn of Swedish rule in Norway. Norwegianess was being constructed both in relation to and in opposition to neighboring populations, the Danes, the Swedes, the English, and the Germans. Danes, Swedes, Icelanders, and the Finns were undergoing similar processes, and due to the geopolitical circumstances where great powers like the British, the Germans, and the Russians threatened the sovereignty of the smaller Nordic states, the Nordics often defined themselves in opposition to empire and civilization.85 In that respect, the boreal stereotype of the “wild whites,” northern Europeans as humans between civilization and nature was a powerful self-conception that served the role among the Nordics to envision themselves as separate from the European “civilization project,” and distinguish each other from one another on a similar scale. The farther from the European continent you are, the farther from the civilizing powers of Italy, Germany, and England you are, the closer you are to nature.

Virile, Wild Whites in Contemporary Popular Culture

The boreal stereotypes associated with the Nordics have grown firm roots in global twenty-first-century popular culture. This is primarily due to the cultivation of these stereotypes in Anglophone media. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact moment in the postmodern information age when the boreal stereotypes were first disseminated in popular Anglophone media. That the Nordic past was a topic of fascination to Anglophone film audiences already in the 1950s is evident in the 1958 film The Vikings, which starred such Hollywood notorieties as Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, and Janet Leigh.86 In 1954, J. R. R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy had been published. Tolkien described his writing as 51

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“mythopoeia,” and saw his role as an English author of the nascent fantasy fiction genre as a creator of an Anglophone mythology, inspired by Elias Lönnrot’s intentional creation of the Kalevala epic based on songs gathered from the Finnish populace.87 The influence of medieval European literature and history on Tolkien’s literature is unmistakable, and elements of Nordic mythology, Viking Age, and Anglo-Saxon history are commonplace in his writings.88 The Lord of the Rings was released as a cartoon in 1978 directed by noted animator Ralph Bakshi,89 and Peter Jackson’s highly popular live-action movies The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King came out between 2001 and 2003.90 The release of the trilogy came at a turbulent time in Euro-American history. A few months before The Fellowship of the Ring came out in theaters, terrorists claiming to represent the Islamic struggle against America had attacked the World Trade Center (WTC) towers in New York. The symbolism of this event can hardly be underestimated. At the time, and in the following decade, the event was invariably framed as a clash of civilizations in public discourse. In 2011, a Pew Research Center survey noted that some 35 percent of Americans perceived the WTC attacks, along with the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of a major conflict between the West and Islam.91 The intellectual framework for the cultivation of such views in the public can be observed in Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Originally published in 1997, The Clash of Civilizations made the claim that civilizational kinship is the driving force behind peaceful relations between nations and peoples,92 and noted that Islamic countries are more prone to having conflict with civilizations in their periphery.93 While a direct pipeline between Huntington, ideological developments among politicians in the West, and the sentiments of the general public is hard to demonstrate, it is possible to see the convergence of events, public attitudes, and political responses in the first two decades of the twenty-first century as a zeitgeist dominating the worldview of many in the West. If scholars such as Huntington delivered the intellectual framework for the Euro-American public to perceive the West in opposition to, and in conflict with, other civilizations, it may be possible to see The Lord of the Rings as a narrative 52

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that delivered the mythological framework for especially the Anglophone public across the world to see themselves as part of a Western civilization. The Lord of the Rings is a narrative that describes a league of peaceful peoples beleaguered by representatives of a brutal, autocratic, dark force of the East: Sauron. The dark force sends its legions of demonic orcs, dressed in black, with darkened skin, toward the western regions of Middle Earth, and it is up to the hobbits, a simple countryfolk, to save the world. Their journeys in the trilogy take them to representatives of the human race to reinvigorate their spirits and step back into their roles as world leaders. Both Rohan, the region of Middle Earth that has the most similarity with Anglo-Saxons and the Nordics, and Gondor, a realm resembling Charlemagne’s western Europe in decay, finally rise to the hour after having been reminded of their past glory. In The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the crescendo of heroism arrives in The Return of the King, when the human armies are gathered in front of Sauron’s Black Gate, in a dusty, desert wasteland, and the hitherto reluctant leader Aragorn holds a riling speech for the cowering armies, exclaiming: “I bid you: stand, men of the West!”94 In Tolkien’s original text, this uttering is relegated to Gandalf.95 Aragorn becomes king in the film after the defeat of Sauron, and he is a descendant of the Dúnedain, the Kings of Men, whose name in Elvish means Men of the West.96 Released two years after 9/11 and the onset of the war in Afghanistan, just nine months after the beginning of the war in Iraq, this is a moment in popular Anglophone culture that could be said to have spoken directly to the sentiments of many in the West, who felt besieged by Muslims and called to repel them.97 Stereotypes inherent to Tolkien’s fiction, and interpreted in historical context by Peter Jackson in his envisaging of the narrative, seem to have been distinctly suitable to inspire the Anglophone public to think of themselves as part of a civilizational white “West,” and may have encouraged audiences to attach sentimentalism to freedom, environmentalism, and heroism. This is the dawn of the new age of Nordics in popular culture. The following decades of the twenty-first century have featured several popular productions in TV, cinema, video games, and music, which have presented aspects of Nordic cultural material to the global public. Marvel’s Thor franchise, based on its comic book series published in 1962, 53

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brought Nordic mythology to the global audience in 2011,98 presented in a comical and relatable format. The last of the Marvel movies about Thor, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out in 2022.99 Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth in the movie series: a tall, blonde man with blue eyes.100 The TV show Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin’s books A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–present), aired between 2011 and 2019.101 The imaginary world of Game of Thrones includes a northern realm populated by ice giants and “wildlings.” The wildlings appear as a type of northern barbarians cast in the mold of common stereotypes about the Nordics: brutish, violent, excellent survivors in cold climes. They are dressed in primitively designed skins and often wield axes, but they lack the cultural refinement of peoples from the southerly regions. An important character is Tormund Giantsbane played by the Norwegian actor Kristofer Hivju, a large man with red-blonde hair and beard.102 Tormund is a Norwegian name. Another TV show, Vikings, aired first in 2013 and continued until 2020.103 This show follows the life of Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons. It mixes historical elements with fiction, narrating a history about the Viking Age, how Scandinavians found their way to England, France, and other European locations, not least Iceland and North America. While the show was produced by The History Channel, historical persons, events, processes, and locations are fictionalized to an extent that it must be considered fantasy in the same league as Game of Thrones. The presentation of Nordic relationships to other Europeans follows the typical stereotypes, suggesting that the Nordics are less refined and more naïve, but distinctively violent in nature, compared with their European neighbors. Nordic incursions into western Europe are portrayed as the result of a discovery made by intrepid members of fledgling Nordic societies, who initially have no knowledge of the existence of locations like England and France. This presentation of Nordic knowledge of Europe in the era is markedly false,104 but aligns with stereotypical public conceptions about the Nordic region as a European civilizational periphery. The Nordics are also represented as spiritually mysterious, closer to nature, and in possession of physical and mental capacities that make them militarily superior when entering England. This is portrayed in the show as bloodlust and a fighting style that includes the use of shield walls. In 54

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season 1, episode 2 “Wrath of the Northmen,” the attack on Lindisfarne in 793 is reenacted, portraying the Nordic invaders with a penchant for sadism. In contrast to these portrayals, there is little historical evidence for Nordics being any more or less ruthless, technologically advanced, or militarily more capable than their English, French, German, and Slavic-speaking neighbors.105 Similarly, the common notion that Nordics used shield walls in warfare is likely to be overstated, if not incorrect, judging from archaeological evidence.106 A movie that follows a similar pattern of stereotypical portrayal of Nordics is The Northman from 2022.107 This revenge narrative about a young prince who is ousted from his father’s kingdom in Norway is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and has affinities to the 1994 Danish-English movie Royal Deceit.108 Royal Deceit is based on the medieval historian Saxo’s story about a Danish prince named Amled, whose uncle killed his father, the king, and usurped the kingdom. Saxo’s story is related in books three and four of his Gesta Danorum, and it is likely to have served as inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet from c. 1600. While Royal Deceit takes place in Denmark and England, in accordance with Saxo’s narration, the settings chosen in The Northman are Norway, Russia, and Iceland. After Amled’s uncle has killed his father, the young prince takes to the sea and eventually turns up in Russia with a band of berserker Viking warriors, raiding villages for slaves. Several scenes in the movie display stereotypes of violence attached to the Nordics: when the berserkers are rowing up a river, they pass a man and his son, who are loading a boat. One of the berserkers shoots an arrow into the boy’s chest, and as his father is rushing toward him, the berserker shoots him in the back, too, laughing as he does it. When the berserkers attack a village, they do so bare-chested, catching spears hurled at them, climbing the palisades, and chopping down enemies with hand axes and supernatural fighting styles. Activities in the movie otherwise include swimming long distances in the frigid North Atlantic Ocean, an excessively violent reproduction of a medieval Icelandic ballgame called knáttleikr, and a stand-off between Amled and his uncle Fjölnir on top of an erupting volcano between rivers of lava. This display of violence and supernatural exercises performed by the characters to the oft repeated refrain by the 55

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lead character, “I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir,” is a fantastic departure from Saxo’s original story, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the relatively realistic reproduction of the story in Royal Deceit. It appears that the focus in The Northman is to portray violence as an inherent trait of Nordic culture. These violent and martial connections to the Nordics are mirrored in music genres of the twentieth century that developed from the 1970s. In 1970, Led Zeppelin’s popular “Immigrant Song” seemingly set the tone for the treatment of the Nordic past in rock and heavy metal music. Basing their portrayal in stereotypical Anglo-cultural views of the North, the band curates Nordic bodies in a dramatic, northern landscape, “We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow. The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands.” The intensity of the music in “Immigrant Song,” accompanied by high-pitched screaming and lyrics that describe hordes of violent raiders from distant icy shores, driven by their pagan fervor—the hammer of their gods—describes these Nordic invaders as barbaric warriors longing for the death realm of their war-god Odin. This is arguably the first identifiable moment in Information Age music where the boreal stereotypes are presented to a broad Anglophone public. Led Zeppelin’s use of Vikings as a theme accords with a greater interest in violence, notions of freedom, and individualism circulating in heavy metal milieus in the 1980s.109 Iron Maiden’s album, titled Iron Maiden from 1980, includes “Prowler” and “Running Free” as examples of songs suggestive of these core themes.110 On their second album from 1981, Killers, the songs “Wrathchild,” “Murders in Rue Morgue,” “Killers,” and “Drifter” speak to themes of violence, individualism, and freedom. On their third album, The Number of the Beast, from 1982, the songs “Invaders,” “Children of the Damned,” “The Prisoner,” “Run to the Hills,” and “Gangland” all take part in cultivating the prevailing fascination with themes of freedom and violence.111 In the case of “Run to the Hills,” there is also the theme of immigration and settler culture in North America, as the lyrics and music video are about white settlers fighting Native Americans. As an immensely popular heavy metal band, Iron Maiden seems to set the tone for the music genre in the 1980s. 56

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Formed in 1980, the band Manowar is a contemporary of Iron Maiden. As a band, they partake more deeply in cultivating correspondence with boreal stereotypes and fantasies of warriorhood.112 Their album Into Glory Ride from 1983 includes multiple songs highlighting Nordic violence, especially “Gates of Valhalla.”113 In 1984, the band released the album Sign of the Hammer, a title suggestive of the Old Norse thunder god Þórr, who of course carries his Mjolnir hammer.114 On this album the songs “Thor” and “Sign of the Hammer” are grounded in boreal stereotypes. In 1999, Manowar’s “Thor” was covered by the Swedish band Therion on their album The Crowning of Atlantis.115 This is notable because it is an explication of the imaginary link between the Nordics and Atlantis that was cultivated in Swedish Gothicism in the eighteenth century and adopted in the fantasies of the Aryan race in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Manowar has continued to cultivate boreal stereotypes in their music. The albums Fighting the World (1987), Kings of Metal (1988), and Warriors of the World (2002) feature such elements in various forms, many also alluding to the fantasy world of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.116 Warriors of the World also seems to speak directly into the political reality of its time, with the songs “Call to Arms,” “The Fight for Freedom,” “Valhalla,” “Swords in the Wind,” “The March,” “Warriors of the World United,” “Fight Until We Die,” and “American Trilogy.” The juxtaposition of war-related songs directly applicable to the reality immediately after 9/11 with songs associating with boreal stereotypes is suggestive of the “Men of the West” mythology grounded in borealism. With their 2007 release, Gods of War, Manowar made an entire album dedicated to Nordic mythology.117 This evolution of a forty-year-old heavy metal band is indicative of development in certain subcultures, which increasingly has pointed toward reverence for the Nordic past, perceived in light of boreal stereotypes. Along with the more broadly received bands such as Led Zeppelin and Manowar, boreal stereotypes have been cultivated widely in black metal music from Norway and Sweden. The Swedish band Bathory has been part of pioneering black metal and Viking metal since 1983. Their albums Hammerheart (1990), Twilight of the Gods (1991), and Blood on Ice (1996) are all based on themes related 57

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to the Nordic past and may have been inspired by Manowar.118 The albums Destroyer of Worlds (2001), Nordland I (2002), and Nordland II (2003) were similarly themed. Bathory has inspired other black and Viking metal bands, including Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Satyricon, Burzum, Immortal, Dimmu Borgir, and Enslaved. Boreal stereotypes have inspired albums and songs by all these bands and as the names of the artists Gorgoroth and Burzum suggest, they have also found inspiration in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Burzum means “darkness” in Tolkien’s invented language of Sauron’s realm Mordor, the black speech that the legions of evil orcs speak. Gorgoroth is the name Tolkien gave to a region in Mordor. Enslaved is notable as one of the first heavy metal bands who released albums and songs in Old Norse with their 1994 album Vikingligr Veldi (Viking Power or Viking Empire), while their fellow black metal bands largely used English.119 With Enslaved, themes from the Nordic past were arguably fully cemented as a stable theme in extreme heavy metal.120 From this convergence of boreal stereotypes with extreme heavy metal genres in Norway, as an identity-making feature of the genres, grew contemporary styles of music that explore the Nordic past outside of the heavy metal genres. As noted, the founders of the Nordic ritual folk ensemble Wardruna included the well-known black metal musicians Einar Selvik and Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal from Gorgoroth.121 The music played by Wardruna is a complete departure from heavy metal genres into world music styles with sounds made with historical instruments such as the Kravik-lyre, the Trossingen-lyre, the Taglharpa, goat horns, lurs, and flutes.122 This innovation has shaped a new genre of music that seeks to create a sense of authenticity in its expression of its attachment to boreal stereotypes.123 Where the interest in boreal stereotypes in heavy metal, black metal, and Viking metal appears to originate in a fascination with the stereotype of violence attached to the Nordic past, the Wardruna style of Viking music goes beyond the stereotypes, seeking an authentic connection to the past. Authenticity in this regard should be understood as a genuine or more comprehensive use of historical instruments, lyrics, and cultural material from Norway and the North Atlantic in an attempt to create a modern music culture based on a lost tradition. Notably, the artists Einar Selvik from Wardruna and Ivar Bjørnsson from 58

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Enslaved created a collaboration around the theme of Nordic history called Skuggsjá (Mirror) in 2016, to which they released a sequel Hugsjá (Mind-see) in 2018.124 The artists describe the title of Hugsjá, a word that they have made themselves based in the Old Norse language, as “to see with, or within, the mind,”125 signaling the pensive relationship that these artists with their background in extreme metal now have to their use of the Nordic past. The themes of both albums are deeply connected to Norwegian and North Atlantic Viking Age history. On their co-owned label ByNorse’s website, the two artists present themselves with an image of them standing on the prow of a reconstructed Viking ship.126 As a musician in Wardruna, Einar Selvik has created music for the TV show Vikings.127 Selvik has also composed music for the popular UBISOFT video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which was released in 2020.128 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla joins such video games as Skyrim Elder Scrolls (2011) and God of War Ragnarök (2022) as interactive platforms for global audiences to engage with boreal stereotypes in fantasy worlds that furnish their interest in and perspective on the Nordic past.129 From this cultural network, a clear cliché has emerged about the Nordic past, which can be observed in Will Ferrell’s comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga from 2020. Ferrell plays a failed musician named Lars from Húsavík, who, through a series of unlikely events, ends up representing Iceland at the Eurovision Song Contest in Scotland.130 The movie begins with a scene where Lars and his co-star Sigrid, played by Rachel McAdams, are imagining the performance of their song “Volcano Man.” Lars is dressed in a costume inspired by Marvel’s Thor and Sigrid is dressed as an elf or nature spirit. They appear in the dramatic Icelandic landscape with fjords, glaciers, and volcanoes. This is a play on well-rehearsed Icelandic stereotypes, where women are supposed to represent nature and Iceland’s spirit, while men represent the unconquerable Viking spirit that reflects the country’s geologic violence and exist to protect it. The movie revolves around the song contest and crescendos with the presentation of a song that Rachel McAdams sings in dedication to her character’s hometown, “Húsavík.” In the lyrics, mountains, seagulls, whales, the northern lights, and the magic nights are highlighted as core characteristics of Icelandic nature, the North.131 The 59

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cost of singing the song, which differs from the one the pair entered the contest with, is that they are disqualified, but they win the hearts of the Icelanders watching the show. As an aside: when the couple are competing for selection as Iceland’s nominees for the Eurovision Song Contest in Reykjavík, several stereotypical contestants are portrayed in performance. A man with long red hair and beard performs a song titled “Brand New” under the name Twenty-First Century Viking. His dress is “Vikingesque,” a long leather-looking tunic with a belt, visually akin to costumes from Vikings, Game of Thrones, or The Lord of the Rings. Released in 2020, it appears that the movie in this scene is presenting a parody of an actual performer from 2018, Denmark’s Rasmussen, who entered the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Higher Ground.”132 Rasmussen, a tall, redhaired man with a full beard, visually akin to Game of Throne’s Tormund, appeared on stage at the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon in 2018 with images of Viking ships and lyrics inspired by the Viking Age and the Old Norse Eddic poem Hávamál written in 1270. Both Rasmussen’s performance and Will Ferrell’s comedy suggest that boreal stereotypes about the Nordics have become commonplace to the extent that mainstream performances, both in film and music, can rely on their audience’s familiarity with them for commercial success.

Conclusion

What may be observed in this convergence of borealism in movies, literature, TV shows, music, and video games is that these popular genres form a contemporary media platform that projects the Nordic past to global audiences. Each production, be it a film, a book, an album, or a video game, is designed independently by its creators, but is at the same time tied to a common ideal representation of the Nordic past, which is created with a target audience’s expectations in mind. The audience’s expectations come into being as a result of a centuries-deep framing of the Nordic past, the region’s peoples, and its geology. The framing of the Nordic past takes place in the interface between the authors,’ directors,’ performers,’ and game designers’ knowledge level, the culturally available material, and individual interests. If a person or group creates a piece of art or commercial product about the Nordic past, it is their immediate 60

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interests that will determine the framing. A heavy metal band whose interests are to create music that communicates with their audience’s interest in the extreme may choose to represent the Nordic past as an era of violence, populated by violent human beings. A movie like The Northman, telling a tale of revenge and ultraviolence, will equally represent the Nordic past as a violent era. As has been demonstrated in this chapter, the history of reception of the Nordic past does not lack projections of violence. On the contrary, this has been an interest of both artists and scholars for centuries. The violence has been represented as an element of racial essentialism attached to the construction of the Nordic race. The Nordic race was created in the context of general European racialization of human beings on the planet to offer a cohesive racial unit in which to fit members of societies in the European Northwest. While the construction was first reserved for some Anglo-Germanic groups, it was later expanded to fit the early twentieth-century fascist ideological project of the Aryan. The construction of the Aryan race entailed certain physical and mental characteristics, the most prominent ones in the latter category being virility and violence. As the fascist projects fell apart toward the middle of the twentieth century, the Nordic-Aryan stereotype was abandoned in anthropology but was popularized in modern media. Anglophone media culture has since then venerated the Nordics as a peripheral in-group that is often exalted for its closeness to nature and a more natural way of life in contemporary civilization projects. Members of Nordic societies have responded to this veneration with attempts to fit themselves and their histories into the stereotype, resulting in popular products for consumption in the Anglophone cultures, which speak to these conceptions. Musical phenomena such as Wardruna and Heilung are examples of such responses, standing on the shoulders of heavy metal music.

Notes

1. Verner Söderberg, “Nikolaus Ragvaldis tal i Basel 1434.” Samlaren vol. 17 (1896), 187–95; Mats Malm, “Swedish Romanticism and Gothicism: Aesthetic Synergies.” The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, Volume I: From the Middle Ages to c. 1850, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 351–56.

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Chapter 2 2. William R. Short, Icelanders in the Viking Age: The People of the Sagas ( Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2016), 210; Heather O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008). 3. Christopher Krebs, “Borealism. Caesar, Seneca, Tacitus and the Roman Discourse About the Germanic North.” Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. E. S. Gruen (Berkeley: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 202–3; Mats Malm, “Translations of Old Norse Poetry and the Lyric Novelties of Romanticism.” Studies in the Transmission and Reception of Old Norse Literature: The Hyperborean Muse in European Culture, ed. Judy Quinn and Adelle Cipolla (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 151–64; Heather O’Donoghue, “English Romanticism and Norse Mythology.” The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, Volume I: From the Middle Ages to c. 1850, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 383–90; Katja Schulz, “Literary Modernism and Old Norse Myth.” The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, Volume II: From c. 1830 to the Present, ed. Margaret Clunies-Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 267–312. 4. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 88. 5. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 230. 6. Stephen D. Arata “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, 33.4 (1990): 621–645. 7. Jen Hill, White Horizon. The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 1–4. 8. Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 216–18. 9. McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, 219. 10. McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, 219–27. 11. McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, 229–33. 12. McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, 234–36. 13. Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 71. 14. Hill, White Horizon, 5–27. 15. Ross Hagen, A Blaze in the Northern Sky (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 45–6. 16. Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (Sussex: Sussex University Press and Heinemann, 1974), 183–88; Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 10–12. 17. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York University Press, 1998), 29–36; Sergej Liamin, “Images and Imageries of Norse Mythology in German Sentimentalism and Romanticism: From Herder to Heine.” The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, Volume I: From the Middle Ages to c. 1850, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 317–30.

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Anglo Fascinations 18. Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s Priestess, 29–30. 19. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins 74–88. 20. Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s Priestess, 35–7. 21. Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc., 1751.” Benjamin Franklin: Representative selections, ed. Frank L. Mott and Chester E. Jorgenson (Knoxville TN: American Book Company, 1936), 217. 22. Joseph Deniker, Les Races de l’Europe: La Taille en Europe vol. 1–2 (Paris: L’Association Scientifique de France, 1908); Joseph Deniker, “Les Six Races Composant la Population Actuelle de l’Europe.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland vol. 34 (1904), 199–200. 23. Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s Priestess, 35. 24. Talia Schaffer, Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Pearson, 2007), 3. 25. René Guénon, Lord of the World. (Sherburne, UK: Coombe Springs Press, 1983 [1927]). 26. Zeev Sternhell, “Crisis of Fin-de-siècle Thought.” International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, ed. Roger Griffin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998), 169; Stanley G. Payne, A history of fascism 1914–1945 (London: Routledge, 2005), 23–24. 27. Benjamin Teitelbaum, Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 12–13; Mathias Nordvig, “From Barbarian to Lord: The Influence of Männerbund-Theories on Alt-Right Author Jack Donovan.” RVT 74: The Wild Hunt for Numinous Knowledge: Perspectives on and from the Study of Pre-Christian Nordic Religions in Honour of Jens Peter Schjødt, ed. Karen Bek-Pedersen, Sophie Bønding, Luke John Murphy, Simon Nygaard, Morten Warmind (Aarhus: Dept. of the Study of Religion Aarhus University, 2022), 756. 28. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, 50–62. 29. Peter Davis, “’Männerbund’ und ‘Mutterrecht’: Hermann Wirth, Sophie Rogge-Börner and the Ura-Linda-Chronik.” German Life and Letters 60, no. 1 (2007): 98–115. 30. Bernhard Mees, “Germanische Sturmflut: From the Old Norse Twilight to the Fascist Dawn.” Studia Neophilologica 78, no. 2 (2006): 184–198. 31. Klaus von See, “Politische Männerbund-Ideologie von der wilhelmischen Zeit bis zum Nationalsozialismus.” Männerbünde, Männerbande vol. 1, ed. Gisela Völger and Karin von Weck (Köln: Rautenstrausch-Joest Museum, 1990), 93–102; Stefanie von Schnurbein, “Geheime kultische Männerbünde bei den Germanen: Eine Theorie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Wissenschaft und Ideologie.” Männerbünde, Männerbande vol. 2, ed. Gisela Völger and Karin von Weck (Köln: Rautenstrausch-Joest Museum, 1990), 97–107; Friedrich P. Heller and Maegerle Anton, Thule: Vom völkischen Okkultismus bis zur Neuen Rechten: Von den völkischen Mythologien zur Symbolsprache heutiger Rechtsextremisten (Stuttgart: Schmetterling, 2007); Courtney Marie Burrell, “Otto Höfler’s Männerbund Theory and Popular Representations of the North.” NORDEUROPA forum. Zeitschrift für Kulturstudien. Themenschwerpunkt: Bilder des Nordens in der Populärkultur (2020), 230–66; Courtney Marie Burrell, “Otto Höfler’s Männerbünde and Völkisch Ideology.” Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies: Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives,

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Chapter 2 ed. Nicolas Meylan and Lukas Rösli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 91–116; Horst Junginger, “The Revival of Archaic Traditions in Modern Times: Völkisch Imaginations in the Context of European Nordicism.” Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies: Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives, ed. Nicolas Meylan and Lukas Rösli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 131–54; For early scholarship on Männerbünde, see: Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft (Berlin: Georg Andreas Reimer Verlag, 1902); Lily Weiser, Altgermanische Jünglingsweihen und Männerbünde (Karlsruhe: Verlag der Konkordia, 1927); Otto Höffler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Moritz Diesterweg, 1934); Otto Höffler, “Der germanische Totenkult und Sagen vom Wilden Heer.” Oberdeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 10 (1936), 33–49; Otto Höffler, “Das germanische Kontinuitätsproblem.” Historische Zeitschrift 157 (1936): 1–265. 32. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, 64–86. 33. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 33–77. 34. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 90–105. 35. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 97. 36. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism 98–104; Wilfried Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab: Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. Überreuter, 1994. 37. Hieronymus Ekkehard, Handbuch zur Völkischen Bewegung 1871–1918 (Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1996). 38. Barbora Davidek, “Reception of the Past, Projection of the Present: Creating Viking Masculinities.” Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies: Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives, ed. Nicolas Meylan and Lukas Rösli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 189–208; Henrik Jansson, “The Organism Within. On the Construction of A Non-Christian Germanic Nature.” Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives, ed. Catharina Raudvere and Anders Andrén (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2006), 393–98. 39. Franck Usbek, Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany (Berlin: Berghahn Books, 2015), 23. 40. Usbeck, Fellow Tribesmen, 29–54. 41. Usbeck, Fellow Tribesmen, 55–76. 42. Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979). 43. Gunlög Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History: Unthinkable Connections?” Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity, ed. Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (New York: Springer, 2013), 17–36. 44. Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History,” 27–30. 45. Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History,” 27. 46. Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History,” 30–2. 47. Usbeck, Fellow Tribesmen, 164–8. 48. Michael Harbsmeier, “Bodies and Voices from Ultima Thule: Inuit Explorations of the Kablunat from Christian IV to Knud Rasmussen.” Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Scientific Practices, ed. Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörling (London: Science History Publications, 2013), 33–4. 49. Harbsmeier, “Bodies and Voices,” 35–6.

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Anglo Fascinations 50. Harbsmeier, “Bodies and Voices.” 51. Monika Zagar, Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 52. Elisabeth Oxfeldt et al., “National (Gender) Trouble: Race, Bodies and Sexualities.” Denmark and the New North Atlantic: Narratives and Memories in a Former Empire vol. 1–2, ed. Kirsten Thisted and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2020), 17–25. 53. Oxfeldt et al., “National (Gender) Trouble,” 22–3. 54. Johannes V. Jensen, The Fall of the King, trans. Alan G. Bower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 213. 55. Eino Jutikkala and Kauko Pirinen, A History of Finland (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1979), 82–123. 56. Hugh Beach, “The Saami.” Endangered Peoples of the Arctic: Struggles to Survive and Thrive, ed. Milton Freeman (Westport CT: Greenwood, 2000), 223–46; Henry Minde, “The Assimilation of the Sámi.” Gáldu Čála—Journal of Indigenous Peoples Rights no. 3 (2005), 3–33; Henry Minde, “The Challenge of Indigenism: The Struggle for Sámi Land Rights and Self-Government in Norway 1960–1990.” Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights, ed. Svein Jentoft, Henry Minde, and Ragnar Nilsen (Utrecht: Eburon, 2003), 75–104; Seija Tuulentie, “For and Against the Rights of the Sámi People: The Argumentation of the Finnish Majority in the Debate on the Sámi Rights.” Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights, ed. Svein Jentoft, Henry Minde, and Ragnar Nilsen (Utrecht: Eburon, 2003), 274–95; Daniel Lindemark, “Colonial Encounter in Early Modern Sápmi.” Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity, ed. Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (New York: Springer, 2013), 131–46; Kaius Tuori, “The theory and practice of indigenous dispossession in the late nineteenth century: the Saami in the far north of Europe and the legal history of colonialism.” Comparative Legal History, 3:1 (2015), 152–85; Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja Magga ed. The Sámi World (London: Routledge, 2022). 57. Harbsmeier, 2013; Richard Caulfield, “The Kalaallit of West Greenland.” Endangered Peoples of the Arctic: Struggles to Survive and Thrive, ed. Milton Freeman (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), 167–85; Axel Kjær Sørensen, “Greenland: From Colony to Home Rule.” Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World, ed. Svend Tägil (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 85–105; Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, “The Specter of an Empire.” Denmark and the New North Atlantic: Narratives and Memories in a Former Empire vol. 1–2, ed. Kirsten Thisted and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2020), 117–21. 58. Matti Klinge, “‘Let us be Finns.’ – the Birth of Finland’s National Culture.” The Roots of Nationalism: Studies in Northern Europe, ed. Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1980), 67–76; Tuulentie, “For and Against the Rights of the Sámi People,” 276–8. 59. Ketil Lenert Hansen, “The History and Current Situation of Discrimination Against the Sámi.” The Sámi World, ed. Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja Magga (London: Routledge, 2022), 328–47. 60. Christian Norberg-Schultz, Nightlands (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 6–7.

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Chapter 2 61. Johan Callmer, “Scandinavia and the continent in the Viking Age,” 439–52; Lotte Hedeager, “Scandinavia before the Viking Age,” 11–22; Søren Michael Sindbæk, “Local and long-distance exchange.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 150–8; Lars Jørgensen, “Manor, cult and market at Lake Tissø.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 77–82; Günther Schörner, “Transfer römischer Technik jenseits der Grenzen: Aneignung und Export.” Rome and the Worlds beyond its Frontiers, ed. Daniëlle Slootjes and M. Peachin (Ledien: Brill, 2016), 123–50; Nancy L. Wicker, “The Reception of Figurative Art Beyond the Frontier: Scandinavian Encounters with Roman Numismatics.” Rome and the Worlds beyond its Frontiers, ed. Daniëlle Slootjes and M. Peachin (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 243–56. 62. Dagfinn Skre, “The development of urbanism in Scandinavia.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 83–93. 63. Douglas Fisher, The Industrial Revolution: A Macroeconomic Interpretation (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992), 190–223. 64. “OECD Better Life Index” https:​//​www​.oecdbetterlifeindex​.org​/​#​/11111111111. 65. Felipe Fernando-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2001). 66. Jørgen Goul Andersen, Mi Ah Schoyen, Bjørn Hvinden, “Changing Scandinavian Welfare States: Which Way Forward?” After Austerity: Welfare State Transformation in Europe after the Great Recession, ed. Peter Taylor-Gooby et al. (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2017), 89–114. 67. Matti Heikkila, Bjørn Hvinden, Mikko Kautto, Staffan Marklund, Niels Ploug ed. Nordic Social Policy: Changing Welfare States (London: Routledge, 1999); Sakari Hänninen, Kirsi-Marja Lehtelä and Paula Saikkonen ed. The Relational Nordic Welfare State: Between Utopia and Ideology (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019); Bjørn Hvinden and Håkan Johansson, Citizenship in Nordic Welfare States: Dynamics of Choice, Duties and Participation In a Changing Europe (London: Routledge, 2007); Mikko Kauto, “The Nordic Countries.” The Oxford Handbook of Welfare States, ed. Francis G. Castles et al (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2010), 586–600; Peter Baldwin, “The Scandinavian Origins of the Social Interpretation of the Welfare State.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:1 (1989): 3–24. 68. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). 69. “Visit Norway, Explore the Outdoors” https:​//​www​.visitnorway​.com​/things​-to​-do​ /outdoor​-activities​/friluftsliv/. 70. Roger Isberg and Sarah Isberg, Simple Life “Friluftsliv”: People Meet Nature (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2007). 71. Linda Åkeson McGurk, The Open-Air Life: Discover the Nordic Art of Friluftsliv and Embrace Nature Every Day (New York: Penguin, 2022). 72. Oliver Luke Delorie, Friluftsliv: Connect with Nature the Norwegian Way (New York: Sterling Ethos, 2020). 73. “BBC Worklife” https:​//​www​.bbc​.com​/worklife​/article​/20171211​-friluftsliv​-the​ -nordic​-concept​-of​-getting​-outdoors.

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Anglo Fascinations 74. David Nikel “Friluftsliv: The Key to Living a Happy Life in Norway.” Forbes Travel, May 1, 2019. Accessed October 12, 2023. https:​//​www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/davidnikel​/2019​ /05​/01​/friluftsliv​-the​-key​-to​-living​-a​-happy​-life​-in​-norway​/​?sh​=5df6c5a54675. 75. Jen Rose Smith, “What is ‘Friluftsliv?’ How Norway’s Friluftsliv could Help Us through a Coronavirus Winter,” National Geographic, September 11, 2020. Accessed October 23, 2023. https:​//​www​.nationalgeographic​.com​/travel​/article​/how​-norways​ -friluftsliv​-could​-help​-us​-through​-a​-coronavirus​-winter. 76. Matthew Simpson, Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom (London: Continuum, 2006). 77. Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and revolution; a history of civilization in France, England, and Germany from 1756, and in the remainder of Europe from 1715 to 1789 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 1091. 78. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: Springer, 2000); Dewey W. Hall, Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912 (London: Routledge, 2014); Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Greg Ellermann, Thought’s Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022). 79. Universitetet i Oslo, Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, “PaaVidderne,” accessed October 3, 2023, https:​//​www​.ibsen​.uio​.no​/DIKT​_Diktht​%7CDiftPaaVidderne​.xhtml​?modus​ =enkeltdikt. 80. Universitetet i Oslo, Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, “Nasjonalromantikk,” accessed October 3, 2023, https:​//​www​.ibsen​.uio​.no​/SAKINNL​_intro​_romantic​.xhtml. 81. Ordbog over det danske sprog, bd. 6 (København: Gyldendal, 1924), “friluft–.” 82. Katharina Wilson, An encyclopedia of continental women writers, 1, A–K. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 436. 83. Jeremy Wilson, “The History and Traditions of Friluftsliv.” Norwegian Journal of Friluftsliv (1989). 84. Wilson, “The History and Traditions of Friluftsliv,” 19–23. 85. Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, “The Specter of an Empire,” 112–13. 86. Richard Fleischer, dir., The Vikings (Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, 1958). 87. Jane Chance, Tolkien and the Invention of A Myth (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 278–83. 88. Gloriana St. Clair, “An Overview Of the Northern Influences on Tolkien’s Works.” Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 21 (1996), 63–7; Stuart D. Lee (ed.), A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (New Jersey: Wiley, 2014); Tommy Kuusela,“In Search of a National Epic: The use of Old Norse myths in Tolkien’s vision of Middle-earth.” Approaching Religion 4 (2014): 25–36. 89. Ralph Bakshi, dir. The Lord of the Rings (Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, 1978) 90. Peter Jackson, dir., The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema, 2001); Peter Jackson, dir., The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema, 2002); Peter Jackson, dir., The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema, 2003).

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Chapter 2 91. Andrew Kohut, Carroll Doherty, Michael Dimock, and Scott Keeter, Ten Years After 9/11: United in Remembrance, Divided Over Policies (Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2011), 2. 92. Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996), 166. 93. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 35. 94. Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: The Return of the King, extended edition. At 03:21. 95. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (New York: Mariner Books, 1994), 948–9. 96. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 1128–30. 97. As for Tolkien’s views on race and racism, see: Robert Stuart, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-Earth (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 62–73. For a quick overview of the discussion of Tolkien’s racial thinking, see pages 62–73. In the context of this chapter, it is not a direct interest what Tolkien intended with his writings. Here, the interest is the reception of his literature in the public and on film. 98. Kenneth Branagh, dir., Thor (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2011) 99. Taika Waititi, dir., Thor: Love and Thunder (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios, 2022). 100. Imdb.com. Chris Hemsworth. https:​//​www​.imdb​.com​/name​/nm1165110/. 101. David Benioff, prod., Game of Thrones (New York: Home Box Office, 2011). 102. Imdb.com. Kristofer Hivju. https:​//​www​.imdb​.com​/name​/nm1970465/ 103. Michael Hirst, prod. Vikings (Toronto, ON: The History Channel, 2013) 104. Hedeager, “Scandinavia before the Viking Age”; Sindbæk, “Local and long-distance exchange;” Clare Downham, “The Vikings in England.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 341–49; Callmer, “Scandinavia and the Continent in the Viking Age.” 105. Gareth Williams, “Raiding and warfare.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 193–203; Anne Pedersen, “Viking weaponry.” The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2012), 204–11. 106. Rolf Warmind, “Round Shields and Body Techniques: Experimental Archaeology with a Viking Age Round Shield Reconstruction.” Research draft on Academia.edu website: https:​//​www​.academia​.edu​/27661409​/Round​_Shields​_and​_Body​_Techniques​ _Experimental​_Archaeology​ _ with​ _ a​ _ Viking​ _ Age​ _ Round​_Shield​_Reconstruction​ _draft_ (Last accessed on 10/31/2023); Johanne  Uhrenholt Kusnitzoff, “Did Vikings Really Fight Behind A Shield Wall?” ScienceNordic, September 6, 2017, accessed April 4, 2023, https:​//​sciencenordic​.com​/archaeology​-combat​-denmark​/did​-vikings​-really​-fight​ -behind​-a​-shield​-wall​/1448665# (Last accessed on 10/31/2023). 107. Robert Eggers, dir., The Northman (Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2022). 108. Gabriel Axel, dir., Royal Deceit (Munich: Constantin Film, 1994). 109. Karl Spracklen, Metal Music and the Reimagining of Masculinity, Place, Race and Nation. Bradford: Emerald Publishing, 2020. Pp: 62–73. 110. Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden, EMI, 1980, vinyl LP. 111. Iron Maiden, Killers, EMI, 1981, vinyl LP. 112. Spracklen, Metal Music, 75–88.

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Anglo Fascinations 113. Manowar, Into Glory Ride, Megaforce Records, 1983, vinyl LP. 114. Manowar, Sign of the Hammer, 10 Records, 1984, vinyl LP. 115. Therion, Crowning of Atlantis, Nuclear Blast, 1999, compact disc. 116. Manowar, Fighting the World, ATCO Records, 1987, compact disc; Manowar, Kings of Metal, Atlantic, 1988, compact disc; Manowar, Warriors of the World, Nuclear Blast, 2002, compact disc. 117. Manowar, Gods of War, Magic Circle Music, 2007, compact disc. 118. Interview with Quorthon from Bathory, 2012 https:​ //​ web​ .archive​ .org​ /web​ /20120728052812​/http:​//​www​.anus​.com​/metal​/about​/interviews​/quorthon/ (retrieved 9/15/2023); Bathory, Hammerheart, Noise International, 1990, compact disc; Bathory, Twilight of the Gods, Black Mark Production, 1991, compact disc; Bathory, Blood on Ice, Black Mark Production, 1996, compact disc. 119. Enslaved, Vikingligr Veldi, Deathlike Silence Productions, 1994, compact disc. 120. Spracklen Metal Music, 104–9. 121. Wardruna.com “About Wardruna.” https:​//​www​.wardruna​.com​/about/. 122. “About Wardruna.” 123. Spracklen Metal Music, 113. 124. Ivar Bjørnson, and Einar Selvik, Skuggsjá (A Piece for Mind and Mirror), Season of Mist, 2016, compact disc; Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik, Hugsjá, By Norse Music, 2018, compact disc. 125. ByNorse “Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik.” https:​//​bynorsestore​.com​/collections​/ ivar​-bjornson​-einar​-selvik. 126. Ibid. 127. Wardruna.com, “News—Snake Pit Poetry,” Sept. 15, 2017, https:​//​www​.wardruna​ .com​/news/. 128. UBISOFT.com, “Latest News (Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Soundtrack Out Now),” Nov. 12, 2020, https:​//​news​.ubisoft​.com​/en​-ca​/article​/2Xf9vO7WCuqsnksg2AVoy8​/ assassins​-creed​-valhalla​-soundtrack​-out​-now. 129. E.g., Spracklen Metal Music, 114–17. 130. David Dobkin, dir., Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2020). 131. Fat Max Gsus, Rickard Göransson, and Savan Kotecha, “Husavik (My Hometown),” Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Music from the Netflix Film), Arista, 2020. 132. Rasmussen, “Higher Ground” Renegade, 2018.

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Chapter 3

The Music of the North Ross Hagen

This chapter traces the influence of other Scandinavian musical styles within Nordic ritual folk music, exploring how it employs many existing musical signifiers of Nordic identity. These include traditional folk songs, dances, regional instruments like the hardingfele (see figure 3.1) and nyckelharpa, and community singing traditions. More recently, black metal music has become something of an official cultural product as well, particularly in Norway, and many Nordic ritual folk ensembles operate within the orbit of the extreme metal scene more broadly. This chapter argues that Nordic ritual folk music and its counterparts in the black metal scene also fit neatly within existing national mythologies in Scandinavia, which typically locate authentic national identities in the folkways of imagined rural pasts. This conception also runs through the folk revival scenes in the Nordic region, which sometimes creates tension between preservationist ideals and participants who are more interested in musical innovation. However, the legends around many national folk instruments and musical traditions remain intertwined with the landscape, an environmental and regional outlook that Nordic ritual folk music builds upon. However, this chapter also frames these “national” musical styles within more generalized and widespread conceptions of the Nordic and Arctic region as depicted in diverse artistic, literary, and musical endeavors. The polar North has long exercised a pull on human imaginations 71

Figure 3.1. Hardingfele. Narve Skarpmoen, c. 1899–1930. NORWEGIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY.

The Music of the North

across the Northern hemisphere, almost a sort of magnetic attraction, to borrow Peter Davidson’s exceptionally apt metaphor.1 The polar region is a place of solitude and silence, possessed of a stillness both refreshingly meditative and potentially lethal, full of stunning landscapes and vast emptiness. Beyond merely the environmental perils of wind, ice, water, and various beasts, this imagined North is also home to a host of trolls, ghosts, witches, and other mystical beings who might view humans with sympathy, malevolence, or mere indifference. These conceptions have for centuries imprinted themselves on the inhabitants of the Nordic region and the Arctic, who have long been viewed by continental Europeans as variously barbarous, violent, and backward while also possessing a nobility and toughness tempered by their surroundings. While contradictions abound, the common thread that connects them is a perception of the North as untouched by civilization, a reservoir of elemental and pure essence. This ideal is not only a projection of non-Nordic peoples; it has also helped to animate various movements to preserve and institutionalize rural music traditions across the Nordic region. As noted previously, this exotic vision of the polar North and the Nordic region has been theorized as “borealism,” after Edward Saïd’s foundational work on Orientalism, and it informs much of the reception of Nordic musical styles. The previous chapter introduced borealism in the context of Viking fantasies and their long history within rock and metal music, and this chapter expands that idea into other musical realms. Similar ideals also find expression in music that evokes Northern landscapes and soundscapes without reference to particular national identities, folk traditions, mythologies, or other beliefs. As a result, Nordic ritual folk music itself will largely wait until the following chapters in order to explore and articulate the cultural and aesthetic backgrounds that have shaped its efficacy. Many of the national mythologies in the Nordic region also drink from this same well, with the polar environment acting as a backdrop for growing conceptions of nationhood and cultural identity for Nordic peoples.

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Musical Borealisms

Saïd’s conceptions of Orientalism originally were specifically in reference to trends in European art and literature that evinced a fascination with Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures. These depictions often conjured up fantastical worlds of opulent decadence and sexual permissiveness, with plenty of harem girls and geishas, balanced against scenes of barbarism, danger, and cruelty. This cultural trend took root during the Enlightenment as a means for urbane Europeans to bolster their own sense of rational and moral superiority, while also tantalizing viewers with prurient images of a fetishized Other. Further, such conceptions are by no means limited to those living in faraway lands and can readily be applied against neighbors and minority groups within one’s own society. In more recent popular culture and film, these ideals find expression in stereotyped stock characters like fortune-telling Roma and incestuous backwoods hillbillies. These social outsiders also exist somewhat outside of time as well, representing throwbacks to earlier ways of living. Crucially, however, there is also an element of forbidden desire and escapist fantasy lurking within Orientalist portrayals of foreign peoples, in which they serve as a vehicle for shirking the shackles and expectations of one’s mundane life. The concept of borealism introduced in the previous chapter adapts these fantasies to the Nordic region, finding resonances and echoes with some aspects while adding others that are particular to the North. The dramatic and imposing landscapes and seascapes of Scandinavia and the Arctic figure heavily, as might be expected given the extreme risks they pose. As Peter Davidson outlines in The Idea of North, contradictory perceptions of the polar North as both a dangerous and haunted hinterland and a place of virtue and cleansing date far back into antiquity.2 For the Greek and Roman empires, the far north was a place of barbarism and backwardness, but behind the north wind lay a Hyperborean paradise devoted to the god Apollo. Medieval Christian writers portrayed the North as the dwelling place of evil, perhaps an understandable rhetoric in the face of Viking raiders. Even in modern times, the stereotype of Scandinavian melancholy echoes these sentiments, possibly allowing outsiders to project their own senses of existential unease onto the North.3 74

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There is likewise a sonic element to borealism that often informs music that’s meant to evoke the North. For example, the American composer John Luther Adams expounds on the “sonic geography” of the Alaskan wilderness—a pervasive stillness and silence that intersects with the freezing temperatures and snowy landscapes. In his essay collection Winter Music: Composing the North, Adams describes the North’s spiritual value as a “reservoir of silence” of muffled snow, glassy tones of ice melting, and frozen air “ringing like a blade against bone.”4 Note also Adams’s evocative wording, underlining the long associations of the polar North with violence, death, and brutality. Adams considers further that writing music within (and in some sense for) such a landscape challenges musical notions of rhythm with its still expanses of seasonal and geologic time, and that the sounds of the landscape and its wildlife themselves resist containment by musical semantics and structures. Following John Cage’s ethos, Adams considers that their deepest meaning is that they simply sound without reference or meaning; the human listener is incidental.5 The “music of the North” evokes these sorts of landscapes in various ways through manipulations of tempo, harmony, and timbre. One particular stereotypical trait of “landscape music” in general is a sense of suspended temporality, a spaciousness and stillness that challenges our perceptions of space and time. Not incidentally, these landscapes’ lack of perceivable motion and directed time also associates mountainous and expansive, boundless landscapes with conceptions of eternity and the sacred.6 Although the landscape is unchanging in the moment, its vastness makes it so that it cannot be beheld in a single moment—our experience must also unfold across time. Musically, such experiences find their most obvious expression through drones and pedal tones, which suspend both rhythm and harmony within a static and directionless “now.” Familiar examples from popular culture could include the spacious strings in the languid opening of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring or the open-fifth drone that begins Alexander Courage’s main theme for the original Star Trek series.7 In both examples, the sense of unchanging musical space is intended to evoke literal physical space, whether the vastness of a frontier wilderness or the “final frontier” of outer space. From a practical standpoint, a perfect fifth interval on its own is an 75

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especially empty-sounding sonority. The overtones of the root note map precisely onto those of the fifth, making the interval sound almost like an enlargement of a single pitch rather than two separate tones. The lack of a middle tone also makes the open fifth somewhat devoid of character on its own, as it is then neither major nor minor. Open-fifth drones can also create a sense of timelessness, as they lack any dissonance and, therefore, create no sense of propulsion or need for resolution. Such drones often invite spiritual connotations, whether in the musical “om” played by the tambura in Indian classical music, the stillness of new age music for meditation, or the crushing resonances of drone metal. It is worth noting that composers of beatless ambient music and “space music” regularly invoke natural landscapes in their music as well, often through album artwork, titles, and video treatments. This seeming collapse of ordered time and static contemplation is also a common tendency of “landscape music” composed by Nordic composers, including both the nineteenth-century pillars of Nordic classical music like Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, and Carl Nielsen and more recent composers and musicians.8 Contemporary composers in Iceland, for example, note that it has become something of a cliché that their music tends to slowly evolve over long durations, while writers and critics repeatedly describe the music with geologic metaphors invoking glaciers and tectonic plates.9 There is some truth to this musical stereotype, particularly in the music of the well-known post-rock band Sigur Rós and the composers Hildur Guðnadóttir and Anna Þorvaldsdóttir. Sigur Rós’s songs are usually built on repetitive, simplistic patterns, basic chord progressions, and languid tempos that gradually build and relax in intensity, with dramatic crescendos and climaxes. The band’s singer and guitarist, Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson, employs a falsetto voice to an almost otherworldly and uncanny effect, particularly for listeners who might not understand Icelandic, while his guitar technique often involves a cello bow and various effects to create massive walls of distortion and slowly shifting tones. The large amount of reverb on the guitar allows different chords to bleed into one another and generate complex tone clusters, while the record production also often treats Jónsi’s voice with stereo panning and reverse reverbs that give it a sheen of heightened strangeness 76

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and sonic space.10 Anna Þorvaldsdóttir’s symphonic and chamber music is often similarly built on densely evolving textures and tones, while Hildur Guðnadóttir’s scores for Joker (2019) and the miniseries Chernobyl (2019) are studies in moody ambiance.11 A similar sense of expansiveness informs much of John Luther Adams’s music as well, particularly works like In the White Silence (2003) and Become Ocean (2014).12 Icelandic musicians are especially visible in this regard due to the wide international popularity and critical acclaim of the singer and composer Björk and the band Sigur Rós. Both have also been involved in environmental causes in Iceland, notably the protests around the hydroelectric dam at Kárahnjúkar in East Iceland, constructed in 2007 for the benefit of a US-owned aluminum smelter. As Nicola Dibben has noted, nature and the environment play particularly integral roles in Iceland’s national identity and have become a source of some tension as the island went through rapid economic and social change following its independence from Denmark in 1944.13 Industrialization of the fishing industries, increasing reliance on tourism, and other changes ran alongside fervent nationalism and assertions of independence, with the natural world and the distinct Icelandic language at the center. The role of nature in Iceland’s image abroad is assisted in no small measure by the striking imagery and geographic extremes of the island. Iceland is bisected by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and has long been known for volcanoes and other seismic activity dating back millennia. The island is also largely treeless following centuries of deforestation, lending an otherworldly aura to the volcanic landscape of lava flows, hot springs, and geysers amidst numerous glaciers, dramatic waterfalls, and epic coastal cliffs. In some ways, the dynamism of the Icelandic landscape also actually works against the static ideal of musical landscape. Tore Størvold’s recent study of Icelandic music addresses this more complicated relationship between Icelandic composers and depictions of nature, noting that the static musical textures of stereotypical “landscape music” create a rhetorical division between nature and “culture” by suspending the usual musical operations of eighteenth to nineteenth-century European art music.14 Rather than reinscribing the ideal of a musical landscape as akin to the landscape backdrop in a painting, Størvold sees the intricacies of 77

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Anna Þorvaldsdóttir’s music, especially as expressing a more ecological worldview in which humanity is embedded within the overall texture rather than contemplating it from a removed perspective. Likewise, Sigur Rós’s more heavy and turbulent music on the album Kveikur reflects geological inspirations from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 through evocations of instability and sonic excess.15 As a brief aside, Sigur Rós also collaborated with the rímur singer Steindór Andersen on their 2001 EP Rímur, in which they provided a soundtrack to his vocals. Rímur’s history as a national style of Icelandic music is distinct among other Nordic folk music traditions in that it was treated mostly as a literary genre rather than as music. This was partly because of Iceland’s long celebration of its literary heritage, but also because rímur had often been regarded as embarrassingly primitive and musically unartistic by both foreigners and upper-class Icelanders.16 Due to Iceland’s later independence during the twentieth century’s post-colonial period rather than the nineteenth-century height of national romanticism, its self-conception as an independent nation also hinged on catching up to the modernity of continental Europe rather than on nostalgia for rural folkways.17 Even without such pastoral romanticisms, the island’s isolated and rugged geography has been a remarkably persistent national trope, even if it often serves touristic ends rather than ecological ones. Sigur Rós’s 2007 tour documentary Heima especially sometimes has the feel of a wistful and idyllic tourism film, with Sigur Rós’s quieter moments of twinkling music boxes and xylophones accompanying mundane shots of daily village life in Iceland while turning attention to the vast landscapes for the songs’ climactic crescendos.18 The harmonic character (if not the rhythms) of many traditional Nordic music styles also intersects with the notion of “landscape music” in some regards, as it is common for songs and tunes to sustain single chords for long periods. Contrasting chords are typically either the subdominant or dominant, often used for the second sections of a binary-form tune. In many cases, the limitations of traditional instruments themselves impose this restriction on the player. Wind instruments like overtone flutes and natural trumpets are restricted to pitches available in the overtone series, while bagpipes create sustained open-fifth drone harmonies. String 78

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instruments like the tagelharpa, langeleik and other dulcimers, and the hurdy-gurdy typically involve a single melody string and several other open strings that maintain a drone. Fiddlers often use open tunings that emphasize one or two chords in addition to the standard GDAE violin tuning. This holds true whether one is playing a standard fiddle or an instrument with sympathetic strings, and as a result, fiddle players typically group their concert sets according to key so they can retune in between. Goertzen notes that there is a common tuning pattern for the fiddle that places the tonic and dominant on the lower two strings, so the fiddler can strategically use double-stops to maintain a drone harmony on the open strings while playing the melody on the upper strings.19 These open-string drones also work to increase the instrument’s volume, an important benefit for accompanying social dance, while also allowing the solo instrument to simultaneously perform melodically while sustaining the harmony. The effect is enhanced by sympathetic strings on the hardingfele and nyckelharpa, although the musicologist Pandora Hopkins argues that the resonance of the sympathetic strings may do little to increase overall volume and instead subtly maintains the volume level by continuing to resonate in the spaces between notes.20 It is worth noting also that sympathetic resonating strings are comparatively rare among bowed stringed instruments across Europe, and the few examples from the worlds of art music are obscure and archaic. The most well-known among them is the baryton, an instrument rather like a cello or viola da gamba but with a series of sympathetic strings running behind the neck, which were also available for the players to pluck with their thumb. The baryton was never a particularly widespread instrument, but it owes its relatively high profile to the fact that the composer Joseph Haydn wrote several pieces for it. However, a variety of different hurdy-gurdies and bagpipes proliferated across the European continent, with their open-fifth drones, dance rhythms, and folkish melodies used as pastoral references across instrumental art music genres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 The static harmonies also differentiate both the pastoral trope and actual traditional music from the harmonic structures, lengthy chord progressions, and frequent key changes that are common in keyboard-centric classical music. 79

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The Nordic landscape has also been a similar touchstone for black metal bands in the region for decades, with bands making numerous references to mountains, ice, coldness, and Northernness in song titles, lyrics, album art, and music videos. Indeed, a search for the word “cold” in the black metal bands listed in Metal-Archives.com finds 94 bands and nearly 4,000 song titles that include the word. Similarly, 205 black metal bands include the word “forest” in their band name, while 285 use the word “moon” in some capacity, with both words also showing up in more than 4500 song titles. As might be expected, photos and romantic paintings of fjords, glaciers, mountains, and forests are then all mainstays of Nordic black metal album art, as in the band Windir’s use of John Christian Dahl’s painting Vinter ved Sognefjorden as the cover for their 2001 album 1184 (see figure 3.2). These artistic choices also likely stem in part from the fact that the nineteenth-century artworks in question are all in the public domain and can be licensed free of charge. Beyond these lyrical and artistic preoccupations, black metal’s music style also intersects with some of the broader qualities of other “landscape music.” Black metal drummers regularly employ blast-beats technique, a musical technique based on intense and relentless subdivision, with results that sound akin to a machine gun. Guitarists also typically use a lot of tremolo-picking, a fast double-picking technique. By filling the musical space this way, black metal music often feels simultaneously fast and slow because although the musicians are playing rapidly, the usual markers of musical time tend to receive less emphasis. The result is a sort of maximalist wall that gives an impression of relative stasis even as it teems with intense energy. Black metal chord progressions also tend to move relatively slowly and employ full chord voicings that add to the density of the sound. Further, black metal’s predilection for tritones and chord motions based on minor thirds invoke well-known musical codes for the demonic or supernatural in opera and film music.22 Finally, black metal is also notorious for prizing harsh and often treble-heavy guitar tones rather than the thicker tones used by rock guitarists, which results in a thin, raw, and “colder” sound.23 There is also some evidence that such extremes of tempo and rhythmic subdivision also cause a quasi-synesthetic experience of coldness in listeners.24 80

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Figure 3.2. Johan Christian Dahl, Vinter ved Sognefjorden. 1827.

The use of environmental or geological metaphors is not necessarily unique to Nordic music, but the polar environment seems to have been imprinted particularly deeply on these musical styles. In the case of black metal, the fascination with polar landscapes is a regular and expected feature among bands around the world, regardless of their actual environment and climate. Certainly, there is an element of playfulness involved in referring to a particular song or riff as “cold” or “frostbitten,” but it also works as a pointed description of specific musical gestures and production aesthetics. In many cases, however, there is also an element of conscious self-fashioning on the part of the musicians, as they rely not only on their music and image but also cultivate their Nordicness as a regional brand. The touristic aspect has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century when popular piano arrangements of Scandinavian folk songs were marketed with kitschy covers featuring maidens in folk costumes, idyllic 81

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cabins, and dramatic fjords. Yet the landscape itself typically looms large as a defining point, with the fjord identifying it as specifically Norwegian as opposed to simply invoking bucolic alpine settings in general.25 Finally, an important thread within borealism and what one might call the global “polar imagination” is a persistent notion of the frigid cold as an agent of physical and even spiritual purification. This ideal is often framed in terms of physical fortitude and resilience and regularly positions itself in opposition to the comforts of post-industrial society. It is a powerful fantasy to imagine oneself as thriving under such harsh conditions, although the fantasy also usually hinges on a level of individualism that would quickly prove fatal in reality. Even on a more general level, though, it remains a consistent cultural notion that the discomfort of cold sharpens the senses and focuses the mind. To paraphrase the archetypal American suburban father, it “builds character.” There is perhaps no clearer example of this notion than the claims made by the Dutch endurance athlete and motivational speaker Wim Hof, otherwise known as the “Iceman.” Hof earned notoriety through record-breaking swims under polar ice, and he currently markets a wellness regimen based on exposure to cold temperatures. The pitch on his website is worth considering in full: Put in the simplest terms, the Wim Hof Method is a way to keep your body and mind in its optimal natural state. For most of our evolutionary history, a merciless natural environment automatically did this for us: sub-zero temperatures, howling winds, and hungry wolves kept our muscles and veins supple, and our minds sharp and clear. Fast forward to today, and phones are exhausting our brains, while the rest of our body wastes away as we sit in toasty rooms strapped to stiffening chairs. As a result, those natural defenses are no longer on high alert. We fall ill more easily. We stress out, lose sleep, and wake up without focus or energy.26

Several things are worth highlighting in this passage, particularly the repeated references to a state of “natural” living that was actually healthier for our minds and bodies. This concept is a keystone for a number of modern wellness methods, from paleo diets to wilderness therapy, and 82

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also underpins alternatives to modern living offered by various neopagan and new age practices. While asceticism and abstention in the pursuit of self-betterment is a widespread, if not universal, idea, Hof explicitly connects his natural wellness regimen to the experience of coldness. As a modern wellness practice, Hof ’s method also promotes ideals of physical fortitude and a certain commitment to asceticism that has broad appeal for everyone from new age yogis to fitness fanatics to self-fashioned Spartans and Vikings. As seen in the previous chapter, it also taps into long-lasting cultural theories that temperate and polar environments inspire strength, vigor, and virtue. The 2007 Vice documentary True Norwegian Black Metal provides a clear illustration of this when Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal of Gorgoroth and Wardruna leads a group of very ill-prepared young American filmmakers on a hike to the top of a snowy mountain to see the ruins of an old family cabin as a part of demonstrating the essence of black metal. The episode clearly portrays the themes of manly ruggedness and meeting the challenge of the landscape as crucial to Gaahl’s conception of black metalness. He underscores this at the end of the film by going silent after realizing that the filmmakers are merely looking to be told “the answer” to black metal.27 Creating these sorts of connections between the landscape and collective identities, shared cultural heritages, or the “spirit” of a nation became a key component of the various nationalist movements in Europe in the nineteenth century. The landscape works with more nebulous cultural qualities like music, lore, and dress to lend a sense of natural organicness and inevitability to newly created political nations. As theorized by political historians Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobspawm, among others, the interplay between cultural identity and a political nation-state involves a process of collective invention both backward into the past and forward into the future.28 The historical impulse typically gathers together a shared communal heritage, often emphasizing folklore and music as a means for conveying a sense of continuity between the past and the present and for days to come. There is often a sense of nostalgic loss and reclamation involved, a reassertion of social cohesion via retreat into a supposedly glorious history that is ripe for rebirth.29 The landscape further ties these cultural narratives to their geography and 83

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the environment, associations that Nordic ritual folk musicians regularly build upon.

Nordic Folk Music Institutions

In his book Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century, ethnomusicologist David Kaminsky articulates a set of rhetorical axes for understanding the roles and positions of folk music and musicians. Although his study focuses on Sweden, his framework is illustrative of folk music in many other contexts and is presented as something of a language game in which competing ideals compete for prominence. Kaminsky considers four elements in particular: Tradition, Nation, Folk, and Nature, which move along respective spectra of Time, Place, Commonality, and Quality, each with their own tensions and debates.30 The axis of Tradition and Time concerns conflicts between preservationist ideals focused on a static past heritage and innovators seeking creativity. Concepts of Nation and Place consider how folk music intersects with both political constructs of nationhood and with participants’ desires to identify with wider regional and global musical communities. Folk is counterposed with Commonality, representing the relative obscurity of folk music and the countercultural and insular nature of many folk music scenes and institutions when compared to the broader international music industry. The axis involving Nature and Quality explores how folk musicians perpetuate an ideal of naturalness in their music by avoiding playing techniques associated with art music and exaggerating rhythmic elements, open-string drones, and gritty-sounding timbres. Across the Nordic region and in other areas as well, these intersecting and conflicting motivations helped to define much of the folk music and revivalist milieux that ultimately informs the world of Nordic ritual folk music. Kaminsky explains that much of the original interest in Nordic folk music in the early nineteenth century involved preservationist impulses among the bourgeois aimed at collecting and saving peasant music from extinction in the face of modernization and industrialization. Somewhat paradoxically, early fruits of these projects often consisted of bowdlerized notated arrangements of folk melodies, often with piano accompaniment according to the standards of domestic music-making at 84

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the time. At the time, folk music’s preservation hinged on fixing it in a notated form that erased many of its most distinct aspects. From its outset, however, this sort of project works to frame folk music as lasting and fundamental cultural artifacts that can only ever be eroded by change and innovation.31 This conception naturally sparks various xenophobic anxieties over outside musical influences and makes folk music an attractive political tool for those who invoke imagined rural lifestyles as justification for their policies. It also creates a sense of sovereignty and ownership over musical styles identified as “folk music” or “traditional music.” The Nordic regions’ sense of identity and self-determination has long been wrapped in a national romantic musical garb, whether concerning specific instruments or musical practices. The use of music as an ingredient of national and cultural identity is, of course, a widespread practice, manifesting in everything from national anthems to regional and local music tourism, so the Nordic regions are not exceptional in this regard. Where the Nordic region differs, perhaps, is in the interest in cultivating folk music within various civic institutions, from music education programs at the primary levels to university music departments, official music festivals, and music competitions. As an introductory case study, Norway is particularly productive because its traditions of national music cut across the worlds of classical music, traditional folk music, and various popular music styles, all of which feed into the milieu of Nordic ritual folk music in various ways. All of these musical traditions have tended to root their various nationalisms and national romanticisms in borealism, highlighting the harsh and beautiful Norwegian landscape in various ways. Beyond the landscape itself, the “authentic” character of the nation is identified closely with rural peoples and their customs and traditions as opposed to the presumably more cosmopolitan urban areas and seats of political and economic power. The identification of the “spirit” of a nation with its more far-flung areas and its supposedly noble past has many counterparts over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from fascist movements in Europe (and elsewhere) to the repeated invocations of allegedly wholesome “small-town” values in US politics. This purposeful expression of cultural and musical differences accompanied nationalist sentiments in Norway in the early nineteenth century, 85

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looking to the model of German Romanticism and its collectors of folklore and myth from the rural areas of the country. As argued by the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, the key to the rhetorical power of folk music in these contexts is that it resists conforming to a normative, universal style in a manner similar to the tropes of landscape music encountered earlier.32 Further, he argues that this nonconformity doesn’t necessarily have to be unique or specific, noting that particular musical tropes might be shared across national and regional boundaries but still function as musical identifiers. As an example, he notes that the piano music of both Edvard Grieg and Frederic Chopin reference folk music and dance through emulations of bagpipe drones and melodies using a raised 4th scale degree but that they also work as specific references to both Norwegian and Polish folk music, respectively.33 For listeners, the key is the difference from a normative style, in this case, the German and Austrian idioms that came to dominate classical piano music in the nineteenth century and beyond. The folkiness of these musical gestures also lends them a touch of the archaic, which further connects them with a sense of communal heritage while also separating them from more “learned” and international styles. This distinction is a foundation of the Folk axis in Kaminsky’s framework of the competing ideals at work in Scandinavian folk music. Yet this sort of musical nationalism should not be considered to be merely regressive or a retreat into nostalgia and a rejection of cosmopolitanism because it also works as a progressive and creative force that actively shapes the traditions it is reviving. Then, as now, the preservation and reawakening of older “hidden” music almost invariably involves a series of refinements and updates designed to broaden its appeal and reach. As an example, the musicologist Daniel Grimley has detailed the ways in which nationalism, folk music, and landscape manifested in nineteenth-century Norwegian art music, particularly the works of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Classical music proves to be a productive vehicle for exploring the competing goals and incentives that animate musical nationalism, particularly as concerns the tension between the cosmopolitan style of much European art music and the desire for local color. For one early example, Grimley explores the 86

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music of the 1825 Syngespil (comic opera, or Singspiel) Fjeldeventyret (“The Mountain Tale”) by the composer Waldemar Thrane, noting that although it contains elements meant to evoke Norwegian music, it does so within the broadly European style. Thrane includes rural dialects and stylized references to the lur folk horn and an unaccompanied kulokk or herding song (also referred to as kulning) that invokes the peasantry of the Norwegian countryside. Yet these sorts of musical references to local color also reflect the broader expectations of European opera at the time, which regularly included “rustic” characters accompanied by standard pastoral musical tropes like hunting calls and static harmonies. These sorts of stylized alpine shepherding calls also had a rich rhetorical side that invokes not only a sense of individual freedom but also calls forth feelings of nostalgia, longing, and displacement.34 In this context, though, these recognizable generic folk idioms work to locate the action firmly in Norway (at least for Norwegian audiences) and do so via an appeal to the countryside. As Kaminsky also notes, similar dualistic tensions between art music and folk music, preservation and innovation, and cosmopolitanism and locality continue to animate discourses around folk music and national identities. The Norwegian fiddle tradition associated with the folkemusikk revivals of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides further provocative and illustrative examples of these motivations. As with other folk music revivals, a certain anti-cosmopolitan and even anti-modern thread runs throughout, but with the additional institutional layers of official societies like the National Fiddler’s Association (Landlsaget for Spelemenn) and associated music competitions. Chris Goertzen’s 1997 book Fiddling for Norway: Revival and Identity traces the history of these societies and competitions in some depth, but a few points can be drawn out here. Within a revivalist music scene like this, tracing the heritage of particular tunes and playing styles is of paramount interest. Goertzen notes that this impulse drives the rather matter-of-fact formula that names many Norwegian fiddle tunes, in which the tune’s genre is followed by “in the manner of . . . ” followed by a famous fiddler’s name. It’s essentially a musical analog to the convention in painting in which a painting copied from or in the style of a famous painter is said to be 87

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“after” the famous painter. The example Goertzen gives is “Springleik etter Kjøk,” named for the well-known fiddler Erling Kjøk (1932–1999) from the valley of Gudbrandsdalen in the county of Innlandet. For fiddlers, the naming formula invokes not only a region and a single player, but a multi-generational lineage of fiddlers and teachers. This particular springleik is then connected not only with Mr. Kjøk but also with other famous fiddlers from his village, and with Mr. Kjøk’s son Knut, a renowned fiddler in his own right.35 Beyond just antiquarian local interest, the folk music revival has a long history of association with nationalist and national romantic movements. From the beginning of the organization in 1923, its first president, Arne Bjørndal, depicted traditional fiddling as under siege from foreign instruments and “mechanical” musical styles, invoking nationalism, tradition, and the Norwegian landscape in the process.36 Numerous later writers of poetry and editorials in folk music newsletters from the mid-twentieth century explicitly connect Norway’s harsh and beautiful landscape with its folk music. Goertzen cites a 1951 letter in the Spelemannsblad newsletter, which referred to folk music as “Norwegian nature in its changing moods, with its mountainous country and sheltered valleys, wild waterfalls, and still, dreamy fjords” and claimed that only the hardingfele has the “Norwegian resonance.”37 Waterfalls especially are associated with fiddles in Norwegian folklore more broadly as well in the fossegrim, a type of troll or water spirit that lives near waterfalls. According to folklore, fossegrimen in Norway typically play a Hardanger fiddle and can be convinced to teach their skills if the correct sorts of offerings are made. In one well-known depiction, the famous 1901 statue of the violinist Ole Bull in Bergen features Bull playing atop a rocky outcrop while a muscular fossegrim below him plays a harp fashioned from logs (see figure 3.3). Nativistic pronouncements such as those in Spelemannsblad also depicted Norwegian folk traditions as being threatened by the introduction of foreign instruments, yet the need for a hardingfele revival in the first place was due in no small measure to late-nineteenth century religious movements in Norway’s western mountains.38 These pietistic movements took a decidedly dim view of fiddling and folk dancing as 88

Figure 3.3. Ole Bull and Fossegrim statue in Bergen. PHOTO BY ROSS HAGEN.

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vectors of sin and violence, so it’s worth considering how the fossegrim legend echoes similar associations between musicians and demonic or supernatural forces in Euro-American culture. For virtuoso musicians like pianist Franz Liszt, violinist Niccolò Paganini, or the blues guitarist Robert Johnson, the whiff of Faustian brimstone burnishes their reputations, but such suspicions can also cause significant problems for less famous musicians when religious authorities take the charges seriously. Norway even has its own variation on the devil fiddler legend: a mid-nineteenth century poem by the noted folklorist Jørgen Moe (1813–1882) depicts the lively slått (tune or melody) “Fanitullen” being given to man by the Devil, with lethal consequences. “Fanitullen” also uses an alternative hardingfele tuning called trollstilt and huldrastilt, among other names, betraying common linguistic associations with supernatural bewitchment while also describing the unusual sonorities.39 The well-known fiddler Hallvard T. Bjørgum also described in a 2023 NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) feature how “rammeslåttar” tunes played in gorrlaus bas tuning were particularly well-suited for causing trances because the pitch of the hardingfele’s lowest string is dropped significantly.40 However, he also claimed that the practical reason for the fiddle’s association with waterfalls was that the noise of the water drowned out the fiddle, letting the fiddler shirk his farm chores to practice in secret. In this telling, the fossegrim was a later addition, contributing layers of fantasy and mystique while also tying the fiddle and its music to the Norwegian landscape and nation. In a related sense, fiddlers and scholars of folk music have also often given special attention to tunes in unusual melodic modes, as they help distinguish the local repertoire from both art music and popular music while also implying that it might be older and more authentic.41 Goertzen particularly notes a tendency to drift toward the Lydian mode in some fiddle performances, which is relatively rare in most contexts because the mode includes a tritone. He offers a couple of possible explanations, noting that fiddlers could be imitating the upper partials of overtone instruments like the willow flute. However, Goertzen finds it more plausible that the modal drifting derives from particular fingering patterns.

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As might be expected, a long-lived conservationist institution like the National Fiddler’s Association has had its share of controversies and arguments over its purpose and direction, both in person and in the pages of its newsletters. Many of the arguments and debates hinged on the importance of maintaining the identity of the society and its contests as self-consciously Norwegian in character, most often in terms of the types of tunes and types of instruments allowed in official competition. Indeed, the first folk music competition focused on the wooden lur as a symbol of Norwegianness that would likely appeal to foreign tourists.42 Although the “normal” fiddle was widely popular across Norway, the competitions initially focused on the hardingfele, with the additional expectation that players would focus on their local village style. The contests gradually welcomed fiddlers in the “normal” tradition, but debates continued over whether the competition environment was potentially detracting from the “folk” nature of the music. The focus on fiddling is itself emblematic of a shift toward an individualistic “art music” conception which prizes the virtuoso soloist, while the more utilitarian and harmonically limited instruments such as the lur, bukkehorn, munnharpe ( Jew’s harp), and the more “domestic” langeleik zither have been more marginal in competitions and attract smaller numbers of aficionados.43 Further controversies erupted in the 1980s concerning the inclusion of gammeldans music, Nordic versions of broadly popular European social dances like the waltz and polka with ensemble accompaniment and button accordions, resulting in the creation of a separate gammeldans festival in 1986.44 Although these long-running disagreements over proper definitions of “folk music” were taking place within the bounds of competitive fiddling, involving the minutiae of local song types and usual status games and resentments, they, of course, involved much more than disagreements over musical style. The formality of national music competitions also intensifies the need to define boundaries and set clear parameters, laying bare many underlying motives in the process. Here, much of the conservationist and antiquarian drive among fiddlers seems animated by the notion that there is, in fact, some sort of authentic and unsullied Norwegian-ness to be found in folk music and dance. On one level, the disagreements are merely chewing over which instruments and which 91

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dance types fall within those boundaries, but the competing axes of Kaminsky’s framework provide intriguing means by which to understand the stakes. While Goertzen’s examples of Norwegian fiddle competitions show clear allegiances toward an understanding of folk music that privileges tradition, localized musical practices, insular musical knowledge, and unique musical characteristics, this has not been the case across the Nordic region. Indeed, Norway’s folk-rock scene in the 1970s, spearheaded by the groups Folque and Folk och Rackare, stood in clear opposition to such institutional gatekeeping, not least because the competitive folk music circuit in Norway focused on instrumental playing rather than singing. The folk revival movements in Finland especially pursued a cosmopolitan and global vision of folk music fueled by a search for novelty. Similarly to Norway, nineteenth-century conceptions of the Finnish nation centered on wilderness, and particularly forests, and located the “folk” of the nation within that landscape. Music also figures heavily in the mythology of the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, gathered from oral tradition and published by Elias Lönnrot in 1835. The epic’s hero, Väinämöinen, transforms the barren land into forests and ultimately becomes a bard and the creator of the kantele, a zither that he originally fashions from the jawbone of a pike and which has magical qualities in the tales. The musicologist Tina Ramnarine considers that the story functions as a metaphor in which the spirit of the nation arises from wilderness and is given voice through folk song.45 Juniper Hill’s 2007 study of the scene around Finnish contemporary folk music notes that the ideal for many Finnish folk musicians involves collaborating with other artists from around the world, researching the music of neighboring countries, and playing traditional instruments from multiple cultures.46 Many of Hill’s interlocutors professed a cosmopolitan ideal that works in opposition to nationalist conceptions of traditional folk music, connecting instead to a global community of folk musicians. For example, the Sibelius Academy Folk Music Department chair, Kristiina Ilmonen, describes how their department encourages their students to connect with musicians from around the world to both gain new musical tools and break down outdated boundaries.47 Several influential 92

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“new folk” musicians and ensembles are alumni of the Sibelius Academy, including Hedningarna and Värttinä. Simultaneously, institutions like the Sibelius Academy and the Kaustinen Festival Organization worked diligently to make the kantele and Kalevala songs a cornerstone of Finnish music education since the 1980s as a way to build a foundation for such music in higher education.48 Tina K. Ramnarine’s book Ilmatar’s Inspirations (2003) argues, however, that many of these “new folk” musicians did not approach their transformations of existing folk music traditions solely in the interest of novelty. By introducing new modern elements into the music, they imagine recapturing a lost folk essence of the music, a cultural and musical dynamism that had been lost in previous generations.49 The oppositional poles of tradition and innovation in folk music essentially get folded back on themselves through the argument that the calcified Tradition is both recent and falsely defined (at least in part). In this way, musical innovations like the electric kantele, which was introduced in the 1980s by the group Salamakannel, and all manner of musical borrowings, adaptations, and redefinitions became legitimated within Finnish folk music circles. These ideals also helped Finnish ensembles like Värttinä find success within the global world music industry with rock-based music that nonetheless still conveys Finnishness, and with lyrics that often reflected bold contemporary feminism rather than traditional gender roles.50 These sorts of redefinitions of musical tradition and recognition of the malleability of all traditions directly fed the emergent “amplified histories” of the Nordic ritual folk music world. While the debates within these folk music institutions tend to revolve around the introduction of modern rock, pop, and jazz instruments and idioms into traditional music circles, the Nordic heathen music scene often looks toward older and more esoteric instruments. While “normal” Nordic instruments like hardingfele and nyckelharpa are regularly featured in Nordic ritual folk music, many performers gravitate toward more “primitive” instruments that had fallen out of widespread use in the twentieth century, particularly bowed lyres of various types and sizes such as the talharpa and the Finnish jouhikko. These instruments typically have between two and four strings and had typically been used 93

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for accompanying dances, with melodies passed down largely through oral tradition. The musical limitations of these instruments and their comparatively “rough” sound immediately set them apart from “learned” traditions of string instruments, emphasizing the ideal of naturalness and “wildness” that folk musicians often promote, in an intensification of Kaminsky’s Nature vs. Quality axis. A number of Nordic ritual folk musicians also use newly developed baritone and bass versions of the talharpa and jouhikko, in which the larger strings generate a significant amount of “grit” in the sound due to the increased kinetic energy used in bowing. Choices of wind instruments follow a similar path, favoring the rougher sounds of various natural trumpets and horns like the lur or bukkehorn, and in some cases, recreations of ancient brass instruments like Wardruna’s replicas of ornate Bronze Age lurs discovered in Brudevælte Mose in Denmark. This aesthetic ideal bears comparison with the antiquarian side of classical music, in which “historically informed” performance relies on the use of recreated or restored instruments from the time periods in question. As in that community, the Nordic ritual folk music scene is heavily indebted to specialist luthiers and other artisanal builders who design and construct versions of obscure archaic instruments that are suitable for modern concert performance.51 The final turn to “nature,” though, is the extensive use of large drums, bells, and rattles, which are rarely (if ever) a part of traditional Nordic dance music as cultivated in fiddle competitions and similar environments.

Black Metal Museums

In addition to the worlds of Nordic folk music, the Nordic ritual folk music scene also draws some influence from black metal, a style of extreme metal that has been heavily associated with Scandinavia ever since its first moments of wider visibility in the early 1990s. The previous chapter details the association between metal and Viking fantasies, but metal has also become adopted as an authentic Nordic style by government and educational institutions. Further, some black metal bands look back to the sorts of traditional folk music detailed in this chapter, along with musicians who work within both metal and neofolk idioms. As noted previously, black metal’s prominence in modern Norwegian music 94

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is in no small measure because of a campaign of church arsons committed by black metal musicians between 1992 and 1994 and the murder of Mayhem guitarist and de-facto scene leader Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth by his former friend, fellow black metal musician Varg Vikernes. Vikernes had also been the main instigator of the church arsons, which he framed in the press as acts of heathen reclamation and retribution. Vikernes and Aarseth also gave interviews in metal magazines in which they claimed to run an extensive network of Satanic terrorists and neo-Nazis, and both tabloids and international music magazines repeated these claims. After Aarseth’s murder, many other participants in the Norwegian black metal scene faced other charges, and Vikernes would end up in prison for fifteen years. However, the accompanying publicity and notoriety have continued to bear fruit for Norwegian black metal bands around the world, even if such overt criminality has not been a regular recurrence in the intervening decades. Indeed, some of the scene’s elder musicians seem to be somewhat haunted by the fact that their continued success hinges at least partly on acts of self-destruction and violence that cost the lives of their friends decades ago.52 In the twenty-first century, however, black metal has become “institutionalized” as one of the cornerstones of Norwegian popular music history, as one of the few self-consciously Nordic music scenes to find a global audience. As noted above, many Norwegian black metal bands also rely heavily on their Nordic-ness as an exotic selling point for international audiences, many of whom may have little experience with Nordic culture beyond these music styles. Norwegian cultural institutions eventually followed suit in adopting black metal fully into their orbit, with black metal bands like Enslaved and Satyricon winning Spellemannprisen (Grammy) awards and touring internationally with support from the Ministry of Culture’s Music Norway foundation. Rockheim, Norway’s National Museum for Popular Music, includes black metal musicians in many of its exhibits and also features a display room dedicated to black metal. The black metal room is housed within a full reconstruction of the band Mayhem’s original rehearsal space, a shed that used to be a chicken shack. The attention to detail extends to discarded egg cartons, derelict armchairs, and a coffee table full of empty beer bottles and cigarette 95

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butts, alongside artifacts from the scene’s early days, including instruments, concert posters, costumes, and a video backdrop of a snowy forest. Clearly, no expense was spared. In 2022, the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo curated an exhibit in which a selection of paintings was “scored” by the band Satyricon, a project that was released as the album Satyricon & Munch along with a hardcover photo book of the exhibition.53 But perhaps the best example of Norway’s institutional investment in black metal and Nordic ritual folk music’s borealistic sound was the commissioning of Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik’s piece Skuggsjá to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian constitution in 2014, which also included a performance abroad at the Roadburn festival in the Netherlands the following year. Norwegian metal’s further use as an instrument of international cultural diplomacy was evidenced by a series of exhibitions, panels, and film screenings about Nordic metal hosted by the Nordic Embassies in Berlin in the summer of 2023.54 The events featured a wide variety of academics, musicians, documentary filmmakers, and archivists and also included a growling workshop for children ages six to thirteen. Black metal has also been the subject of much international academic interest since the late 1990s, with a variety of publications exploring its connections with occultism, nationalism, neo-fascism, mythology, and esoteric philosophy. Even when critical, academic engagement with a music scene helps to legitimize it in the view of government and cultural institutions, although some might also consider it an act of appropriation and domestication that robs that music scene of any subversive countercultural potential.55 Black metal was also the first widely visible style of music in which many prominent musicians self-identified as heathen and aligned their music with Nordic heathen spiritualities. Heavy metal, in general, has had a fascination with occultism since its inception in the 1960s and ’70s, but in many cases, it manifested in songs that were modeled after popular horror movie tropes. Contrary to the fears of conservative Christian cultural guardians, there were few (if any) prominent metal musicians in the 1970s–1990s whose engagement with occultic or alternative spiritualities extended beyond their stage personae and visual presentations. There were rock bands and musicians like Coven and King Diamond 96

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who claimed to be dedicated Satanists offstage as well, although they were also relatively obscure at the time. Indeed, in some cases, older metal songs about “evil” tend to resemble cautionary “fire and brimstone” sermons or literary and cinematic works like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, in which an outwardly demonic and shocking plot ultimately confirms Christian (specifically Catholic) theology as truth, including the literal existence of a Christian devil. But for many musicians and other artists, the “Satanic” aspect tends to be more symbolic, using the figure of Satan to stand for a more generalized rebelliousness and opposition to Christianity and conformity, drawing inspiration from Milton’s Paradise Lost. As noted in the previous chapter, Vikings and other historical and mythological figures had also been regular subjects for metal songs and costumes dating back to the 1970s, although likewise without significant personal or ideological investment offstage. Norwegian black metal musicians in the early 1990s obviously understood the promotional potential of occultism and violence, but introduced the added expectation that the musicians would themselves be adherents of Satanism or heathenism, as opposed to simply mining occult milieux for creative inspiration. Their real-world campaign of destruction and death ensured that, no matter how short-lived it turned out to be. Yet it also arguably created a space in which musicians could explore Nordic heathen beliefs as a serious expression of their personal spiritualities and philosophies, even if that initially helped to cast them as pariahs rather than paragons. For some metal musicians in the Nordic regions, this increasing engagement with Ásatrú and other heathen spiritualities led them to seek ways to express this beyond the standard musical and visual tropes of black metal music. These impulses ultimately led fans and musicians to articulate the novel genres of “folk metal,” “pagan metal,” and “Viking metal,” although, as with most musical genres, the boundaries and definitions remain overlapping, permeable, and fluid. Taking cues from Norwegian black metal bands’ frequent invocations of Norway and Norwegian landscapes, bands began to employ quite specific local references as a form of almost touristic currency highlighting their country of origin. One of the earliest well-known examples is the Finnish death metal band Amorphis, whose albums Tales from the Thousand Lakes (1994) and 97

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Elegy (1996) employed lyrics from the Finnish national epics Kalevala and Kanteletar, although in English.56 The use of local color extended to the visual presentations. For example, the Faroese metal band Týr has used photos of traditional sod houses and posed with sóknarongul whaling hooks in their promotional photos, although much of their music adheres to standardized metal norms.57 These fascinations with regional and local culture and folklore also extended to traditional Nordic music, taking cues not only from black metal but also from ideas drawn from folk-rock music and Celtic punk bands like The Pogues. In the 2000s, folk metal bands across the Nordic region and the European continent began engaging more closely with traditional and national styles of music. The album Nordavind (1995) by the Norwegian supergroup Storm (composed of members of the black metal bands Darkthrone and Satryicon) took a somewhat literal approach to folk metal by adapting and arranging traditional Norwegian folk songs in a metal style.58 The Norwegian band Glittertind took a more “patriotic” approach by recording metal arrangements of widely known national songs like “Nordmannen/Mellom bakkar og berg” (“The Norwegian/ Between Hills and Mountains”), “Norge i rødt, hvitt og blått” (“Norway in Red, White, and Blue”) and “Sønner av Norge” (“Sons of Norway”) along with the popular fiddle tune “Nordafjells” and a setting of Edvard Grieg’s popular chorus Landkjenning, originally from an uncompleted opera about the Viking king Olav Trygvason.59 Glittertind’s 2004 album Evige Asatro (Eternal Ásatrú) also makes a strikingly explicit connection between Ásatrú, metal music, and patriotic Norwegian music.60 Returning to the Faroese band Týr, several of their songs are arrangements of works from the Faroese kvæði ballad tradition. Nordic and European folk metal groups also increasingly sought to augment standard metal ensembles with traditional folk instruments, particularly fiddles, tin whistles, accordions, and bagpipes of various types. The chosen instruments are sometimes indicative of a specific national folk music style. For example, the music of Finnish bands Korpiklaani and Finntroll frequently references Finnish humppa, a version of German “oom-pah” music that resembles a very fast polka, so the bands include accordion and fiddle parts in the humppa style. Folk metal bands from the Baltic states, Russia, 98

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and Eastern Europe typically include wind and string instruments that are particular to their regions, along with many lyrical and visual references to Baltic and Slavic neopagan religions that have enjoyed renewed interest after the fall of the USSR. In some cases, this expanded ensemble can nearly double the size of the performing group, as with the Swiss band Eluveitie’s inclusion of a bagpiper, a harpist, a hurdy-gurdy player, and a fiddler. In keeping with the “nature” imperative of folk music style, these folk metal bands rarely employ “learned” classical instrumentations or styles, eschewing the choral, orchestral, and keyboard parts that are a regular feature in black metal.

Conclusion

Although the music associated with Nordic heathen spirituality is clearly a particular and unique tapestry of influences, it is woven from existing threads within a diverse range of Nordic and “Northern” music. Much of its impact relies on borealistic associations between musical style and the vastness of the Nordic and North Atlantic landscape and seascape, along with long-lasting myths about the character of people who inhabit such regions and who have a long history of being simultaneously derided and lauded for their supposedly uncivilized nature. The receptions of Nordic music often followed suit, highlighting idiomatic aspects that struck listeners as simplistic or “rustic.” Crucially, Nordic musicians and institutions regularly took up these mantles as well in the name of articulating a sense of their unique national character, as seen in the examples from hardingfele competitions and other nationalistically minded art and music dating back generations. In many cases, the music was already connected to the landscape itself via local folklore. Norwegian black metal’s notorious fetish for everything frozen, forested, mountainous, and wolf-ish is, in some ways, simply playing to type when it comes to Northern music in general. Listeners both in the Nordic region and beyond are then already primed to experience and interpret the music with this sort of mindset. The Finnish “new folk” music scene hints at other aspects of this music scene that require further scrutiny, however. One of the hallmarks of Finnish “new folk” is a deliberately cosmopolitan and multiculturalist ethos that encourages collaboration with musicians and musical styles 99

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from around the world. The following chapter explores how these intersections with “world music” provided Nordic heathen musicians and fans not only with a broader stylistic palette, but also a means to imbue their music with a primordial and magical aura. When the available music from the past isn’t entirely up to such challenges of conjuration, musicians often find effective substitutes in the musical traditions of other cultures.

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Notes

1. Peter Davidson, The Idea of North, (London: Reaktion Books, 2016). 2. Davidson, The Idea of North, 21–38. 3. Andrew Mellor, The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 167. 4. John Luther Adams, Winter Music: Composing the North (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 6–8. 5. Adams, Winter Music, 27. 6. Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian Identity (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 55–8. 7. Neil Lerner, “Copland’s Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001): 477–515. 8. Grimley, Grieg, 57. 9. Mellor, The Northern Silence, 137. 10. Tore Storvold, “Sigur Rós: Reception, Borealism, and Musical Style,” Popular Music vol. 37, no. 3 (2018): 385–87. 11. Hildur Guðnadóttir, Chernobyl (Music from the HBO Miniseries), Deutsche Grammophon, 2019, compact disc; Hildur Guðnadóttir, Joker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Watertower Music, 2019, Vinyl LP. 12. John Luther Adams and The Seattle Symphony, Become Ocean, Cantaloupe Music, 2014, compact disc; John Luther Adams, In the White Silence, New World Records, 2003, compact disc. 13. Nicola Dibben, “Nature and Nation: National Identity and Environmentalism in Icelandic Popular Music Video and Music Documentary,” Ethnomusicology Forum 18/1 (2009): 131–51. 14. Tore Størvold, Dissonant Landscapes: Music, Nature, and the Performance of Iceland, eBook edition (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), 241–46. 15. Störvald, 263–87; Sigur Rós, Kveikur, XL Recordings, 2013, compact disc. 16. Ragnheiður Ólafsdóttir and Nicola Dibben, “Rímur: From National Heritage to Folk Music,” in Sounds Icelandic: Essays on Icelandic Music in the twentieth and twenty-first Centuries, Edited by Þorbjörg Daphne Hall, Nicola Dibben, Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, and Tony Mitchell (Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2019), 39–57. 17. Kimberly Cannady and Kristín Loftsdóttir, “A Nation Without Music?”: Symphonic Music and Nation-Building,” in Sounds Icelandic: Essays on Icelandic Music in the twentieth and twenty-first Centuries, Edited by Þorbjörg Daphne Hall, Nicola Dibben, Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, and Tony Mitchell (Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2019), 35–6. 18. Lawson Fletcher, “The Sound of Ruins: Sigur Rós’ Heima and the Post-Rock Elegy for Place,” Interference 2 (2012), http:​//​www​.interferencejournal​.org​/the​-sound​-of​-ruins/. 19. Dibben, “Nature and Nation,” 132–39. 20. Pandora Hopkins, Aural Thinking in Norway: Performance and Communication with the Hardingfele (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1986), 122. 21. Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985), 21.

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Chapter 3 22. Bérenger Hainaut, “‘Fear and Wonder:’ Le fantastique sombre et l’harmonie des médiantes, de Hollywood au black metal,” Volume! La revue des musiques populares 9, no. 2 (2012): 179–97. 23. Ross Hagen, Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 75–7. 24. Qian Janice Wang and Charles Spence, “The Role of Pitch and Tempo in Sound-Temperature Crossmodal Correspondences,” Multisensory Research 30, no 3–5 (2017): 307–20. 25. Grimley, Grieg, 64–8. 26. “Welcome to the Official Wim Hof Method Website,” Wim Hof, http:​//​www​ .wimhofmethod​.com, accessed May 10, 2023. 27. Peter Beste (dir.), True Norwegian Black Metal, VBS TV, 2007. 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, ed. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 29. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 30. David Kaminsky, Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2011), 10. 31. Kaminsky, Swedish Folk Music, 19–20. 32. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 1989), 217–25. 33. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 309–10. 34. Grimley, Grieg, 26–34. 35. Chris Goertzen, Fiddling for Norway: Revival and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 18. 36. Goertzen, Fiddling for Norway, 32. 37. Johannes Skarpund 1951, cited in Goertzen, Fiddling for Norway, 34. 38. Goertzen, Fiddling for Norway, 24. 39‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌. Karin Løberg Code, “A Guide to Tunings on the Hardingfele,” Hardanger Fiddle Association of America, https:​//​www​.hfaa​.org​/about​-the​-hardanger​-fiddle​/articles​-on​ -the​-hardanger​-fiddle​/a​-guide​-to​-tunings​-on​-the​-hardingfele. 40. Ole Kristian Årdal, “Å spele seg frå sans og samling: Går det an å gå i transe ved hjelp av musikk? Nevroforskaren gir svar,” NRK, November 26, 2023, https:​//​www​ .nrk​.no​/kultur​/xl​/hallvard​-t​.​-bjorgum​-spelar​-seg​-i​-transe​-ved​-hjelp​-av​-rammeslattar​-1​ .16627391. 41. Goertzen, Fiddling for Norway, 132. 42. Deirdre Morgan, “Speaking in Tongues: Music, Identity, and Representation in Jew’s Harp Communities,” PhD Thesis (SOAS, University of London, 2016), 118. 43. Morgan, 123–25. 44. Goertzen, Fiddling for Norway, 106–21. 45. Tina K. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 43.

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The Music of the North 46. Juniper Hill, “‘Global Folk Music’ Fusions: The Reification of Transnational Relationships and the Ethics of Cross-cultural Appropriations in Finnish Contemporary Folk Music,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 39 (2007): 50–83. 47. Hill, “Global Folk Music,” 69. 48. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations, 64. 49. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations, 48. 50. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations, 107–8. 51. “Inspirational Instruments: Making the Instruments of Wardruna with Don Shaw—Midgardsblot 2023,” interview by Jameson Foster, The Nordic Sound Channel with Jameson Foster, https:​//​youtu​.be​/jSz0MtO8bC0​?si​=lWDbT6RLL7kFPpj9. 52. Ross Hagen, “On Horseback they Carried Thunder: The Second Lives of Norwegian Black Metal” in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music, ed. Jan Herbst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 221–36; Ross Hagen, “‘From the Dark Past:’ Historiographies of Violence in Norwegian Black Metal,” in Researching Subcultures: Myth and Memory, Edited by Bart van der Steen and Thierry P. F. Verburgh (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 151–71. 53. Satyricon, Satyricon & Munch, Napalm Records NPR1081VINYL, 2022; Morten Andersen, Satyricon & Munch, (Oslo: Munchmuseet, 2022). 54. “Der harte Norden—Heavy Metal aus den Nordischen Ländern,” Nordische Botschaften, accessed September 29, 2023, https:​//​www​.nordischebotschaften​.org​/ ausstellungen​/der​-harte​-norden​-heavy​-metal​-aus​-den​-nordischen​-l​-ndern. 55. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 92–9. 56. Amorphis, Tales from the Thousand Lakes, Relapse Records, 1994, compact disc; Amorphis, Elegy, Relapse Records, 1996, compact disc. 57. Joshua Green, “From the Faroes to the World Stage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, Edited by Fabian Holt and Antti-Ville Kärjä (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 111–30; Donna Weston, “Basque Pagan Metal: View to a Primordial Past,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (2011): 103–22. 58. Storm, Nordavind, Moonfog Productions, 1995, compact disc. 59‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌. Glittertind, Landkjenning, Napalm Records, 2009, compact disc; Glittertind, Mellom Bakkar Og Berg, Ultima Thule Records, 2002, compact disc. 60. Glittertind, Evige Asatro, Ultima Thule Records, 2003, compact disc.

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World Music of the Ancient World Ross Hagen

The distant (and even not-so-distant) past has long been a repository for the desires, dreams, and anxieties of the present, and music often proves to be a particularly powerful vehicle for these kinds of expressions. Evoking imagined other lives, other loves, other places, and other times has long been one of the primary roles of music and a key to its central role in many spiritual practices. As seen in the previous chapter, many of the easily recognized symbols of Nordic identity in Scandinavian music have their roots in imagined rural pasts and national heritages, including more recent styles like black metal that add more obvious layers of fantasy to the mix. To that end, this chapter explores the intersections between Nordic ritual folk music and the milieux of early music and world music, as this music arguably intersects with both categorizations. In particular, I will be attempting to untangle ways in which ancient music and world music have been valued because of their symbolic distance from the concerns and anxieties of the present moment, whether one is seeking simplicity, authenticity, enchantment, or excitement. Indeed, the past has long exerted a comparable pull expressed across centuries and artforms even as the precise visions and meanings of the past are continually reinvented.1 But if our representations of the past connect us to “othertime,” many Western listeners have found similar experiences in the music of other cultures, to the extent that the two are often conflated. The 105

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exoticism of other cultures’ music regularly rests not only on artistic novelty but also the sense that their current practices represent residues of one’s own ancestral prelapsarian past. Even if patronizing conceptions of social and civilizational “progress” are left aside, the notion that the “old ways” only truly remain in the hinterlands has proved to be remarkably persistent. This can be observed in numerous “folk horror” books and films like The Wicker Man (1972) and Midsommar (2019) that imagine long-forgotten beliefs, usually steeped in violent sexuality, lurking within bucolic rural communities, along with a general tendency toward Orientalism in medievalist music and film.2 Tracing these threads in twenty-first-century Nordic ritual folk music involves roping in a wider variety of music from the worlds of “new folk” and Mittelalter music that have been cultivated in medieval markets, Renaissance fairs, and Viking markets in Europe and the United States since the 1960s. One of the signatures of this wider musical milieu is the regular intermingling of musical instruments and performance techniques from around the world with instruments, melodies, and texts that are specific to European traditions. For example, it is quite common for percussionists in Nordic ritual folk ensembles to make use of a wide variety of North African and Afro-Cuban instruments, while singers regularly make use of throat-singing techniques and vocal ornamentations from a variety of different cultures. From a sympathetic perspective, these sorts of fusions display a sense of cosmopolitanism that could work against currents of nationalism and ethnocentrism that have often run within these revivalist music scenes.3 Even more broadly, musical creativity always involves a measure of cultural borrowing in one fashion or another, and the musical world of “new folk” music in Scandinavia has a long history of musical fusions. Conversely, such things could also be framed as yet another example of European musicians and artists extracting symbolic power from colonized peoples and Indigenous cultures, but this time doing so under the cover of intercultural connection. Further, numerous issues arise in the adaptation of ancient texts and melodies within modern musical styles, especially in cases where their aesthetic appeal is privileged over their original context and purpose. The many twentieth- and twenty-first-century versions of the 106

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thirteenth-century Crusade song Palästinalied provide a useful case study here, particularly since, in most cases, the song’s original religious and propagandistic intent is either ignored or willfully subverted. Instead, Palästinalied and similar musical artifacts conjure a generalized mystical and ancient aura, shorn of specific associations and purposes. It shares this in common with many other early music examples and the universalist discourse around classical music in general. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, in the hands of twenty-first-century Nordic ritual folk musicians this multicultural and agnostic approach becomes a potential path for exploring imagined othertimes and elsewheres without simply co-opting or disrespecting traditions, costumes, or other symbols specific to particular cultures. Even this proves to be a fraught path. Yet even if distinctions of time and place are muted, the appeal often continues to hinge on a connection with some sort of “original,” even if it only exists in the listeners’ imaginations. As in all music, any perception of naturalness also hinges on a level of artifice.4 However, this chapter also must conclude with an important caveat, noting that the culturally omnivorous nature of Nordic ritual folk music also derives in no small measure from the revivals of Indigenous Sámi music since the 1980s. While these revivals shared with other folk revivals the sense that they were reconnecting with something primeval, they did so in the spirit of Indigenous self-determination and solidarity. Musicians like Mari Boine and Frode Fjellheim deliberately drew upon a global sonic palette, taking inspiration from Indigenous musicians and activists in the Americas and actively participating in pan-Indigenous movements and organizations. In doing so, these musicians also provide a valuable rejoinder to views of world music that depict stylistic fusions as either an act of colonization or contamination. Even when well-intentioned, these sorts of preservationist views often “museumize” dynamic music traditions and fail to account for the agency of Indigenous musicians. As with other Indigenous groups, the Sámi have also found their musical traditions and other cultural expressions commodified by outsiders in the Nordic region and beyond.5 Boine and other Sámi musicians then connect with Indigenous musical traditions across the world in the service of pan-Indigenous activism rather than seeking 107

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to extract authenticity and ancient-ness from within the music of other cultures. While some in the Nordic ritual folk music milieu undoubtedly blur boundaries between expressions of solidarity and Indigenous cosplay, the decades of Sámi influence on Nordic musicians show some further potential of the Nordic ritual folk music scene in this regard. Sámi music has also long been regarded as peripheral within the wider study of Nordic music (popular and otherwise), making it even more important to highlight its influence here.

Exoticized Pasts in the Present

Connecting Nordic ritual folk music with world music and early music opens a productive strain of inquiry regarding authenticity and exoticism, in which musical authenticity is asserted by essentially commodifying distance. As Simon Frith notes, the initial construction of “World Music” as a pop music category in the mid-1980s relied on discourses of exploration and discovery, which served to burnish the cultural capital of communities of world music enthusiasts.6 Although the music in question might be uniquely diverse and dispersed, the strategy is also recognizable to record collectors, fans of the 1960s folk revivals, “kvlt” black metallers, and underground music aficionados in general. In these musical communities, obscurity in and of itself confers value, along with ties to local traditions and communities and a sense of unfiltered expression. The world music scene also cultivated demonstrations of expertise within extensive liner notes, often written by academic ethnomusicologists, that served to authenticate the music within. Frith argues that this desire for such a guarantee makes it clear that “authenticity” in this context is simply a redescription of the exotic, serving as a touristic search for the “real thing.”7 Similar fascinations with orientalized elsewheres and othertimes occur across other genres of music adjacent to Nordic ritual folk music and in other media. Devotees of drone metal ensembles like Sunn O))) and OM regularly describe their experience of the music as an encounter with shamanic forces, exotic landscapes, and premodern cultures, often with generalized and interchangeable references to India, Tibet, and the Middle East.8 Cinematic depictions of medieval and medievalist worlds 108

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likewise rely heavily on non-Western instruments in order to convey a sense of otherness and mystery. As Helen Dell notes, music that is authentically medieval is often not up to the task on its own because it remains too familiar, so composers often rely on “exotic” scales and harmonies that create a sense of unsteadiness.9 In a similar vein, Howard Shore’s score for the Lord of the Rings films scores Lothlorien, the woodland realm of the elves, with a female chorus, monochord, ney, and sarangi to create an ambiguous and unreadable soundscape.10 The use of women’s voices also contributes to the sense of uncanniness and otherness in this context, given the paucity of female characters in the Lord of the Rings books. Whether conscious of it or not, many Nordic ritual folk musicians interface with similar musical exoticisms, particularly regarding their instruments of choice. Many of these instruments continue to signal cultural and temporal otherness for listeners in a quasi-cinematic manner. A particularly evocative example can be found in Diedre Morgan’s and Owen Coggins’s research into the roles of Jew’s harps in heavy metal and related musical styles. As an instrument type, the mouth harp is represented all over the world in one form or another, but in much modern Western media and music, it is often associated with outlaws and outsiders, folkloric mysticism, and premodernity more broadly. Well-known examples include Ennio Morricone’s score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and the diegetic use of Jew’s harp in The Wicker Man.11 Jew’s harps also have a variety of more localized connotations, from shamanism in Central Asia to Indigenous activism in South America. But in any case, the “boing” of a Jew’s harp is often a signal to the listener that they’re being relocated to somewhere enchanted, pre-modern, and possibly a little bit dangerous.12 The signifying roles of instruments like the Jew’s harp also mitigate against questions of historical inauthenticity in both instrumental choice and playing technique. Groups that use a number of archaic “primitive” instruments can then rely on them to evoke the ancient world regardless of whether they are authentically ancient or not. Indeed, Wardruna’s main composer Einar Selvik regularly insists that his intention in the band is not to attempt a recreation of ancient music, but to use the instruments 109

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effectively in a modern setting. But he also notes that when one is faced with an instrument like a lyre, a bronze lur or other natural trumpet, or a Jew’s harp, each of those instruments comes with a very limited musical vocabulary. Natural trumpets, overtone flutes, and Jew’s harps, in particular, are limited to the pitches available in the overtone series, like modern bugles. As a result, Selvik feels it’s reasonable to assume that what he does with the instruments in Wardruna is probably reminiscent of their use in ancient times because it’s essentially impossible to do much else with them.13 Historically minded early music ensembles have had to traverse similar terrain over the decades as well, even though they are dealing with music that at least has a written historical record, however scant it might be. Thomas Binkley’s Studio der Frühen Musik introduced a number of Arabic and Andalusian instruments, ornamentations, and improvisational practices to their influential performances and recordings in the 1960s, sparking ongoing controversies in the field, even setting aside the dubious notion of performing medieval and Renaissance music with an eye to a phantasmagoric “original.” For some, bringing Arab-Andalusian elements into recordings of troubadour songs and other medieval repertoire bore hints of a long-running Orientalist tendency to look to the margins of Europe for hints of the ancient and to clumsily incorporate those elements without fully understanding them.14 Yet other scholars have taken a more positive and pragmatic view of this intercultural approach to early music. Kristen Yri notes that it provides a corrective to histories that have minimized (if not utterly erased) the influence of Arabic and Jewish musical tradition and thought in European art music.15 There is also a pragmatic element at play among early music specialists in that the sketchy historical source material for early music can be productively fleshed out in collaboration with musicians from other living traditions.16 Viewed sympathetically, one can see how this contributes to the establishment of early music as a living art form itself. However, Orientalist notions also work to make much more recent musical practices seem “ancient” or “primitive,” provided they originate from often ill-defined far-flung lands. This was made particularly salient in the infamous hit singles “Sweet Lullaby” (1992) by the French duo 110

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Deep Forest and “Return to Innocence” (1993) by the German artist Enigma.17 Deep Forest’s entire first album is laced through with samples from Central African vocal music, and “Sweet Lullaby” features a vocal hook sampled from a 1973 UNESCO recording of music from the Solomon Islands. The vocal hook in “Return to Innocence” was sampled from a 1989 compilation of Aboriginal Taiwanese music. “Sweet Lullaby” found its way into commercials for Coca-Cola, Neutrogena, and Porsche, while “Return to Innocence” was a theme song for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. In both cases, the artists claimed to have followed proper licensing protocols for sampling the recordings, but the performers were not credited or compensated, which led the Taiwanese singers Difang and Igay Duana to eventually bring legal action in the case of Enigma.18 Even then, it is worth considering that such claims of legal ownership and control over music reflect Western values and rarely align with Indigenous approaches to thinking about who, if anyone, might “own” a song. The legal situation with “Sweet Lullaby” became particularly tangled, involving not only the various record labels but also the ethnomusicologist who made the original field recordings and other musicians who later borrowed the melody for their own compositions.19 In these cases, the song’s titles, lyrics, and music videos also explicitly reference childhood, turning the sampled vocals into ciphers for listeners’ nostalgic introspections while also subtly infantilizing the cultures of the singers. There are definite echoes of the romantic notions that regularly accompanied Western colonialism in generations past, in which patronizing Orientalist attitudes were also paired with the sense that the colonized populations retained some sort of fundamental essence that had been lost in the progress of “civilization.” From the Romantics onward, the nostalgias for the innocence, vitality, and sincerity of childhood were also conflated with the notion that supposedly primitive societies retained these child-like qualities.20 In a parallel but slightly more radical sense, encounters with Indigenous populations also provided critiques of Western society and political structures in that they modeled alternatives to both hereditary aristocracies and emergent capitalism in Europe. It has perhaps not been fully appreciated how popular and influential these accounts of Indigenous life were in Europe at the time and how they 111

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might have inspired this thread of envious nostalgia.21 However, it is important to note also that one might admire or envy another culture’s modes of creativity and expression while still believing them to be racial or ethnic inferiors. Examples abound, but an obvious one would be the broad popularity of styles with roots in Black American culture, like jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and hip-hop, during times in which those same Black communities were living under systems of official state oppression and neglect. In this mode, the world music listener is invited to find themselves, or their imagined selves, in the music of a cultural Other, as a kind of self-exoticization. While one might optimistically see opportunities for cross-cultural connection and empathy, the decontextualized (and often uncredited) nature of the samples in songs like those from Deep Forest and Enigma bears more than a hint of the ongoing colonialist extractions of more tangible sources of wealth. Beyond just music, the situation is also reminiscent of numerous instances in which new age shamans and other counter-cultural figures have repackaged various Indigenous traditions as purchasable balms for Western spiritual seekers.22 It also bears some comparison with the successful yet controversial Paul Simon recordings Graceland (1986) and Rhythm of the Saints (1990), in which the American singer-songwriter revitalized his music through collaborations with musicians from South Africa and Brazil, breaking an anti-apartheid embargo in the process.23 However, it is worth noting that many of the musicians who played in the sessions viewed their involvement more positively, both in terms of the experience and its effect on their careers.24 In the twenty-first century, however, forces of globalization and the increasing digitalization of music production and consumption have worked to destabilize these sorts of hierarchies and networks in various ways, although vestiges of a “World Music 2.0” definitely persist.25 From here, we can turn to the ways these issues manifest in Nordic folk-fusion music and ritual Ásatrú music, which likewise turn to musical traditions from around the globe and the cultural margins of Europe in order to construct a modern intercultural musical style, while relying on a discourse of Indigenousness that renders it “ancient.”

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Cosmopolitan Comforts and Eliding the Exotic

Nordic ritual music and the adjacent scenes around contemporary Nordic folk music provide numerous opportunities for exploring the ethical issues of such cross-cultural and transnational musical practices in the twenty-first century, particularly when the examples are less clear-cut from an ethical and economic standpoint. Contemporary Nordic folk music scenes often advance a cosmopolitan musical and cultural ideal prizing fusion and hybridity, an extension of earlier conceptions of “national” folk music in the Nordic region as combinations of locally grown styles and imported genres. As seen in the previous chapter, this terrain has been long contested and inspired distinct debates in different countries and regions, but in the twenty-first century, it has sometimes been extended to an effectively post-nationalist stance. Of particular importance was a shift in the definition of “folk music” from a specific national or local heritage to a genre with identifiable musical idioms that can be learned by anyone. This redefinition was assisted by the entrance of folk music into music school programs and also by revivals in the 1970s and ’80s that involved many musicians with backgrounds in other musical genres.26 The folk music scenes in Sweden and Finland especially cultivated a deliberately global ideal of folk music as an international community, making multiculturalism almost a default setting. However, the history of European folk music and “world music” also shows that the desire for cosmopolitanism and pan-nationalism also has the potential to reinforce ethnic differences. The history of 1990s Celtic music shows this clearly. Further, it has the potential to scrub the ethnic and cultural markers from the music of historically marginalized peoples and to then press that music into service, conveying a comforting multiculturalism, as seen in the international vogue for Balkan/Romani/ klezmer fusion groups in the 2000s and 2010s. Aspects of these issues crop up not only in the music scenes themselves but also in music schools and other institutions that promote folk music as a paragon of multiculturalism and collaboration. As noted in the previous chapter, the Finnish folk music scene has a distinctly global and cosmopolitan outlook, encouraging collaboration and research involving traditional musical styles and musicians from 113

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elsewhere in the world, as explored by Juniper Hill and Tina Ramnarine.27 However, Hill observes that many of these collaborations and appropriations articulate a variety of relationships with distinct dynamics and hierarchies, for example, noting that Finnish folk musicians tended to cultivate relatively egalitarian relationships with Swedish and Norwegian musicians while tending to ignore Russians and even denying Russian influence in traditional Finnish music. The importance of lending institutional weight and authority of institutions like The Sibelius Academy to this project should not be overlooked, as field research and archival work are relatively common activities among Finnish folk musicians. The Finnish band Hedningarna, for example, recorded numerous arrangements of pieces they sourced from early twentieth-century field recordings from the Baltic regions and traveled to Karelia to meet elderly runo singers as part of the compositional process for their 1999 album Karelia Visa.28 Yet Hill observes that the transnational relationships formed by these Finnish musicians continue to articulate a variety of hierarchical stances, even as they envision themselves within a global community. They seem to incorporate older Baltic musical traditions essentially as part of a heritage-seeking project rather than treating their neighbors as musical peers and collaborators.29 The fact that Karelia Visa includes a stylized passport stamp as a part of its cover art emphasizes the notion of the album as a travelogue of an expedition. Appropriations of concepts and musical instruments from more distant musical traditions tend to be framed as cosmopolitanisms, stemming from the aforementioned feeling of affinity with a global community. Crucially, Hill’s interviewees imagine that folk musicians worldwide share their values and approaches to music-making, including a sense that their musical activities are somewhat countercultural.30 The Finnish/Swedish band Gjallarhorn is a prime example, as they incorporate a variety of Afro-Cuban and African instruments, along with a didgeridoo, in their arrangements of traditional Nordic and Finnish melodies and texts. The back cover of Gjallarhorn’s 2000 album Sjofn describes Nordic traditional music as the foundation for a “truly global Nordic journey” created by diverse instrumentation.31 It’s notable that this text only seems to exist on the US release by the label 114

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Northside; it’s a clear pitch to the North American world music audience. Gjallarhorn also intentionally marketed themselves as “world music from Finland” to avoid confusion with differing definitions of “folk music” in the North American market. The liner notes then go on to describe how the individual musicians evoke the traditional music of the North with instruments from the Global South. The didgeridoo and “slideridoo” (a didgeridoo with the ability to change key) take up the “constant shamanic pulse of the old tunes,” traditionally provided by the Jew’s harp and sympathetic strings, while Afro-Cuban, Indian, and Middle Eastern percussion revive the shaman drum of the “old days.” Sjofn’s opening song “Suvetar” is a case in point, as it is an arrangement of a traditional Karelian runo song welcoming the fertility goddess Suvetar, accompanied prominently by a kalimba, a lamellophone with roots in Southeast Africa that has long been popular in Europe and North America. Indeed, Gjallarhorn’s use of African and Indigenous Australian instruments mirrors the use of such instruments in the world music market, where they are both familiarly exotic and also disassociated from their cultural contexts. As instruments that provide rhythmic and timbral interest rather than melody and/or text, they are also potentially less noticeable than melody and/or text, which Gjallarhorn and other musicians source from their “own” traditions. This sort of blurring conjures an undifferentiated “global” accompaniment backing up specifically Nordic melodic and lyrical material. An important point also is that these sorts of borrowings are not legally actionable, unlike the cases involving sampled melodies and texts in hit songs.32 Although concerns over cultural appropriation remain, it seems clear that a number of participants within these musical scenes also see such things as emblematic of their connections with other cultures and a challenge to nationalistic ideas of musical “ownership.” One could certainly connect Hill’s Finnish musicians’ feeling of global musical kinship with Heilung’s invocation of global animist brotherhood. Every Heilung concert opens with a creed that the audience recites along with performers, stating that all humanity are brothers along with every animal, plant, stone, and wind. This fits within their overall framing of neopagan practice as essentially Indigenous. Yet one could also consider that there 115

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might be a self-serving ulterior motive at work that turns the rest of the world’s musical cultures into a sort of artistic smörgåsbord. As the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld eloquently put it, the voices of homage, connectedness, and creativity are “harmonized” with countermelodies of power, control, and commodification.33 The widespread popularity of Celtic music in the 1990s is a particularly salient example, ranging from Enya’s 1988 hit album Watermark, to James Horner’s heavy use of tin whistles in the music for the film Titanic (which signals both region and economic class), to the enormously successful Riverdance franchise.34 Similar epic musical stage shows by the ensembles Celtic Thunder and Celtic Woman toured North America extensively in the 2000s, with the first Celtic Woman album gaining a platinum designation in the United States. Yet the popularity of Celtic music and Celtic-themed theatrical and cinematic productions was not without political context and motivation. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the formation of the European Union, there seemed to be an evident need for some sort of ethnically coherent European identity that could serve as a bulwark against cultural Others (particularly from the Middle East) without invoking Nazism or Aryan-ness.35 Celticness seemed to fit the bill, as it was typically portrayed in popular culture as ancient and mystical while also being Indigenous, colonized, and oppressed, a combination that also allowed Europe to elide its own past with colonialism.36 The trope was equally successful when applied to recent political conflicts in films like In the Name of the Father or heavily mythologized epics like Braveheart.37 This Celtic vogue eventually lost its particular frisson, both from overexposure and because relocating symbolic “Europeanness” from the Aryan to the Celtic didn’t actually remove associations with white supremacism. After all, the Celtic cross remains one of the most popular and persistent international symbols for these movements. In the aftermath of this infatuation with Celtic music, scholars have noted that its role has been filled more recently with an Eastern European pastiche that draws freely from Balkan, Romani, and klezmer music. The journal Ethnomusicology Forum devoted an edition to this trend, dubbed the “New Old Europe Sound,” with editor David Kaminsky 116

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noting key resemblances spanning across multiple genres, from “Gypsy punk” groups like Gogol Bordello to Balkan brass bands.38 For example, Kaminsky notes that the music tends toward an unkempt “primal” effect that evokes peasantry and folk mysticism, referencing his “Nature” ideal described in the previous chapter, while the lasting tropes of itinerant Romani and Jewish communities buttress ideals of post-nationalist freedom and lack of boundaries. Musicians who are ethnic outsiders to the Jewish, Romani, and/or Balkan traditions can then use that lack of rootedness as a bulwark against accusations of appropriation, while the free mixture of musical idioms further deflects such claims. The innate eclecticism of Romani and klezmer music further bolsters a universalist ideal, but potentially at the expense of cultural specificity. Kaminsky further argues that much of the discourse around klezmer and Romani music privileges geographical location, echoing national romantic assumptions that culture is a product of the relationship between a people and their land, which in turn implicitly denies cultural ownership to those without a country of their own.39 He considers that klezmer especially has been a valuable tool that allows outside musicians to elide key dilemmas within world music fusion: persistent notions that folk traditions exist almost as sovereign territories that can only contaminated or cheapened by style mixtures, and that those traditions can never truly belong to musicians from other cultures or places. Questions of license and authenticity abound. Kaminsky argues that klezmer, on the other hand, seems open and claimable to non-Jewish European musicians because it is already hybrid and doesn’t belong to a particular homeland, while its associations with itinerant subaltern groups lend impressive authenticity credentials.40 In another example, Kaminsky cites the Swedish “gypsy punk” band Räfven, an overtly egalitarian, anti-racist, and pro-immigrant ensemble comprised of white Swedes that draws heavily on klezmer and Romani music. Their music and costuming evoke a wild, utopian, and “Gypsified” fantasy world, a multicultural playground that appeals to their audiences’ self-perceptions as progressive, cosmopolitan, and anti-nationalist. Here, the exoticized self potentially takes on a measure of political advocacy, although with the caveat that white Europeans are arguably not in a position to truly challenge systemic hierarchies. As seen, “world music” 117

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fusions have just as much potential to reinscribe those same hierarchical differences. Some critical scholars argue further that the positive focus on hybridity and diversity as an end unto itself effectively smooths over histories of colonialist violence and oppression, noting that the utopian world without barriers to cultural borrowings ultimately serves existing capitalist structures and hierarchies.41

Exotic Voices: Throat-Singing and Other Vocal Mysteries

One of the most distinctive musical practices within the milieu of Nordic ritual folk music is the frequent use of overtone singing or throat-singing, a vocal technique that selectively emphasizes harmonic overtones in order to create a variety of different timbres. In some cases, the technique is used to create a polyphonic texture in which the fundamental pitches and overtones seem to operate as independent melodies. As a musical practice, throat-singing has been cultivated in disparate parts of the world, with particularly noted traditions in Tuva, Tibet, and the Arctic. Even if the general technique is common, the cultural meanings and practices behind them are distinct. Groups within the Nordic ritual folk music scene tend to adopt a lower growling tone reminiscent of the Tibetan chanting tradition or Tuvan kargyraa, in which the singer uses the vestibular folds of the larynx to generate an undertone an octave below the fundamental. Singers can manipulate the specific harmonics by adjusting the shape of their mouth to highlight different resonances, giving the impression that they are creating multiple pitches simultaneously. Throat-singing techniques are both widespread across the globe and compellingly exotic-sounding, simultaneously offering the frisson of Otherness and a cosmopolitan linkage between disparate cultures. Within their native cultures, throat-singing techniques are also often associated with shamanic applications such as healing or influencing animals and other natural forces, even though the specific practices themselves can be quite divergent. The katajjaq tradition found in the Arctic circumpolar regions, and particularly among the Inuit peoples, consists largely of a rhythmic pattern of inhaled and exhaled sounds, typically alternating between a high and a low pitch and often employing 118

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“ha,” “he,” and “ham” syllables. In practice, it is typically performed as an endurance game between two women standing closely face-to-face so that their vocal patterns seem to interlock. The competitive aspect lies in the fact that either woman might change the pattern, obliging the other to follow, and the game is lost when one singer is either out of breath or falls out of sync with her partner. However, the musicologist and semiotician Jean-Jacques Nattiez notes that the practice is more multifunctional than simply offering entertainment and competition. The katajjaq may involve archaic words, names or people and animals, melodies of other songs, imitations of bird and animal calls, and imitations of natural sounds.42 Nattiez further hypothesizes that in pre-Christian times the katajjaq may have acted as a kind of “survival music” performed by women during hunting seasons as way to exert influence over the sea animals and natural elements, hastening the safe return of their men. Similarly, Tuvan and Mongolian xöömii throat-singing shows links with magical practices and animistic beliefs among semi-nomadic herders in the region, although it also has a history of secularized use for yak-calling and celebrations. Practitioners recognize a variety of different xöömii singing styles, but they all typically involve generating a fundamental drone while adjusting the resonance of the mouth cavity to produce overtone melodies. In Carole Pegg’s 1992 account, her Mongolian interlocutors stressed the physical exertion of sustained performance, noting that injuries to the larynx and broken blood vessels can result.43 The connection with animistic beliefs is largely inferred through legends of xöömii’s relationship with the sounds of mountains, rivers, and the spirits and gods therein. However, Pegg also notes that the associations between throat-singing and magic are potentially stronger among non-Mongolians, and especially new age practitioners. Even writing in the early 1990s, she notes that it has been adopted by gurus who assume it has beneficial effects as a means of ancient sonic meditation that could, in one instance, “reharmonize a patient’s energy field.”44 The unusual sound, its hazy origins in ancient legend, and its close relationship with landscapes and animal mimicry also render it an ideal vehicle for collapsing the exoticisms of time and geography into one another. Even academic studies of the practice can be 119

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prone to fetishizing, as seen in Theodore Levin’s description of Tuva as “like a musical Olduvai Gorge—a living record of a protomusical world, where natural and human-made sounds blend.”45 These varied throat-singing techniques have made some inroads into more visible arenas of popular music, although for many they remain fairly esoteric. Katajjaq’s limited filtrations into wider popular culture have largely been due to the success of the Canadian Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq, particularly following her collaborations with the Icelandic singer Björk in 2004 and her award-winning 2014 album Animism.46 Central Asian throat-singing has, until recently, largely remained within the milieu of world music, with Tuvan bands like Huun-Huur-Tu finding success both as a traditional folk ensemble and in collaboration with Western musicians. As with other “world music,” much of this success likely hinged on their ability to convey to Western audiences a sense of authenticity, purity, and exotic timelessness. More recently, Central Asian extreme metal bands like Tengger Cavalry, Darkestrah, and The Hu have begun employing throat-singing and traditional folk instruments, meeting with significant interest and success on the international metal circuit. For these bands, their inclusion of throat-singing is both an act of identity formation with roots in nationalism and, in the case of Darkestrah, an imagined pagan past not unlike that explored by Viking metal and Nordic ritual folk musicians.47 However, metal scholar Karl Spracklen also notes that these bands are also potentially playing to an Orientalist stereotype that imagines throat-singing as an expression of an ancient, fixed, and continuing folk culture unaffected by globalization and modernity.48 Similar ideals seem to be at work in the reception of these techniques among fans of ensembles like Heilung; it represents a kind of ancient alterity, somehow reaching back to Levin’s musical Olduvai Gorge. By most accounts, Tuvan-style throat-singing entered the “Viking” musical scene in the late 1990s, due largely to performances of the group Ehwaz, a short-lived ensemble that included future members of Heilung, Wardruna, and Folket Bortafor Nordavinden. Former member Kjell Braaten has described in recent interviews how the band introduced throat-singing and percussion instruments to the musical performances 120

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at Viking reenactment gatherings in Scandinavia.49 From his accounts, their music was not always well-received at first by audiences and fellow performers who were more accustomed to traditional folk music and community sing-a-longs. Braaten traces his introduction to the technique to the album Fly, Fly My Sadness, a 1997 collaboration between the Tuvan ensemble Huun-Huur-Tu and The Bulgarian Voices Angelite, a women’s choir.50 The Bulgarian women’s choir tradition will be considered on its own shortly, but even a cursory listen to Fly, Fly My Sadness reveals many seeds of later “Viking” musical styles. Given the predilections for historical accuracy among Ásatrú practitioners especially, in as much as it can be determined regarding intangible things like music, there are attempts to justify throat-singing as a historically authentic part of Viking music. In this endeavor, the writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan provide much of the extant evidence in his brief account from travels to Volga Bulgaria in 922. He describes the singing of the Norse as being akin to “barking dogs,” and notes that he did not find it particularly pleasant.51 This was the full extent of his remarks, and it is of course impossible to ascertain whether or not he was referring to throat-singing or another kind of vocal technique. One could also imagine that he might have witnessed some sort of complex polyphonic choral singing and that the “barking dogs” reference is meant to invoke seemingly nonsensical rhythmic chaos rather than vocal tone. It’s hard to know what was really happening beyond the fact that Ibn Fadn didn’t particularly like it. Scholarly-minded musicians and fans have also considered the possibility of central Asian throat-singing techniques arriving in Northern Europe with the expansions of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (well after the Viking Age). Additionally, ancient Nordic peoples would likely have been familiar with the throat-singing practices of various Indigenous groups in the Arctic. In any case, it cannot be known with any certainty whether or not ancient Nordic peoples employed throat-singing, but it is obviously well within the realm of possibility. This account also highlights that the Nordic region was much more connected to the wider Eurasian continent than is often presumed, both before and during the Viking Age. If historical accuracy is the goal, it also raises the possibility that the modern 121

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cosmopolitan and multicultural ideal of much Nordic ritual folk music might be much nearer to actual ancient practice than nineteenth-century notions of national musical styles. As with other aspects of Nordic ritual folk music, the lack of tangible evidence creates an opening for living musicians to create a new efficacious practice. Regardless of its historic profile, the throat-singing practices of the wider world have become an indelible part of the Nordic ritual folk musical milieu, playing particularly large roles in the music of Heilung and the Siberian duo Nytt Land. Heilung vocalist Kai Uwe Faust makes use of a wide variety of throat-singing timbres and other extended vocal techniques, but of particular interest here is the first half of the song “Hamrer Hippyer,” the final song on Futha (2019) and the finale for their performances.52 The song begins with a rhythmic throat-singing pattern on the syllables “hamma” reminiscent of Inuit katajjaq, and Faust’s vocals are then electronically looped and layered in order to create a continuous katajjaq groove. A similar musical strategy is at work in “Traust,” also from Futha, in which a constant throat-singing loop underpins the entire piece, creating a warbling and slightly unsettling sonic background. The Siberian group Nytt Land, hailing from the town of Kalachinsk near the Russian border with Kazakhstan, make extensive use of both the midrange khoomei and the deeper kargyraa styles of Tuvan/Mongolian throat-singing throughout many of their songs. Nytt Land breaks with the throat-singing tradition, though, in that both male and female vocalists perform the technique. Although not strictly within the orbit of neopagan music, the Russian group Phurpa has taken a different tack, relying not on the Tuvan/Mongol tradition but on Tibetan traditions of Bon, an ancient shamanic practice with links to Tibetan Buddhism. Rather than the trance-inducing but easily understandable music of Heilung or Wardruna, Phurpa’s performances are steeped in traditional Tibetan Buddhist tantric chant, which has a distinctly deep timbre. Other instruments include large drums, shawms, bells, and natural trumpets, but the performers make little concession for listeners who might be unfamiliar with that musical tradition. They approach their performances as tantric rituals that require extreme physical endurance and that manifest magical power. Still, 122

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Phurpa has performed at a few metal festivals in Europe, although the members seem somewhat bemused by the attention.53 While the throat-singing techniques are immediately striking for listeners, other vocal techniques utilized by the singers in these bands also have their roots in traditional practices. As noted in the book’s first chapter, a number of prominent female singers in neopagan and gothic bands draw inspiration from the 1975 Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares album featuring the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, which was itself a compilation of recordings dating from as far back as the 1950s.54 It was reissued by 4AD and Nonesuch Records in 1986, and the second volume in 1989 won a Grammy award. Their choral style features a penetrating and throaty vocal sound with bracingly dissonant harmonies and complex meters and rhythms. Although Le Mystère was successful enough on its own, the singer Lisa Gerrard adopted the vocal techniques for her work with the influential gothic band Dead Can Dance, and its influence can be heard in the vocals of the Finnish groups Hedningarna and Värttinä. However, Mark Slobin underlines that the “tradition” of this choir was part of a long-running national heritage project on the part of the Bulgarian state. As with most traditional musical practices, it is clearly the result of a fair bit of deliberate manufacturing, although the Euro-American music industry was keen to perceive it as authentic and organic.55 Beyond the Bulgarian influence, singers in Scandinavian folk groups have also incorporated kulning, a singing practice that originated as shepherding calls for livestock. Kulning and related alpine herding calls are high-pitched with a focused and piercing tone designed to carry long distances, and they often involve a variety of ululations, yodels, and idiomatic microtonal inflections. In particular, kulning has been employed by the singers Jenny Wilhelms of Gjallarhorn, Lindy-Fay Hella of Wardruna, and Amalie Bruun of Myrkur. Bruun also credits the Danish singer Helle Thun with mentoring her in the liner notes to the Myrkur album Folkesange (2020).56 Thun’s company Nordic Voice offers a variety of different workshops on kulning and other traditions, with a measure of borealism in the marketing copy which promises to teach how to use one’s voice “as the Vikings did, to find [one’s] own primal strength and connect to Nordic roots.”57 As with throat-singing, these 123

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vocal techniques serve to distinguish these bands and their music from the normative practices of pop, rock, and classical singing. Perhaps one key aspect of these vocal techniques’ appeal and their sense of “ancientness” is the relative lack of the emotive inflections used by singers in both classical music and popular music genres. Indeed, kulning and other herding and hunting calls are primarily musical tools intended for work rather than performance, regardless of their aesthetic appeal. In an outline of a complex wedding ritual recorded in the Arctic Russian village Varzuga in the 1960s, Mark Slobin describes a similarly emotionless and detached affect in the ritual song performances. As he puts it, the singers put a sort of mask on their voices akin to the physical masks that often accompany ritual activity, which minimizes the singers’ individuality and enables the song to be expressive of the whole village and even of the tradition itself.58 Evocations of medieval sacred music accomplish a similar sort of emotional distancing, as in the wordless opening to Myrkur’s song “Gudernes Vilje” on Folkesange. The melodies are highly reminiscent of the eleventh-century composer Hildegard of Bingen, particularly the signature rising fifth interval that begins each phrase. The complex physical techniques required for Tuvan throat-singing also work against the subtle timbral modifications and variations in vibrato that typically signal emotional intensifications and which also often work to individualize the performance. Instead, the singer has to focus on maintaining the biphonic texture between the fundamental pitch and the overtone, while also enunciating the text, if there is one. Performing melodies requires the singer to accentuate different pitches in the overtone series above the fundamental drone through precise manipulations of vocal resonance. It is possible to create more complex melodies by strategically shifting the fundamental pitch while also continually maintaining the overtones, but few singers can accomplish this feat. While the sound of throat-singing is undeniably distinct, these demands mean that it is also often rather monotonous and not particularly expressive. Although it is obviously possible to deliver lyrics while throat-singing, the result is usually a recitation on a single sustained biphonic “chord.” The heightened inscrutability of the

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technique creates much of its otherworldly aura, especially when foreign and archaic languages are employed. Finally, the archaic language itself does much to conjure feelings of otherworlds and othertimes by placing the words and their meanings just slightly beyond the threshold of understanding. The situation bears some comparison with the Icelandic lyrics and glossolalia used by Sigur Ros’s singer Jónsi, in that the emotive power of the vocal sound itself touches the listener more deeply without the concrete meanings of understandable text.59 The combined effects of “exotic” vocal technique and inscrutable language can then conjure up a primordial past for both ritual participants and casual listeners.

Ancient Texts: The Case of Palästinalied in Neopagan Folk and Goth Music

As seen, the world music industry and the neopagan music scene have a long history of fetishizing “foreign” musical styles and also receiving them as authentic, unfiltered remnants of ages past. This past is often achingly nostalgic and exciting while also being simultaneously brutal and repellent. In the end, musicians within these milieux borrow the aspects of these musical styles that seem most compelling and efficacious, and then put them to new uses. However, the other side of this coin concerns the revival and reinterpretation of music that is itself authentically ancient, whether it exists only as text or with some accompanying notation. As a part of Nordic ritual folk musicians’ interest in the past, many affiliated groups base their lyrics on extant texts in a variety of archaic languages. The relatively small number of sources results in some songs and lyrics being repeatedly referenced; the satirical goliard songs of Carmina Burana, the poetry of the Icelandic Eddas, and the High German Merseburg Charms are particularly popular. But as with the adoption of selected aspects of non-Western and Indigenous musical traditions, these older lyrics are subject to new interpretation, decontextualization, and “remix.” As a case study, we turn briefly to Walther von der Vogelweide’s eleventh-century Crusade song Palästinalied, which has long been a mainstay of early music, medieval market music, and, somewhat paradoxically, neopagan music. 125

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Walther von der Vogelweide was one of the principal figures among the Minnesänger of medieval Germany, poets and songwriters working in the courtly love tradition of the French troubadours and trouvères. Palästinalied was most likely composed between 1224 and 1228 during a period when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was in the process of forming an army to lead the long-delayed Sixth Crusade. Most Crusade songs were essentially recruiting tools intended to convince knights to join with promises of both earthly wealth and heavenly rewards, as in Palästinalied’s opening stanzas extolling the beauty of the Holy Land. By the later Crusades, however, some of the troubadours and Minnesänger had adopted different tactics. The failures of earlier Crusades were used to shame and scare knights into joining by threatening the wrath of Judgment or by implying that their cowardice would cause God to favor the Muslims.60 Additionally, after several of the Crusades targeted fellow Christians, some Crusade songs became openly critical and anti-clerical.61 Palästinalied is also unusual among Crusade songs because it acknowledges the multiple claims upon the Holy Land, rather than simply urging for the banishment and extermination of the Muslims. Of course, it ultimately affirms that the Christian claim is the correct and just one. In later centuries, medieval poetry and music were used as symbolic pillars of German artistic identity and nationhood, especially during campaigns for German unification in the nineteenth century. Folklorists ‘re-collected’ many of these songs that had since entered the oral tradition, and several of Wagner’s operas drew from the Minnesänger and Meistersänger legends. Walther von der Vogelweide in fact makes an appearance as a character in Tannhauser. During the Third Reich, the satirical goliard poems of the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana manuscript were promoted as another touchstone of German artistic genius and used as the text for the famous 1937 cantata by Carl Orff. As Richard Taruskin notes, this particular cantata and its glorification of youth and neo-paganism became a tool in the Nazi regime’s propaganda battle with German churches.62 By the time these medieval songs entered the world of popular music, they had already been through several cycles of anachronistic artistic appropriation. 126

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Palästinalied has been recorded in many different contemporary versions including settings using period-appropriate instruments to versions that place the melody in diverse contexts ranging from heavy metal to gothic ‘darkwave’ electronica and club-oriented techno. Given folk metal and neofolk scenes’ frequent association of ancient European identity with animist spiritualities rather than Christian traditions, Palästinalied seems a somewhat contradictory choice. As such, modern interpretations tend to suppress the original context of Palästinalied and other medieval tunes in favor of a distanced aesthetic enjoyment as part of a medievalist pastiche. Yet, even if the overtly Christian themes of Palästinalied are often muted, the song’s militarism is echoed in the reactionary European nationalism that runs through many folk metal and neo-folk scenes. To a certain extent, though, the lasting popularity of Palästinalied might simply come down to issues of accessibility. As Rebecca Ahrendt notes, the piece has often been given a position of prestige in the Norton Anthology of Western Music textbook since the 1960s.63 Although there is a danger of overestimating the influence of classroom materials, the piece would undoubtedly be familiar to many musicians who studied historical performance in music conservatories. Palästinalied’s inclusion in these anthologies also makes the song relatively low-hanging fruit for musicians with an eye to the distant past. Palästinalied’s popularity can also be traced to several landmark early music recordings from the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those by Studio der Frühen Musik in 1966 and David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London in 1971. In 1974, a version by the German progressive rock group Ougenweide signaled the song’s possibilities within a rock-based ‘medieval fusion’ idiom by including modern guitars and electric basses. Many modern adaptations of Palästinalied also adopt the ethos of gothic music. Goth music and Gothic literature generally cultivate nostalgic anachronism, frequently relying on historical reality but loosening or removing the restrictions of history to allow for imaginative scenarios.64 The notably successful 1995 version of Palästinalied by Qntal provides an example of this approach. Their recording begins with ethereal vocals performed by Sigrid Hausen and ambient electronic accompaniment but eventually introduces a slightly sped-up drum loop 127

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sampled from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” (1971). Qntal’s “Palästinalied” then neatly encapsulates the anachronistic aspect of goth music with its mix of medieval melody and text, 1970s rock drums (from a recording that is itself a reworking of the original 1929 Delta blues song by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie), and 1990s electronic music sounds.65 Isabella van Elferen also notes that the metric conflict between the triple-metered medieval song and the 4/4 meter of modern dance music forces the rhythms of the past and the present into uneasy coexistence.66 Later electronic and goth versions of the song often follow Qntal’s lead, pairing female singers with electronic music that is alternately meditative and aggressively rhythmic. A search through the offerings of streaming music services yielded twenty-one different recorded vocal versions of the song, ranging from versions exclusively using period instruments to heavy metal and electronic arrangements. Versions by ‘Mittelalter-metal’ groups In Extremo (1998) and Wolfmare (2010) fuse heavy metal drum kits and overdriven electric guitars with “medieval” bagpipes, shawms, wooden flutes, hammered dulcimers, Celtic harps, and frame drums. The versions by Qntal (1995) and other goth groups often feature synthesizers and drum machines. Some groups perform the song as an uptempo dance number, but others play the melody incredibly slowly, as heard in the version by the vocal group Mediæval Bæbes (2000). The recordings consulted were: Studio der Frühen Musik, Minnesang und Spruchdictung (Das Alte Werk, 1966) Early Music Consort of London, Songs of Love and War: Music of the Crusades (Argo, 1971) Ougenweide, All die Weill Ich Mag (Polydor, 1974) Corvus Corax, Congregatio (Pica Records, 1990) Corvus Corax, Inter Deum Et Diabolum Semper Musica Est (Pica Records, 1993) Qntal, Qntal II (Gymnastic Records, 1995)

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Estampie, Crusaders in nomine domini (Christophorus, 1996) Kalenda Maya, Pilegrimsreiser (Kirkelig Kulturverksted, 1997) In Extremo, Weckt die Toten! (Vielklang Musikproduktion, 1998) Van Langen, Des Teufels Löckvogel (1999) Mediæval Bæbes, Undrentide (Nettwerk America, 2000) Various Artists, Palästinalied-Projekt (Curzweyhl, 2002) The Soil Bleeds Black, Mirror of the Middle Ages (The Fossil Dungeon, 2003) Unto Ashes, I Cover You With Blood (Projekt, 2003) Omnia, PaganFolk (2006) Annwn, Orbis Alia (Curzweyhl, 2007) Tuivelsminne, Im Osten nichts Neues (Zerberus Music, 2007) Toronto Consort, The Norton Anthology of Western Music (Oxford, 2009) Wolfmare, Hand of Glory (CCP Records, 2010) Arcomnia, Star of the Sea (Arcomnia, 2011) Mandylion, D. S. Fortis Adonay (Dark Daze Music, 2011) The complete Palästinalied has 13 stanzas, but most recordings only include 3–4 stanzas, most commonly the stanzas numbered 1, 2, and 4 in Christoph Corneau’s edition followed by one or two others.67 Other sources place Corneau’s third verse next to last, so in that ordering, many groups simply record the ‘first three’ stanzas. Perhaps the only studio recording to feature all 13 verses is the 2002 compilation Palästinalied-Projekt, a collaborative album featuring 20 different ensembles of various styles, each performing a single verse or an instrumental version of the melody. The penultimate verse in this compiled recording also includes the first verse of ‘Alte Clamat Epicurus,’ a parody of Palästinalied 129

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from the Carmina Burana manuscript performed here by Corvus Corax and Tanzwut. The choice of verses in these recordings is noteworthy because several of the verses in Palästinalied are potentially incendiary. In particular, the fourth verse taunts the heathens (Muslims) with the fact that they are denied salvation, while the twelfth verse acknowledges the struggles between Christians, Jews, and Muslims while asserting that God will choose for the forces of Christianity: Christians, Jews, and heathens All claim that this [land] is their inheritance. May God decide justly for us All the world is fighting here; We are desirous of the right; It is for Him to defend us.68 Six of these 21 recordings of the song include this twelfth verse, while the others either include other verses or simply don’t venture beyond the first three stanzas. It is worth noting that verses 1, 2, 4, and 11 are also the verses included in the song’s entry in the Norton Anthology of Western Music. This anthology has been a mainstay of university music curricula for decades in the English-speaking world, which likely makes these stanzas the easiest to find even if the anthology might not be as widely used at European conservatories. Palästinalied’s popularity among these diverse bands is a testament to the enduring appeal of its melody, its musical flexibility, and its evocation of misty medievalism. Yet for many of these musicians, their fascination with medieval mysticism and spirituality is tied to connections with pre-Christian pagan traditions (even if the musicians may or may not be practitioners). Keith Kahn-Harris notes that many folk metal bands consider Christianity as a colonizing influence, a sentiment that runs throughout much of the discourse around Nordic ritual folk and black metal bands.69 Palästinalied finds a place in this diverse range of settings because it is arcane enough to be one of the “roots” and its text provides ample fodder for ethnocentric and nationalistic sentiments. 130

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Even then, the musical repertoires of most pagan folk metal and neofolk bands would seem to be hostile to an explicitly Christian piece like Palästinalied. Many of the other popular pieces from the traditional repertoire, such as “Villeman og Magnhild” and “Herr Mannelig,” tend to be murder ballads or supernatural stories. For Palästinalied to be accepted into this kind of environment, its original context likely needs to be adapted, ignored, or possibly simply misunderstood. For example, the massive popularity and influence of Orff ’s Carmina Burana could generate an implicit assumption that other medieval vernacular texts share its antipathy toward piety and temperance. Indeed, several of the groups that have recorded Palästinalied have also set poems from Carmina Burana to new music. However, one main source of Palästinalied’s “dechristianization” may be the fact that over the twentieth century, listeners of ‘classical’ and ancient music have become accustomed to experiencing older works of religious music as purely aesthetic artifacts rather than as embedded parts of Christian worship. The ritual purpose of the initial compositions is easily excised, particularly after sound recordings allowed people to listen to these pieces at their leisure. The situation is further compounded by decades of musical scholarship and pedagogy focused on music’s structure as opposed to its function. Indeed, even music history texts that include the song have often praised its aesthetic beauty, so it’s not surprising that musicians and listeners might enjoy Palästinalied for its hauntingly archaic aura.70 Yet even if Palästinalied is considered just as a beautiful piece of medieval repertoire, the song’s original intention is sometimes referenced even by self-identified pagan musicians. The Russian pagan folk metal band Wolfmare (2009) highlights Palestine in their version by adding a new electric guitar melody based on the Phrygian dominant scale. This scale is commonly used in Middle Eastern music as well as in Spanish flamenco music and Jewish klezmer music. As such, it has long been used to signify cultural otherness in Western classical music, opera, and film music. In this case, the scale’s cultural associations with Arabic and Jewish music also conveniently map onto the adversaries of Christianity listed in Palästinalied, and Wolfmare preserves the verse that taunts them. 131

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Several versions of Palästinalied also include portions of the parody found in Carmina Burana, “Alte Clamat Epicurus,” which recasts Vogelweide’s melody as a paean to gluttony. Corvus Corax includes all five verses of “Alte Clamat Epicurus” in a version they recorded on their 1993 album Inter Deum Et Diabolum Semper Musica Est. Another version posted to YouTube in 2013 and attributed to Des Teufels Löckvogel takes an interesting approach to combining the two texts.71 Adding a rather confounding layer of mystery, this particular recording doesn’t correspond to any of those listed in Des Teufels Löckvogel’s discography, nor could I find it anywhere else. This version of Palästinalied begins with stanzas 1, 2, and 4 set to a relatively sedate musical background but then introduces heavy metal guitars and drums for “Alte Clamat Epicurus.” The song then climaxes as a male singer sings the inflammatory twelfth verse of Palästinalied while a female singer doubles the melody wordlessly in the background. The entrance of heavy metal for both the “Alte Clamat Epicurus” parody and the militaristic verse seems to play on heavy metal’s common associations with hedonism and aggression, even if the two last verses could seem to be at cross-purposes ideologically. A particularly intriguing version of Palästinalied is that recorded by the Dutch band Omnia as part of a song entitled “Teutates” from their 2006 album PaganFolk. Omnia seem to explicitly highlight Palästinalied’s incongruity within their specific oeuvre and the neofolk and Mittelalter-metal scene as a whole. The title “Teutates” refers to a Celtic god of protection, and the song begins with a group chant invoking Teutates as the god of “the tribe” and of “our blood.” The majority of “Teutates” is an uptempo instrumental, until about halfway through when the tempo slows and the band sings the first half of the first verse of Palästinalied, which extols the holiness and purity of the land but does not yet contain any reference to Christianity. The song then reprises the original tempo and melody until the track ends with laughter, perhaps suggesting that Palästinalied’s inclusion was a knowing wink at the song’s ironic popularity among neofolk groups. Omnia’s evocation of tribal and blood identity illuminates an underlying current of pagan nationalism that may inform the use of Palästinalied. European neopaganism often cultivates localized ethnic, 132

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cultural, and religious identity, and this aspect is easily conflated with an ethnocentric view of the modern nation-state. As noted above, medieval German poetry has a long history as a symbol of German national pride, and it seems significant that many of the groups who have recorded Palästinalied over the years have been German. Palästinalied’s popularity in the decades following the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall could be considered an echo of the use of medieval German song as a symbol of national unity in the nineteenth century. However, some fans go beyond national romanticism and use these recordings as vehicles for promoting racism and xenophobia. As one example, a 2010 YouTube video made by ‘Wofka1986’ set Saltatio Mortis’s 2003 recording “Palästinalied (Via Infernale)” to a series of battle scenes from Crusade-themed films and television series.72 While this is perhaps not that controversial on its own, the comment section of the video includes repeated calls to purge Islam from Europe and to wage holy war against ISIS in the Middle East. The uploader of the video also appears to be an Eastern European or Russian Christian nationalist with an extreme dislike of Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. Ironically, Saltatio Mortis’s ‘Palästinalied (Via Infernale)’ is actually a recording of “Alte Clamat Epicurus,” a fact which seems to have escaped most viewers. Other YouTube videos of Palästinalied regularly invite the comment ‘Deus Vult,’ a battle cry from the First Crusade, and commenters often invoke the 2015 terrorist attacks in both Paris and Brussels, as well as refugee crises in their calls to defend Europe and Christianity. Even though many participants in the neofolk and folk metal scenes might disavow such specifically Christian sentiments, similar xenophobic antipathy toward Muslims and immigrants can find purchase in these scenes’ romanticization of “blood and soil” nationalism. The facets of the neofolk scene that have their roots in industrial music also often have strong ideological ties to neo-fascist groups and promote an elitist chauvinistic ethnocentrism that rejects liberal democracy and multiculturalism.73 The celebration of local identity becomes a means to resist both the homogenizing influence of the European Union and to reassert national identities in the aftermath of the Soviet Bloc.74 Similarly, many of these groups are fascinated with the occult side of Nazism, particularly 133

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Himmler’s adoption of pagan ritual.75 Ben Teitelbaum’s research on radical white nationalist music also suggests that the ethereal female vocals of Qntal and similar ensembles can invoke an ideal of “pure” European femininity that should be defended from foreign influence.76 None of the pagan-identified groups cited here seem to claim membership in neo-fascist circles, but this facet of the scene almost certainly informs some of their listenership. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that most of the musicians who have recorded this song seek to insulate themselves from the political undercurrents and potentialities of the medieval repertoire. Qntal, whose first two records use medieval melodies and texts to comment on current issues, now focus purely on the aesthetic appeal of the repertoire77 Ahrendt makes the further point that many of these medievalist musicians use their educational credentials and training as classical musicians as a way to shield themselves from such concerns, relying on the same ethos of “timeless” music and distanced appreciation that has long sustained Western classical music. As demonstrated above, however, listeners and fans of this music may use it to underpin a much more confrontational political stance regardless of the recording artists’ intentions. Although Palästinalied is a particularly charged example, this mode of distanced aesthetic appreciation also informs other settings of old texts and melodies and allows them to act as a force of enchantment and fantasy. As with the earlier exploration of vocal technique and style, this effect relies on the fact that the words in these songs are likely not decipherable by listeners without help from liner notes or translations. This sense of unknowability makes the experience of ancient music not only exotic but also enticingly sublime and efficacious, evoking religious experiences of wonder, mystery, and longing for the sacred.78

Using the Past Against the Present: The Influence of Sámi Musicians

Up to this point in the chapter, the focus has been on the ways that Nordic ritual folk musicians search far across the globe and deep into the past for musical and lyrical inspirations. Nordic folk music is central to the sound, but musical traditions as varied as Tuvan throat-singing, 134

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Balkan choral music, Celtic music, Indigenous Australian music, and medieval Crusade songs also all have their turn, demonstrating both a sense of modern cosmopolitanism and an omnivorous acquisitiveness. Their effectiveness often resides in their ability to seem somehow primeval and outside of time. However, the Nordic heathen music scene has also been profoundly influenced by the revival of Indigenous Sámi music and culture post-WWII, both in terms of its interest in Indigenous and environmental issues and in its deliberately multicultural sonic profile. Sámi musicians have also been highly visible and influential within the broader world music scene. The Sámi are an Indigenous people whose homelands encompass the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and part of Russia. While the ancient Scandinavian population of the Nordic region initially arrived primarily from continental Europe and the British Isles, the Sámi came to the region from the west, originating in modern-day Russia and Mongolia. The interactions between the Sámi and the Scandinavians who populated the southern regions of the Nordic countries have often been complicated and contentious. Over the twentieth century especially, the Sámi faced generations of official government persecutions including forced relocations and settlement, the suppression of Sámi languages and cultural practices through Christian missionary work and boarding schools, and environmentally destructive mining, drilling, and logging. The history mirrors the treatment of Indigenous cultures in North America in many respects, although there are variations between the countries. In Norway, for example, the fight for Sámi recognition and legal rights was sparked by protests in 1979 over the construction of a hydroelectric dam across the Alta River in Finnmark, which would have inundated a village and disrupted salmon fishing and reindeer herding. The dam was ultimately constructed in 1987 but the protests brought more visibility to Indigenous rights issues, culminating in the 2005 Finnmark Act establishing a joint administration for the county that includes the Sámi parliament (founded in 1989) and gave the residents legal right to land that had been state property. However, Norway’s official recognition of Sámi land rights is also the exception in the region.

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The Sámi musical revival scene has been a crucial element of these efforts, and especially the Sámi joik, a distinctive tradition of unaccompanied vocal performance. Joik has been a powerful means to define and articulate a Sámi identity because of its connection to older shamanic practices, its history of suppression at the hands of religious and government authorities, and the way in which it blurs and evades Western conceptions of music, poetry, and ownership. The latter decades of the twentieth century also found numerous Sámi musicians adapting joik practices by including instrumental accompaniment in a variety of popular music styles, alongside more traditionalist practices. It has also been a critical element of Sámi land-rights activism along with efforts to recover and sustain Sámi languages and dialects and revive Indigenous nature-based cosmologies. As a result, joik is at the center of a definable and transnational Sámi musical and political identity that resists assimilation into the discrete Nordic nations. The Sámi models for musical practice informed by spirituality and environmentalism also proved exceptionally influential and inspirational for Nordic ritual folk musicians who may not themselves be Sámi. As a musical practice, joik is somewhat hard to define or categorize; as noted, this slipperiness imbues it with much of its symbolic power in opposition to traditionally Western sources of authority. (Ethno)musicology and music theory are no exception, as the disciplines have typically intended to categorize and exert ontological control over musical works and practices. Indigenous practices rarely conform to these modes for organizing knowledge. Thomas Hilder’s 2015 book Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe provides a thorough account of joiking’s transformations and adaptations, while acknowledging its ineffabilities.79 From a strictly musical standpoint, joiking is traditionally unaccompanied, with repetitive short melodic gestures sung in a free rhythm, with broad latitude for personal interpretation. The vocal timbre is rather tense, with a resonance somewhat similar to yodeling practices and the throat-singing techniques mentioned above. As with throat-singing, the timbre also contributes to a perception of joik as primordial and ancient, a sort of vestigial music within teleological discourses of musical and cultural evolution.80 Joik is also a form 136

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of storytelling and narrative, variously concerned with people, locations, animals, and spirits. Rather than being merely “about” these subjects or a means to remember them, joik is a means to communicate with those subjects and to “presence” them into being, and various vocal techniques, vocables, and ornaments may be used to describe the subject being joiked. If the joik subject is a person, that person is typically considered to be the owner of the joik rather than the singer who originated it.81 As in numerous other examples of Indigenous music, the originator may often consider that the song is something that they spontaneously found or that was given to them from the spirit realm, rather than claiming an active role as “composer.” This conception of musical ownership obviously runs counter to the systems of organization and attribution that typically organize Western musical commerce and archival activities. In addition to joik, Sámi drumming traditions are also deeply connected to spiritual practices and nature-based cosmologies. Traditional Sámi drum types are bowl drums and frame drums, typically in an oval shape with reindeer hide skins decorated with motifs that often include animals, landscapes, people, deities, and cosmological representations. Trance-inducing drumming is closely associated with the Sámi shaman or noaidi, acting alongside chanting and joiking as a means for the noaidi to communicate with the spirit world, heal illnesses, and perform acts of divination and prophecy.82 The revivals of these practices and the associated cosmologies work to forge reconnections with both the natural environment, and also to connect Sámi traditions with those of the wider Arctic and circumpolar peoples. These connections with pre-Christian spiritualities led to generations of forcible suppression of joiking and drumming by religious authorities, particularly in regions with strong connections to Laestadianism, a puritanical nineteenth-century Christian revival movement. Earlier centuries had also seen Sámi persecuted and executed as witches for practicing their traditions. As seen in the previous chapter, these puritan movements also cast rural fiddle-playing and folk dancing in a negative light, associating it with pagan practices. These tensions around joiking and drumming persisted in some communities. As a result, employing Sámi musical traditions has become a powerful rhetorical tool for articulating 137

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resistance to imperialist Christianity, environmental exploitation, and the alienations of capitalism.83 As a case in point, one of the foundational moments in the Sámi music revival were the protests over the aforementioned Alta dam in the late 1970s, which included hunger strikes, sit-ins, and joik singing at the Norwegian Parliament in 1979. The following year, the songwriting duo of Sverre Kjelsberg and Mattis Hætta performed “Sámiid ædnan” as the Norwegian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, a song that made direct reference to the protests and to the powers of joik. The song’s chorus is a wordless joik performed by Haetta, who had participated in the protests. Apart from Haetta’s joik, “Sámiid ædnan” employs a typical musical palette for folk rock ballads in the late 1970s, beginning with Kjellsberg alone accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar and adding the rock rhythm section and a swelling orchestral background with flourishes of swing music. The verse builds to a climax and the band cuts off as Hætta begins the joik alone (in the Eurovision broadcast, Hætta enters from offstage wearing a traditional Sámi gakti).84 The song builds to a second climax as Hætta is joined by the band, with prominent oom-pah style tuba and a militaristic snare drum, while Kjellsberg alternates between singing along and interpolating lines from the earlier verses. It’s worth noting that Hætta’s rendition contains none of the rhythmic complexity, elaborate ornamentation, or tense vocal timbre of traditional joik in order for it to function essentially as a wordless sing-along in a pop context. Traditional unaccompanied joik remains a vital part of Sámi music, but joik also has a long history of similar fusions with myriad popular music styles, beginning with Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s folk song renditions in the 1960s. Indeed, the Sámi Grand Prix, a Eurovision-style singing competition that takes place at the annual Kautekeino Easter Festival, includes both a traditional joik competition and a pop song competition in recognition of this practice. From a strictly practical standpoint, joik’s short melodic cells, tendency toward pentatonicism, and rhythmic delivery can be easily situated in most global popular music styles, leading to a proliferation of joik-tinged Sámi rock, pop, sámi, and hip-hop in recent decades. Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s career alone in the 1980s included several jazz, ambient, and world music fusion records and the symphonic 138

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work Sami Luondo, Gollerisku (1989), all in collaboration with the Finnish saxophonist Seppo Paakunainen.85 As with any fusion between traditional or archaic styles and contemporary pop music, the traditional style’s idiosyncrasies of tuning, temperament, and rhythm tend to fall by the wayside in order to blend tonally with equally tempered keyboards and guitars and to lock in with the rigid rhythmic structure of Western pop and rock music. This tendency was noted earlier in reference to Palästinalied, and joik proved to be no exception. As seen clearly in the example of “Sámiid ædnan” But, as the musicologist Olle Edström remarked in 2003, generations from the 1980s and later heard these rock and pop Sámi songs as their own music and formed a deep sense of ownership and self-identification with them, even as the joik-influenced vocals and vocables became subject to Western pop aesthetics and arguably less distinguishable from similar traditions in other Indigenous cultures.86 Sámi listeners would presumably easily pick up on the joik, but less-informed listeners could easily register joik-ish vocals as Native American, or just “ethnic” in the manner of Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby.” However, Edström singles out Frode Fjellheim’s electronic Transjoik project, which includes both joik performed in studio and samples from archival recordings as an example that has the potential to work at both levels. This globally omnivorous approach to Sámi music on the part of Fjellheim and other artists was also broadly in line with the musical multiculturalism showcased on many world music releases of the time, but here it works to maintain a specific and intelligible connection to the Sámi community and its concerns. It is also worth noting that Fjellheim became almost undoubtedly the most heard Sámi composer in the world when an adapted version of his song “Eatnemen Vuelie” was adapted for the hit 2013 Disney movie Frozen under the title “Vuelie.”87 This kind of cosmopolitanism serves an activist purpose, given joik’s close association with movements for Sámi self-determination. Mari Boine, one of the founding artists of Sámi popular music, has spoken about how she initially fashioned herself after the model of the Indigenous Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. Rather than recording and performing traditional Sámi music, Boine and other Sámi activist musicians engage with Indigenous issues through relatively 139

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normative popular styles that are intelligible to international audiences while retaining Sámi languages and joik vocal stylings. Boine also pursued a deliberately global sound from early in her career; her first album Jaskatvuođa Maŋŋá (1985) is a rock album with standard mid-1980s instrumentation and production, but with protest lyrics highly critical of the Norwegian government.88 Her international breakthrough album Gula Gula (1989) features Andean quena and charango played by Carlos Zamata Quipse, who became a regular collaborator, along with an array of West African percussion and Balkan string instruments alongside electric guitars.89 The album’s international release was through Real World Records, a Virgin records subsidiary founded in 1989 by Peter Gabriel to provide high-quality recordings and international distribution for world music artists, many of whom he had collaborated with on his 1989 soundtrack album for The Last Temptation of Christ (itself a watershed album for the world music industry).90 Sámi music festivals, particularly Riddu Riđđu, not only serve a transnational Sámi audience but also regularly invite Indigenous performers from across the circumpolar region along with global acts like the Aboriginal rock group Yothu Yindi and the Navajo punk band Blackfire, along with workshops and discussions on Indigenous music and issues around the world.91 This sort of cosmopolitan outlook on Indigenous musical solidarity has led some Sámi performers to incorporate katajjaq and throat-singing techniques into their own vocal technique as a way of moving beyond political and ethnic boundaries.92 While these festivals provide platforms for Sámi performers and audiences, they also showcase the living dynamism of their culture and engage non-Sámi audiences in deeper dialogues about Indigenous epistemologies, reciprocity, and decolonization, which has the potential to be deeply affecting for non-Indigenous participants.93 Ultimately, the work of these Sámi musicians and institutions is reflected across the wider Nordic heathen musical scene, influencing bands’ costumes, drumming and singing practices, animist spiritual outlooks, and their sense of Indigenous and environmental stewardship. Mari Boine especially has become a foremother to subsequent generations of Nordic folk musicians. Joik itself seems to have largely remained the province of Sámi performers, as opposed to the widespread adoption 140

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of throat-singing among Nordic ritual folk musicians, likely because of its history of specific political use by Sámi musicians and activists and possibly also because of the idiosyncrasies of technique and language.

Conclusion

In the end, the relativistic and selective approach that Nordic ritual folk music applies to musical traditions from around the globe is also broadly in line with common neopagan and neoshamanic practices. As noted by folklore scholar Thomas duBois, twentieth-century studies of folkloric motifs and comparative mythology have served to highlight connections across Western and non-Western cultures, particularly when combined with more metaphysical concepts like Jungian archetypes. One result is that many aspects of new age thought tend to locate specific myths, beliefs and practices as part of a single human religious continuum, which both excuses and encourages borrowing and “remixing” seemingly analogous features.94 As shown, similar processes are often at work in the musical fusions that have come to shape Nordic ritual folk and neopagan music, along with early music and “world music” more broadly. However, DuBois further observes that scholars of cultural and religious phenomena have also historically displayed a marked lack of tolerance for such diverse and evolving expressions, particularly when the practitioners in question come from affluent societies and seek to make a living from their activities.95 Accordingly, the questions of authenticity, appropriation, and colonial exploitation continue to haunt these syncretic religious and musical practices even when done in the spirit of pluralism and progressively-minded multiculturalism. While world music fans often look to experience a kind of authenticated alterity, supposedly unsullied by commerciality and modern culture industries, the musicians and their cultures tend to remain “foreign.” Nordic ritual folk musicians and practitioners, on the other hand, adopt these aspects into a shared community identity, albeit an identity that is increasingly commodified and purchasable. As with the Celtic and New Old Europe Sound, this sort of discourse provides a pathway for expressing romantic yearning for the past and for a deeper sense of European identity, although the fact that Nordic ritual 141

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folk musicians are constructing an ancient Nordic identity makes the specter of Aryanism difficult to shake. The aspects of this music that look to various global styles potentially offer a way to evade such things, and as with the Roma-influenced New Old Europe Sound the borrowed elements are freely mixed together. As seen with Palästinalied, some legitimately ancient aspects of the music can also be recontextualized in ways that elide their origins, allowing them to slide neatly into this new milieu. A key difference for participants in Nordic ritual folk music, however, is that the ancient cultural identity in question is also often discursively conceived as a pre-colonial Indigenous identity. The following chapter will explore this issue in more depth, for there are aspects of this conception that potentially encourage solidarity with Indigenous groups across the globe. The musical and ideological connections with Sámi revival movements further underline this global perspective. Yet in practice it risks becoming a form of Indigenous minstrelsy, masking the privileges of whiteness and masculinism by constructing an intervening subaltern religious identity.

Notes

1. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 2. Helen Dell, Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 3. Kirsten Yri, “Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism,” Popular Music 38, no. 3, (2019): 361–78. 4. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd. Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 29–30. 5. Thomas R. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 154–58. 6. Simon Frith, “The Discourse of World Music,” in Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 305–22. 7. Frith, “The Discourse of World Music.” 307–9. 8. Owen Coggins, Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 88–93. 9. Dell, Fantasies of Music, 216. 10. Doug Adams, The Music of The Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore’s Scores (Los Angeles: Alfred Music, 2010), 51.

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World Music of the Ancient World 11. Ennio Morricone, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly—Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, United Artists Records, 1968, vinyl LP. 12. Deirdre Morgan and Owen Coggins, “Jew’s Harps in Metal and the ‘Inverse Shock’ of Resistance Discourses between Global South and North,” (Powerpoint presentation, 5th Biennial Research Conference of the International Society for Metal Music Studies, Mexico City, June 8, 2022). 13. Einar Selvik, “Lecture and Performance” (lecture, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, November 7, 2022). 14. John Haines, “The Arabic Style of Performing Medieval Music,” Early Music Vol. 29, No. 3 (Aug., 2001): 369–78. 15. Kristen Yri, “Thomas Binkley and the Studio der Frühen Musik: challenging ‘the myth of Westernness,’” Early Music, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May 2010): 273–80. 16. Jonathan Shull, “Locating the past in the Present: Living Traditions and the Performance of Early Music,” Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2006): 87–111. 17. Enigma, Return to Innocence, Virgin, 1994, CD single; Deep Forest, Deep Forest, 550 Records, 1992, compact disc. 18. Shzr Ee Tan, “Returning to and from ‘Innocence’: Taiwan Aboriginal Recordings” The Journal of American Folklore 121, No. 480 (Spring, 2008): 222–35. 19. Steven Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 145–71. 20. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). 21. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Stras and Giroux, 2021), 27–78. 22. Lisa Aldred, “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer 2000): 329–52. 23. Louise Meintjes, “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning,” Ethnomusicology, Winter, 1990, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter, 1990): 37–73; John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics, and the Culture Industry (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000), 128–29; Paul Simon, Graceland, Warner Bros. Records, 1986, compact disc; Paul Simon, The Rhythm of the Saints, Warner Bros. Records, 1990, compact disc. 24. Bakithi Kumalo, interview by Christina Roden, RootsWorld, www​.rootsworld​.com​ /rw​/feature​/kumalo​.html. 25. Thomas Burkhalter, Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut. (New York: Routledge, 2013). 26. David Kaminsky, “Keeping Sweden Swedish: Folk Music, Right-Wing Nationalism, and the Immigration Debate,” Journal of Folklore Research 49/1 ( January/April 2012): 76–8. 27. Juniper Hill, “Global Folk Music,” 50–83; Tina Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations. 28. Hedningarna, Karelia Visa, Northside, 1999, compact disc. 29. Hill, “Global Folk Music,” 62. 30. Hill, “Global Folk Music,” 68.

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Chapter 4 31. Gjallarhorn, Sjofn, Northside (2000), NSD6052, liner notes. 32. Hill, “Global Folk Music,” 69–76. 33. Steven Feld, “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: On the Discourses and Commodification Practices of ‘World Music’ and ‘World Beat,” in Music Grooves, Edited by Charles Keil and Steven Feld. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 238. 34. Enya, Watermark, WEA, 1988, compact disc; James Cameron, dir., Titanic (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1997). 35. David Kaminsky, “Introduction: The New Old Europe Sound,” Ethnomusicology Forum, 24/2 (August 2015): 149. 36. Kaminsky, “The New Old Europe Sound,” 150; Duck Baker, “Some Reflections on ‘Celtic’ Music,” in Transatlantic Roots Music: Folk, Blues, and National Identities, Edited by Jill Terry and Neil A. Wynn ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 246–55; Marion Bowman, “Contemporary Celtic Spirituality,” in Belief beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age, ed. Joanne Pearson (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 55–102; Michael Dietler, “‘Our Ancestors the Gauls:’ Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe,” American Anthropologist 96/3 (1994): 584–605. 37. Mel Gibson, dir., Braveheart (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1995); Jim Sheridan, dir., In the Name of the Father (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 1993). 38. David Kaminsky, “The New Old Europe Sound,” 143–58. 39. David Kaminsky, “Just Exotic Enough:” Swedish Chamber Klezmer as Postnational World Music and Mid-East Proxy,” Ethnomusicology 58/2 (Spring/Summer 2014): 254–77. 40. Kaminsky, “Just Exotic Enough,” 262. 41. Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica, 19–49. 42. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Inuit throat-games and Siberian throat-singing: A comparative, historical, and semiological approach,” Ethnomusicology, 43, no. 3 (1999): 404. 43. Carole Pegg, “Mongolian Conceptualizations of Overtone Singing (xöömii),” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 1, no. 1 (1992): 43. 44. Pegg, “Mongolian Conceptualizations,” 48. 45. Theodore Levin and Valentina Süzükei, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 80. 46. Tanya Tagaq, Animism, Six Shooter Records, 2014, compact disc. 47. Karl Spracklen “Throat-singing as extreme Other: An exploration of Mongolian and Central Asian style in extreme metal,” Metal Music Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 70–73. 48. Spracklen, “Throat-Singing,” 75. 49. “Kjell Braaten—Blóta, Ethnomusicology, and How Music Travels Through Cultures,” interview by Jameson Foster, The Nordic Sound Channel with Jameson Foster, Nov. 6, 2022, https:​//​youtu​.be​/Ch6​-4uCUT00​?si​=9Kh3isSjknnGLRKx. 50. The Bulgarian Voices »Angelite« Feat. Huun-Huur-Tu, Sergey Starostin & Mikhail Alperin, Fly, Fly my Sadness, JARO Medien, 1996, compact disc.

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World Music of the Ancient World 51. Richard Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia: A Tenth-Century Traveler from Baghdad to the Volga River (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005), 63–73. 52. Heilung, Futha, Season of Mist, 2019, compact disc. 53. Niklas Göransson, “Phurpa Interview,” Bardo Methodology, April 20, 2016. http:​//​ www​.bardomethodology​.com​/articles​/2016​/04​/20​/phurpa/. 54. Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Nonesuch Records, 1987, compact disc. 55. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); Timothy Rice, May it Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Donna Anne Buchanan, Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 56. Myrkur, Folkesange, Relapse Records, 2020, compact disc, liner notes. 57. Helle Thun, “Nordic Voice,” Nordic Voice, accessed January 4, 2024, https:​//​ nordicvoice​.dk​/about/. 58. Mark Slobin, Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 46–47. 59. Tony Mitchell, “Sigur Rós’s Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography,” Transforming Cultures eJournal 4, no. 1 (April 2009): 188–90. 60. Jaye Puckett, ‘“Reconmenciez novele estoire:’ The Troubadours and the Rhetoric of the Later Crusades,” MLN, 116, no. 4 (2001): 864. 61. Puckett, “Reconmenciez novele estoire,” 860. 62. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music Vol. 1: Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 138. 63. Rebecca Ahrendt, “Celts, Crusaders, and Clerics: The Medieval in Gothic Music,” in Nostalgia or Perversion?: Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century Until the Present Day, ed. Isabella van Elferen (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 101. 64. Anne Williams, “Edifying Narratives: The Gothic Novel, 1764–1997” in Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art, ed. Christoph Grunenberg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 151–59. 65. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV, Atlantic Records SD 7208, 1971; Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, “When the Levee Breaks,” Columbia Records 14439-D, 1929. 66. Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2012), 158–59. 67. Christoph Corneau, Walther von der Vogelweide: Leich, Lieder, Sangsprüche (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). 68. J. Peter Burkholder and Claude V. Palisca, ed. The Norton Anthology of Western Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 49. 69. Keith Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2007), 40–41. 70. Ahrendt, “Celts, Crusaders, and Clerics,” 101. 71. M. Bahadırhan Dinçaslan, July 28, 2013, “Des Teufels Lockvögel—Palästinalied,” https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=7QFdZsRb​-MY.

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Chapter 4 72. Wofka1986, ‘Palästinalied,’ December 26, 2010, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=RQTR0D6QCSw. 73. Stéphane François and Ariel Godwin, “The Euro-Pagan Scene: Between Paganism and Radical Right.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1, no. 2 (2007): 35–54. 74. Deena Weinstein, “Pagan Metal” in Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music, Edited bty Donna Weston and Andy Bennett (New York: Routledge, 2013), 58–76. 75. François and Godwin, “The Euro-Pagan Scene,” 35–54; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 76. Benjamin Teitelbaum, “Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism,” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 3 (2014): 405–30. 77. Ahrendt, “Celts, Crusaders, and Clerics,” 102–3. 78. Helen Dell, Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 79. Thomas R. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 80. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance, 7, 74–77. 81. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance, 6–8. 82. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance, 111–20. 83. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance, 118–19. 84. “Sámiid ædnan—Norway 1980 – Eurovision songs with live orchestra,” YouTube, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=AyMdsQOT8vI​&ab​_channel​=escLIVEmusic1 85. Seppo Paakunainen, Symphony No.1 ( Juoigansinfoniija), Sámi Luondu, Gollerisku And Luohtegoallus Sápmi Lottážan, DAT, 1992, compact disc. 86. Olle Edström, “From Jojk to Rock & Jojk: Some Remarks on the Process of Change and of the Socially-Constructed Meaning of Sámi Music, Studia Musicologica Scientarum Hungaricae 44, no. 1–2 (2003): 269–89. 87. Christophe Beck, Frode Fjellheim, and Cantus, “Vuelie,” from Frozen—Original Score Soundtrack, Walt Disney Records, 2014. 88. Mari Boine, Jaskatvuođa Maŋŋá (Etter Stillheten), Hot Club Records, 1985, vinyl LP. 89. Mari Boine, Gula Gula, Real World Records, 1990, compact disc. 90. Peter Gabriel, Passion (Music for the Last Temptation of Christ), Geffen Records, 1989, compact disc. 91. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance, 201–8. 92. Hilder, Sámi Musical Performance, 207. 93. Thomas Hilder, “Sámi Festivals and Indigenous Sovereignty,” in The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, Edited by Fabian Holt and Antti-Ville Kärjä (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 374. 94. Thomas A. DuBois, An Introduction to Shamanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 267. 95. DuBois, An Introduction to Shamanism, 279.

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Chapter 5

Individual Musical Approaches Ancient Enchantments, Modern Technology, and Putting Away “Viking Things” Ross Hagen

This chapter outlines some of the various approaches taken by Nordic ritual folk musicians for creating music that is artistically expressive and ritually efficacious. As noted in the previous two chapters, this music is often a pastiche of disparate styles with roots as varied as traditional Nordic folk music, black metal, industrial music and EDM (electronic dance music), fantasy film scores, and various non-Western traditions. Here, a closer look at songs by the Nordic groups Hedningarna, Heilung, and Wardruna illustrate their particular approaches to this music, while an exploration of the music of the American duo Osi and the Jupiter shows an alternative path that relies much less on “Nordic” or “ancient” musical signifiers. If previous chapters dealt with the music in a sort of “X-ray” approach looking for common skeletal outlines that “reflect the scholar’s light,” to borrow Mark Slobin’s evocative image, the examples here attempt to individualize and flesh out those musical practices.1 Although the examples are emblematic of musical idioms that have become somewhat commonplace in Ásatrú and heathen musical circles, they should of course also not be considered an exhaustive cataloging. Hedningarna’s “new folk” music from the early 1990s provides an initial 147

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point of entry, illustrating the archival and musicological side of Nordic heathen music while also providing a model for many later combinations of “rustic” vocal and instrumental traditional music and electronic instrumentation. Their song “Joupolle Joutunut” also underscores a revisionist impulse within folk revivalists and neopagans that works to combat “respectable” visions of the past in favor of something lustier and more visceral.2 Attention then turns to Heilung, with whom we began this book and one of the most popular groups in this music scene in the 2020s, and their practice of combining texts from various ancient sources to create polylingual works that they imbue with metaphysical power and theatrical drama. Heilung’s music and fan communities also demonstrate the further evolution of the electronic element within this music and its connections with groove-based practices of techno musicians, along with significant connections to the utopian spirit of recent rave subcultures. Wardruna’s rune-based compositions follow paths rooted in arcane interpretations of particular runes from the Elder Futhark alphabet, with the instrumentation, text, and sonic world of each song crafted toward illuminating the meanings and significances of its rune counterpart. Finally, the American ensemble Osi and the Jupiter provides something of an exit point and even a bit of a challenge by explicitly avoiding connections with the tropes of ancient “Viking” music. Instead, the Nordic story-world is woven into an ethos that privileges connections with nature and personal reflection, with a musical aesthetic rooted more in American singer-songwriter traditions and the soundscapes of American minimalist composers. The selected Nordic examples also demonstrate the wide use of dead and “magical” languages in Nordic heathen music, some of which are compiled from obscure and fragmentary sources and may not have even clearly defined meanings. In many cases a significant amount of research is involved on the part of the lyricists and performers, sometimes in collaboration with academic scholars. The use of dead European languages in metal and related genres often serves a nationalistic purpose in opposition to the near-hegemonic use of English in international pop and rock music, yet paradoxically the opaqueness of the language also renders it more universal.3 As noted with the earlier example of Sigur Rós, without 148

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access to the language or text, listeners connect with an overall feeling of the singing and the music, informed by their own expectations for the experience.4 As with aspects of musical technique and performance, the fragmentary nature of ancient source texts also gives composers and lyricists a significant amount of artistic license and room for creative ingenuity. This situation is fertile not only for artistic and musical creativity, but also for lyrical pastiche and collage. The juxtapositions and collisions of disparate and fragmented texts have the further potential to coalesce into a polyglot magical language in themselves, creating a numinous lyrical sound out of the various combinations. Within the Nordic heathen context, an analogy can also be made to the ritual symbolism of bindrunes, combinations of individual runes that are “bound” together into a single sigil with a multi-layered meaning and purpose. Although bindrunes exist in historical sources, I’m referring here to modern spiritual and magical practices. In this music, the artist-practitioner binds fragments of disparate texts together for a similarly cumulative effect, with intention and aesthetic often taking precedence over literal meaning. This “meaningless” interpretation also has some parallels in the Nordic archeological record of rune inscriptions as well as in other traditions of magical music and musical spellcasting, along with certain common rune sequences seeming to act as charms, most notably “alu,” and various other repetitive inscriptions that seem to be meaningless but may represent onomatopoeic incantations. Naturally, there have been generations-long debates among scholars around what might have been intended by these archaeological runic inscriptions, including whether they should be interpreted as being magical or superstitious at all.5 However, as with other aspects of Nordic heathen music and practice, the uncertainties around historical accuracy matter much less than efficacies in the present. Nonsensical (or at least untranslatable) phrases and repeated vocables are also foundational within religious and spiritual traditions of American Indian ceremonial music, Jewish nigun, and Sámi joik. In such contexts they typically act variously as charms, intensifiers of mystical experience, or as onomatopoeic representations of animals, locations, spirits, or people. In these various examples, arguably including Nordic heathen music, the untranslatable nature of the words and syllables is crucial for creating 149

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connections to the ineffable, that which is literally beyond words. Wielding and understanding these secret and arcane languages also function as a form of spiritual authority, comparable to the privileges conferred by the ability to read Latin in the pre-modern era.6 Other often-used sources for lyrical source material are the Old Norse poems from the Poetic Edda, particularly its most famous opening works Völuspá and Hávamál. In Völuspá (Prophecy of the Völva), Odin raises a völva or witch from the dead, and she lets him know the nature of the universe and his fate, weaving a tale of social collapse, war, and destruction in Ragnarok. Hávamál (Words of the High One) is a collection of short verses attributed to Odin that provide philosophical and practical advice for responsible and honorable conduct, followed by an account of how Odin acquired knowledge of the runes and descriptions of eighteen magical songs (ljóð). Given the length of the poems, they are rarely set musically in their entirety, so musicians typically choose particularly evocative and lyrical verses to set to music, as seen in Einar Selvik’s multiple versions of “Völuspá” (2018) and most of the songs on Nytt Land’s 2017 album FIMBULVINTER.7 Sometimes passages are combined with original lyrics, as in the two verses from Hávamál that serve as a coda for Wardruna’s “Helvegen” (2013). As befits this music scene’s focus on dead languages, the musicians’ usual practice is to use the original Old Norse from the source texts rather than translating into modern Icelandic, Norwegian, or English. Another approach is to use the ancient poetry as a reference point and inspiration for new lyrics, as in “Vǫluspá” (2013) by the aptly named Norwegian ensemble Vǫluspá.8 Finally, these poems also sometimes furnish source material for dramatic recitation and theatrical reenactment in fireside rituals at festivals. For examples, the 2023 Cascadian Midsummer festival in Washington featured a recitation of the Völuspá by the performer Kertoa Kalevala (evidently from memory) with improvised musical accompaniment and “Hope is the Name of the River that Runs from the Maw of Fenris Bound,” a dramatic performance by the Council of Gallows troupe based on the narrative of the Æsir binding the wolf Fenris in the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning.

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Hedningarna—“Joupolle Joutunut” (1992)

The Swedish/Finnish group Hedningarna was one of the dominant ensembles for Nordic “new folk” music in the 1990s, and they played a major role in the international spread of this music along with the Swedish and Finnish bands Garmarna and Värttinä. These bands all have some roots in the folk-rock idiom pioneered in Scandinavia in the 1970s by the Norwegian ensembles Folque and Folk och Rackare, who were themselves inspired by the English band Fairport Convention.9 Members of Värttinä and Hedningarna were also affiliated with the Folk Music Department at the Sibelius Academy, while Hedningarna’s Anders Norudde and Hållbus Totte Mattson are also trained luthiers. However, Hedningarna forged a path that became heavily reliant on electronic sampling and programming technologies along with their often-reimagined archaic instruments. The insert of their 1992 album Kaksi! succinctly illustrates their ethos with a photo of a Stråkharpa (talharpa) plugged into a miniature Marshall amplifier. As noted in the previous chapter, Hedningarna also approached their music as a musicological endeavor that included researching traditional music archives and conducting fieldwork. Both their music and their scholarly approach to unearthing and reimagining traditional folk music proved to be highly influential on later artists in Nordic “new folk” and heathen music scenes. “Juopolle Joutunut,” the opening song on Kaksi!, encapsulates these various aspects of Hedningarna’s music and is emblematic of Scandinavian “new folk” music’s turn toward then-current forms of heavy rock, electronica, and industrial music in the 1990s. It is also a prime example of Hedningarna’s musicological approach. The original source for the song’s melody and lyrical content is a tune from the Ingrian region of the Karelian isthmus, a long-disputed region in northeastern Russia bordering Finland and Estonia. The tune is transcribed in Ilmari Krohn’s monumental early twentieth-century collection Finnish Folk Tunes (Suomen Kansan Sävelmiä) in the 1910 volume Runosävelmät I (Runic Tunes I), which focuses on Ingrian ballads and epic poems.10 The tune is listed as having been collected by the ethnomusicologist Armas Launis in 1906, specifically from the Soikinsky Peninsula, a center for the Finnish population in the region. Krohn’s method for classifying folk songs focused 151

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on melodic content, rather than lyrical themes, so only the first line of lyrics is included, and the entry does not include a title for the song. In addition to the usual musical nuances lost in folk-song transcription, Krohn occasionally omitted lyrics entirely on the grounds that they were obscene, a fairly common practice among song collectors of the time. The choice also makes some sense given the nationalistic character of the project in the aftermath of the publications of the Kalevala and Kanteletar.11 Krohn describes the tune as including variation and heterophony (a musical texture in which a melody is sung together in a group with individual singers adding in their own variations as opposed to singing in strict unison), and the volume includes seven other similar poems with varying melodies. There is also evidently an archival recording made by Launis in the archives of the Finnish Literary Society which provides a fuller picture of the song12 From this source material, one is provided with an 8-bar melody and an accompanying verse in the written archive, along with the notes on variation and heterophony and the archival recording, which is not available online. However, Hednigarna’s lyrics do not correspond to those available from the digital archives beyond the repeated invocation “Ras kaalina maja, Ras maalina maja” (which is not included in the liner notes’ translation, suggesting that it might be a phrase of vocables), and it’s unclear if the other lyrics come from other sources or if they are an original addition.13 In any case, the approach demonstrates the sort of creative and potentially anachronistic “filling out” that is standard practice for antiquarian musicians. In Hedningarna’s hands, “Joupolle Joutunut” is given the English title “Gone to Sot” and is a wizened warning to young women against marrying a drunkard, as he will inevitably become violent and make life wretched. The narrator then decries her own poor judgment in choosing a drinker earlier in life but notes that she also takes a spruce cudgel to bed, seemingly as a means of defense but possibly also hinting at some future revenge against her husband. This sort of tale, with its references to intoxication, sexual violence, regret, and revenge, is a far cry from the staid and sanitized folk song ideal promoted by Krohn and numerous other Victorian-era and early twentieth-century song collectors, archivists, and musicologists of 152

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European and American folk song. Given the popularity of English and Scottish ballads like “House Carpenter,” “The Twa Corbies,” and “Matty Groves” among folk revivalists and folk rockers, it can sometimes seem as if musicians and audiences in later twentieth-century folk revivals desired a corrective to this bowdlerized past and so spotlighted tales of the macabre, violent, and magical. The traditional ballads chosen by Hedningarna and their fellow “new folk” groups Garmarna and Varttina over the years have often been of a similar tenor. One other constant, evident in “Joupolle Joutunut,” is a predilection for ballads in which a female protagonist asserts her sexual independence and/or takes vengeance on those who’ve wronged her in the past. This thematic focus likely takes some cues from feminist movements in the 1990s, as argued by Tina Ramnarine in reference to Varttina,14 but these songs also seem to reflect a revisionist desire for a wilder and more sensual past. The desire for wildness also manifests in the performance and composition of “Joupolle Joutunut” and similar works, particularly in the “rougher” timbre of the instruments and vocals, hearkening back to Kaminsky’s “nature” axis in which folk musicians deliberately eschew the sounds and techniques of art music. “Joupolle Jotunut” begins with a slow and ominous drum and bass pattern built around the half-step interval between E and F, and a low string drone likely played by Anders Norudde on the basmoraharpa, a keyed fiddle related to the nyckelharpa. The basmoraharpa adapts that basic design for a baritone instrument, presumably designed and constructed by Norudde. While maintaining the drone pitch, Norudde also intermittently increases his bowing intensity and speed, resulting in a harsh grinding timbre full of harmonics while Hedningarna’s two singers, Tellu Paulasto and Sanna Kurki-Suonio, recite the first lines of the song like a whispered incantation. The main melody of the ballad enters, played on hardingfele, and is then joined with a second fiddle (possibly the basmoraharpa again) playing a lower iteration of the melody before Paulasto and Kurki-Suonio’s vocals return. The tuning between the two fiddle parts occasionally drifts, deepening the feeling of unrefined rustic-ness. True to the informative entry in Runosävelmät I, Hedningarna treats the melody heterophonically; the two fiddle parts are not played in strict rhythmic alignment and Paulasto 153

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and Kurki-Suonio regularly introduce their own ululations and trills near the ends of phrases. About two-thirds of the way through the song, Hedningarna added an instrumental bridge section with a different fiddle melody and a doubled tempo, with more percussion and clapping. They then reprise the opening melody, and the singers have a final verse before the song ends. “Joupolle Joutunut” is a prime example of how Hedningarna took the animating impulses of the folk-rock revival and added in a significant amount of musicological archival work as part of the creative process. They’ve continually returned to the folk music of the Karelian region in particular, although perhaps not without a measure of exoticization.15 However, the musical catalogs of Hedningarna and Garmarna were also significant for Nordic folk music because of their inclusion of synthesized or sampled instruments. Just as the folk-rockers in the 1970s adapted folk songs to include the rhythm section of a rock band, their younger heirs in the 1990s and beyond looked to current electronic and industrial music for inspiration. One other standout example in this regard is Garmarna’s 1999 single “Gamen” from the album Vedergällningen, a ballad about an imprisoned princess who is saved by making a bargain with a vulture.16 Beyond the main melody played on fiddle, Garmarna’s arrangement draws upon late-1990s drum ‘n’ bass and industrial music, including electronic drum loops, synth basslines, and harshly distorted guitar tones. “Gamen’s” main drum loop is a snare-heavy and syncopated drum “break” with a big kick drum accent on the first beat of each measure, a typical rhythmic pattern for popular electronic music acts in the late 1990s like The Chemical Brothers. This rhythmic sensibility originated in no small measure from the widespread practice of sampling drum breaks from 1970s funk and soul records, which also meant that selected loops became a sort of shared musical currency among numerous musicians and producers. In that spirit, the loop in “Gamen” is not only similar to other late 1990s electronica acts but is also nearly identical to the main drum loop in The Prodigy’s hit 1996 single “Firestarter.”17 Although the actual origin of the loop is somewhat murky, it seems likely that Garmarna and The Prodigy

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both found the loop on a mid-’90s compilation of drum breaks and samples that was marketed to DJs and electronica producers.18 The typical song structures of folk ballads and fiddle tunes also turn out to be well-suited to electronica and rave music treatments. As seen with the example of Palästinalied in the earlier chapter, many of these ballads are in a “simple strophic” form, meaning that the melody for each verse is the same, and there is no separate chorus with its own music. This repetitiveness, coupled with the simplistic harmonic language, allows for modern musicians to shape the song by layering rhythmic and instrumental elements around the verses. These methods of gradually building and releasing tension by adding and subtracting elements without losing the fundamental groove are also a hallmark of loop-based musical styles like techno, house, and trance music. Although groups like Garmarna and Hedningarna pioneered this crossover in the 1990s, similar loop-based productions are fundamental to the musical composition and performance of younger heathen ensembles like Heilung, Nebala, and Astralseid.

Heilung—“Traust” (2019)

Heilung is a Danish & Norwegian ensemble led by the composer and producer Christopher Juul and the singers Kai Uwe Faust and Maria Franz. The ensemble describes themselves as “amplified history” with additional inspiration drawn from the customs and costumes of circumpolar cultures. As noted previously, Heilung considers the animistic side of Ásatrú as a sort of connective tissue with Indigenous culture and spirituality globally, as evidenced by the invocation recited at every ritual performance. Heilung’s rituals are highly theatrical and dramatic, employing approximately two dozen additional backup singers, drummers, and a troupe of “warriors” with shields and spears, moving through a series of tableaux akin to a dance performance and culminating in a frenzied circle dance. Faust and Franz’s performance costumes are long flowing garments with long fringes and distinct headpieces with fringe covering their eyes and long antlers (see figure 5.1). The stage set centers around a large central drum on a raised platform and giant compass rug, along with a variety of large branches, greenery, antlers, and bones decorating 155

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Figure 5.1. Screenshot of Heilung, Norupo. HTTPS:​//​YOUTU​.BE​/64CACOHNBEI​?SI​=XS6U1TQVNEIOZCZL

(and concealing) the stands for microphones and instruments. Heilung’s “circumpolar” costuming and the choreographed tableaux of their ritual performances sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance to the fetishized “primitivist” art, music, and dance of the early twentieth century, perhaps most obviously recalling the original 1913 staging of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). Heilung’s lyrics are typically a mélange drawn from a variety of sources, from runestones and inscriptions to epic poems, while the music itself is largely constructed of various loops drawn from a wide range of instruments, vocals, and field recordings. In live performances, these prerecorded elements are controlled by Christopher Juul using a Loop Station, a multi-track sampler designed for triggering and mixing loops on the fly, and other electronics. As described in previous chapters, Heilung’s performances also invite participants to engage with it as a transformative ritual experience rather than simply as a theatrical production. Their performances begin with an opening invocation that is recited by the audience almost as a creed, effectively redefining them as a congregation of sorts. The ceremonial aspect of Heilung’s performance shares much with many other communal ritual contexts but can also be productively compared with rave subcultures from the 1990s and 2000s, in which participants reported similarly transcendent experiences in a nominally secular context. 156

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However, Heilung’s invocations of ancient history and deep time add an additional layer, creating a numinous environment of spiritually charged yet opaque language and heavily rhythmic music enacted dramatically in a transformed and transformative space. Heilung’s song “Traust” from the album Futha (2019) is an illustrative example of the ways in which Nordic heathen musicians combine archaic texts and musical forms to create an efficacious ritual world in sound.19 The title “Traust” can be literally translated in German as “Trust,” although it also implies confidence or faith, meanings that are illustrated by the lyrical texts chosen for the song. The text for “Traust” is a polyglot compilation from archaic sources, including the first of the Merseburg Charms, a pair of spells in Old High German from a ninth-century manuscript, nine spells from the Eddic poem Grógaldr (The Spell of Gróa), and a “washing” incantation from the Galdrabók, an Icelandic book of magic spells collected in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries.20 The First Merseburg Charm invokes female spirits known as Idisi who are often associated with fate and protection; in this spell they are credited with hindering armies and releasing captives. “Traust” includes the spell in its entirety as the beginning and ending sections of a three-part ABA song structure. The middle section is a call-and-response chant which recites nine spells for protection against evils and dangers while traveling, involving natural perils like rivers, oceans, and frost, human foes, and supernatural beings. In their original context in Grógaldr, these protective spells are given to the hero Svipdag by the ghost of his dead mother Gróa, who was a völva or seeress. Svipdag summons her in order to assist him in a quest to win the love of the goddess Menglöð. Heilung punctuates the verses from Grógaldr with the phrase “Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna,” a declaration to wash oneself of the hatred of enemies and the greed and wrath of the powerful. As the song’s title implies, these spells involve scenarios like battle and perilous journeys in which trust or faith in the supernatural may be all one can rely upon. “Traust” begins quietly, with a high-chiming bell repeatedly intoning a C# that is then joined by a second tone an octave below (possibly from a singing bowl), and then additional bell tones that fill out a C# minor chord. These bells create a loop that continues for the entirety of 157

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section A and its reprise, with occasional reverse reverbs that help create a slightly uncanny feeling, because “natural” sounds are behaving slightly abnormally. Then a warbling throat-singing loop emerges with an even 16-note rhythm with intermittent delays and filters that create an effect reminiscent of a synthesizer patch, while a bass drum and rattle accent the first and third beats of each measure. A sung and/or hummed bassline outlines the C# minor tonality, with an emphasis on the flattened 6th, while the vocal melody in the first section begins each phrase on the 5th and descends to the tonic. The middle call-and-response section dispenses with the chimes, bassline, and vocal melody for an extended drone on the tonic, with a female chorus reciting the verses from Grógaldr while a male choir responds with the “washing” incantation. After the nine spells are recited, the Merseburg Charm is reprised in full to round out the piece. In Heilung’s live rituals, the tableau for “Traust” takes place around the midpoint of the performance and features a mock sacrifice and resurrection of one of the female warriors. In the staging at Red Rocks in 2021, Maria Franz and three other backup singers stand on a raised platform behind center stage, in front of the central drum, while the warrior troupe stand on opposite sides of the compass rug in the center of the stage. As the middle call-and-response chant section begins, one of the female warriors takes center stage facing Kai Faust and offers him a noose that he places around her neck. After twirling the spear, she places it behind her back, holding it in place threaded between her elbows. Kai Faust then ties her arms to the spear and, at the appropriate moment, theatrically jerks on the noose and she crumples into a ball on the ground. Faust stays with her briefly and then exits the center, and she remains still until the reprise of the Merseburg Charm section, when Maria Franz’s lead vocals re-enter. As she sings, Franz walks off the riser down to the female warrior, awakens her, and stands her up. With the warrior’s back to the audience, Franz slowly pulls the spear out from its threaded position, freeing the warrior’s arms, after which the warrior dramatically unbinds her hair and walks to take Franz’s position on the raised platform behind the compass (see figure 5.2).

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Figure 5.2. Heilung, “Traust” – removing the spear and freeing the warrior. Oct. 5, 2021, Red Rocks Amphitheater, Morrison CO. SCREENSHOT OF “TRAUST BY HEILUNG @ RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATER 10.05.21” BY KELSEY RITSCH. HTTPS:​//​YOUTU​.BE​/V​_L7KI01HFG​?SI​=6VBTL​-Y​_RSE4UREL

This tableau enacts not only a sacrifice and resurrection/renewal narrative that is fundamental in numerous ritual contexts,21 but is also a fairly literal staging of the Merseburg Charm itself, with Maria and the backup singers acting as the Idisi who hinder armies and free captives. However, Heilung’s performance adds onto this scene the willing sacrifice of a warrior not to an enemy but to Faust’s character, an undefined figure who seems to embody death, war, and/or violence. Franz removes the binding spear on the line “Suma clubodun umbi cuoniouuidi,” a command to leap from one’s fetters and escape the enemies. Rather than a literal release on the battlefield, however, in this case the warrior joins the ranks of the Idisi. The narrative element of the performance also shapes the experience of the song itself, as the return of the Merseburg Charm becomes a dramatic transformation rather than just a reprise of the first musical section. The rest of Heilung’s recorded catalog employs a similarly drone-based and minimalist musical aesthetic, relying heavily on trance-inducing rhythmic loops, throat-singing, recitations, and group chants offset with Maria Franz’s penetrating melodic singing. Heilung’s albums also 159

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typically include “storytelling” tracks with an audio soundtrack, like “Keltentrauer” from the album Drif (2022), which dramatically recounts a battle between the Roman army and Celtic warriors complete with battle sounds. Their songs all employ a variety of archaic and ancient texts drawn from the Eddas, runic inscriptions from archaeological finds, and similar sources. Their sources are also not limited to Norse and Germanic origins, which fits into their overall pan-spiritual ideal but also perhaps acknowledges the limited repertory of ancient Norse texts. The song “Tenet” from the album Drif (2022) incorporates the famous SATOR square, a cryptic acrostic word square found across Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor from the Roman period to the fifteenth century.22 The entire piece is itself also a musical palindrome that reverses itself at the midpoint, not unlike older canon-based “puzzle” works by J. S. Bach and Arnold Schoenberg. Another song on the album, “Nikkal,” is an atmospheric choral setting of the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, a roughly 3400-year-old work of music found on clay tablets in modern-day Syria that is the oldest piece of notated music to survive mostly intact and complete. Heilung’s version is compiled from existing transcriptions of the cuneiform text and corresponds musically with other settings. “Nikkal” is followed by the album’s closer “Marduk,” an incantation reciting the many names of the Babylonian god Marduk. Their pantheistic and syncretic approach to Nordic heathen music intends to connect modern animist spiritualities with similar practices across the world and deep into (pre)history. Heilung’s reliance on loops and repetitive drum patterns highlights how the trance-inducing qualities of electronic dance music styles also make them ideal for ritual experiences, with clear echoes of the psychedelic “techno-shamanism” that has run through the global scenes for techno and trance music for decades. Techno and trance communities also tended to position themselves as outside the normal commercial structures of the music industry and even Western capitalism, with participants often speaking of raves and festivals in therapeutic terms. American pop and rock music has always had an ecstatic current within it that is comparable to certain religious experiences, bequeathed to it through the influence of West African spiritual practices within the 160

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African diaspora.23 Electronic dance music culture brought this aspect to the foreground, appealing not only to partygoers and clubbers but also to participants seeking spiritual healing and utopian community.24 Rave symbolism in the 1990s and 2000s also contained a marked primitivist thread, connecting the communitas and solidarity of the rave with visions of primordial oneness and temporary escape from the confines of the present.25 Scott Hutson goes so far as to compare the positive spiritual transformations and cleansings reported by ravers to Indigenous peyote rituals that mute one’s ego and encourage a feeling of undifferentiated connection with fellow participants and with the eternal and limitless cosmos, with the DJ acting as a shaman guide.26 This unbounded “oceanic feeling,” so termed by the French artist Romain Rolland in the 1920s, can be heightened with entheogenic substances like peyote, psychedelic mushrooms, or modern psychedelics like LSD or MDMA, although the embodied experiences of dance, repetitive rhythmic music, and light shows often allow participants to achieve a trance state on their own. The subjectivity and interiority of musically assisted trance states have long made them a difficult topic within the wider world of musicology and ethnomusicology, as well as in psychology and related scientific fields. There has also been a tendency to focus on the particularly “high arousal” trancing scenarios associated with communal ecstatic religious experiences, as opposed to solitary “deep listening,” meditative practices, or just daydreaming.27 Beyond the inherent difficulties of studying states of consciousness, trancing also has a long history of association with drug use, marginalized religious practices, and Indigenous ethnic groups. Likewise, the study of trance practices that involve spirit possession can become even more fraught because the purpose of the music is to invite external and unseen entities who have their own characters, stories, and motivations. Dismissing those entities as irrational, illusory, or as delusions robs the music of its purpose and power, but academic epistemology has also rarely provided space for the truly liminal modes of understanding that are often at work among participants. Musical scholars likewise have to contend with the tendency to extract music from these experiences and to treat it as a discrete object of study, when its purpose and power reside in its larger context and the participants’ 161

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shared experience, As the ethnomusicologist Richard Jankowsy notes in his studies of Tunisian stambeli trance music, approaching trancing from an emic perspective also requires Western scholars to set aside many of their own preconceptions about religion and belief.28 To this end, the full theatrical and ritual presentation of Heilung’s live performances becomes a key component, adding layers of significance beyond the sonic presentation of their recorded albums. Heilung clearly seem to approach it in this manner, although the band members have noted that the ritual aspects are somewhat compromised by the strict schedules and timeframes required by music festivals and venues.29 Their performing troupe is likewise a professionally-run unit, with some members of the anonymous warrior “chorus” selected through an audition process not unlike a Broadway tour (at least for tours in North America, which no doubt helps to mitigate costs for visas, etc). Indeed, Heilung in live performance is perhaps best considered less as a “band” and more like a touring musical theatre production, with similar needs for administration, logistics, and management. Yet the ritual component remains central to the performance each night, even when under duress. As one example mentioned previously, their 2021 performance at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado was interrupted by a power outage in which the entire PA system went silent for about five minutes. As the speaker system slowly came back online in fits and starts, the ensemble continued the performance complete with choreography, while the only audible sounds were the acoustics of the drums and the cheers and wolf howls of the audience. Although there was evident confusion and distress onstage, the technical issues were eventually resolved, and the performance continued apace without losing momentum. This approach, while necessarily staying within the parameters of the professional concert industry, is one of the keys to Heilung’s efficacy as a performing troupe tasked with conjuring transcendent experiences within otherwise mundane concert venues. Heilung’s fan communities also prioritize the therapeutic, communal, and spiritual side to the group’s live performances, and it is common for some participants in the large “Heilung Tribe and Spiritual Community” Facebook group to post regarding their own mental health struggles and to describe 162

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Heilung’s performances in transcendental and spiritual terms.30 As noted in previous chapters, however, the experiences of entering into altered states, sensing ancient “othertimes,” and accessing a sense of healing and community are not strictly dependent on participants’ affinities with neopaganism.31 Finally, the trance “rave” aspect of Heilung’s music and live performances is a regular part of gatherings and concert festivals within the Ásatrú milieu more broadly. As one example, the 2023 Midgardsblot festival hosted nightly afterparty performances by electronically centered performers like Nebala, Astralseid, and Rúnahild that essentially took on the character of a rave, but with electronic elements augmented by acoustic percussion, archaic “Viking” instruments, and throat-singing. The ensemble Folket Bortafor Nordavinden, a central group affiliated with Midgardsblot’s ritual aspects, performed solely acoustically but with the same ideal of rhythmically repetitive and propulsive music. As a final note, the example of Folket Bortafor Nordavinden also demonstrates the collective and communal aspect of music at these festivals apart from the professional performers on the main stages. At Midgardsblot’s opening blót ritual, for instance, the members of Folket Bortafor Nordavinden play drums and chant for around two hours without stopping as participants process through, although individual members would periodically rotate out while others covered their roles. The blót ritual itself opens with an invocation of the 4 compass points, the earth, and the sky, followed by a procession in which participants typically douse themselves in sage smoke and apply blood to a wooden icon and then to their faces. The large number of attendees at Midgardsblot also turns the ritual into a public performative space for the individual participants, with some of them howling, loudly hailing gods, and (in at least one case) proposing marriage before the crowd of spectators. The musicians’ job was to provide continuous accompaniment as everyone went through their ritual actions, as in similar processionals like Christian communion services or graduation ceremonies. Additionally, Midgardsblot and American festivals like Cascadian Midsummer and Fire in the Mountains also feature lively bonfires that extend well into the evening (and sometimes until morning) and which 163

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invited communal acoustic music-making in addition to sometimes featuring performers from the main stages. Midgardsblot 2023 featured a troupe of Italian drummers and a bagpiper who acted as official bonfire musicians, but festivalgoers who brought their own drums or other instruments were also welcome to participate in the music while others might dance or simply gather to listen and converse.

Wardruna—The Runaljod Trilogy

Along with Heilung, Wardruna is one of the most successful and visible ensembles within the world of Nordic heathen music, and in the early 2000s established an archetypal sound and aesthetic that many others followed and built upon. As noted, Wardruna was founded by the Bergen musicians Einar Selvik (who also goes by the pseudonym “Kvitravn” or “White Raven”), Kristian Espedal (better known by his stage name “Gaahl”) and Lindy-Fay Hella in 2003. Selvik and Espedal had previously played together in the notorious black metal band Gorgoroth, and initially envisioned Wardruna as a side project. Warduna’s music is often dramatic and choral in nature, including several additional singers and a variety of percussion along with archaic wind and string instruments like the birch and brass lur, bukkehorn, mouth harp, and moraharpa. Selvik sometimes performs and records alone, accompanying himself on a reconstruction of the Kravik Lyre, a 7-string lyre from the sixteenth century (see figure 5.3). On occasion, Selvik and Wardruna have also performed special concerts with choirs and classical symphony orchestras. As noted in earlier chapters, Selvik’s catalog also includes compositions and performances in the History Channel’s Vikings series, a pair of collaborative albums with Ivar Bjørnson from Enslaved, and work on the score for the video game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020). These projects contributed immensely to the popularity of not only Wardruna but also the entire Viking music aesthetic. Although traditional and archaic Nordic instruments are crucial for Wardruna’s sound, there are few resemblances to the sprightly traditional folk-dance tunes popular in Nordic “new folk” music. Instead, Wardruna often aims for moody and murky atmospheres, drawing much from the languid doom of underground 1980s and 1990s ambient, industrial, and 164

Figure 5.3. Einar Selvik with Kravik lyre. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, November 7, 2022. PHOTO BY ROSS HAGEN.

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gothic neofolk bands like Coil, Lycia, and the long shadow of Dead Can Dance. Their more bombastic moments, such as the dramatic soaring chorus of “Helvegen,” also bear comparison with fantasy film scores by Hans Zimmer and Howard Shore. Indeed, the booming percussion, blaring low brass, and tense orchestral strings that dominate the musical palettes of Trevor Morris’s scores for Vikings and Ramin Djawadi’s scores for Game of Thrones have become key elements in the music of Wardruna, Sowulo, and similar ensembles.32 The sonic world of Wardruna’s albums also include a significant amount of natural ambient sound, particularly raven calls and sounds of wind, water, and fire, and the liner notes indicate that much of their recording is done outdoors at spiritually significant locations. The ensemble singing is often monotone and conjunct, resembling plainchant, and when the group breaks into harmony they employ austere fourths and fifths of medieval polyphony or Icelandic tvisang, while instrumental parts typically also avoid lingering on pitches that would convey major or minor keys.33 As noted in the previous chapter, this conveys not only a sense of austere seriousness but also locates the music sonically in the ancient world. Further, many of the percussive elements on Wardruna’s recordings and in performance involve trees, stones, branches, bones, and ice in addition to frame drums, bells, and rattles. From his work in Wardruna, Selvik has also become a recognized authority on archaic and ancient instruments and occasionally gives academic lecture-recitals, although he is also careful to emphasize that his music should not be understood as a reconstruction of ancient Nordic music. Rather, his goal is to use the instruments effectively to compose new music. The first three Wardruna albums, Runaljod—Gap var Ginnunga (2009), Runaljod—Yggdrasil (2013), and Runaljod—Ragnarok (2016), form a trilogy centered on runaljod, or magical rune songs. Each album uses runes from the Elder Futhark alphabet and expository rune poems found in three manuscripts dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century as inspiration for individual songs. It is evident from Selvik’s liner notes that the mystical and mythological aspects of the runes are crucial to his artistic concept in Wardruna, and indeed the name of the ensemble refers to guarding secret knowledge. Across the three albums, he provides 166

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extensive details about the runes’ role in Hávamál and other poems and sagas along with critiques of runic divination within New Age movements, cautionary advice for neophytes, and lists of recommended books and other readings.34 Additionally, the liner notes for Gap var Ginnunga state that the outdoor recording locations and natural “instruments” used in the recording were chosen because of their relevance to particular runes and their potential to “enhance the nature of the rune being ‘portrayed’.”35 In one evocative example referenced in this book’s opening, the song “Bjarkan” on Gap var Ginnunga features percussion played on birch branches, in reference to the bjarkan rune’s association with birch trees.36 Wardruna’s musical and “geo-sonic” explorations of these runes and their associated rune poems become akin to a form of commentary or “glossing” of the original source material, in which a scribe or scholar adds onto an existing text in order to clarify its meaning or intellectually engage with its ideas. Such practices have a long history dating back to the Medieval period, evident in the marginalia found in numerous Biblical manuscripts, which was done mostly with the intent of defining difficult or obscure words and passages in Hebrew or Latin scriptures. Indeed, the rune poems themselves are essentially glosses. Polyphonic Christian music from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries sometimes adopted a similar practice as well, most particularly in the genre of organum, in which a composer would “enlarge” an existing chant melody and liturgical text by writing additional countermelodies around it. The ultimate effect is a multilayered composition in which an original sacred text and melody, considered to be of divine origin or to at least contain some sort of metaphysical and spiritual power, coexists with newly added musical and textual annotations. This conception became the seed for creating the vast and diverse repertoire of notated Christian sacred music over the intervening centuries. Wardruna and other Nordic heathen musicians are engaging in a similar practice, although with much more fragmentary source material and without the constraints of institutional religious doctrine, which provides a blank(er) slate for artists to interpret the rune based on their own goals and artistic or spiritual inclinations. “Fehu” from Runaljod—Yggdrasil provides an illustrative example.37

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“Fehu” is the proto-Germanic name for a rune that is closely associated with wealth and livestock in all available sources. However, the extant rune poems for Fehu all focus on wealth’s potential for creating strife, as seen here in the Old Norwegian example: ᚠ Fé vældr frænda róge; (Wealth is a source of discord amongst kin) føðesk ulfr í skóge. (the wolf lives in the forest) Selvik’s lyrics for “Fehu” take this couplet as a starting point before continuing with new lines noting the joy men take in “Fe” and comparing it to a hidden and coiled viper. This section also includes call-and-responses with the other singers interjecting the phrase “Fe-Fehu” in between the lines of text. In setting these lyrics, Wardruna employ a 5/4 meter with a syncopated accent pattern of 3-4-3 at the eighth note, which gives the rhythms a slightly off-kilter feeling and even obscures the meter somewhat when played on the lyre alone. The initial instrumental melody in minor is played on a moraharpa, an early keyed fiddle, over a sustained A minor tonality before several voices enter singing “Fehu Fe-Fehu” beginning on the root note, ascending to the minor third, and then descending back. In the “Skaldic” version of the song, so called because Selvik is accompanies himself on lyre without the backing ensemble in the assumed manner of Viking poet/minstrel/griots known as “skalds,” Selvik completes the chord progression as Am-F-Dm (using string stopping on the lyre) to add in a bit more harmonic interest to the sparse accompaniment. The song’s middle section moderates the syncopated rhythm somewhat, maintaining the 5/4 meter and original melody but with a bass drum hit on each beat and a rattle on each upbeat providing a new sense of forward propulsion. Other tracks from the Runaljod trilogy also illustrate Wardruna’s use of outdoor recording as a sonic reference locating their performance out in the “real world” as opposed to the precise and controlled environment of the studio. As noted in a previous chapter, the Nordic and Arctic landscape has long been a crucial partner in authenticating and enchanting 168

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musical practices from traditional fiddling to modern black metal, and Wardruna taps into that vein via the strategic use of field recordings and natural sounds in numerous instances. Indeed, most of the tracks on the albums open with natural sounds, including storms, wind, birdsong, ravens, horses, and footfalls in brush, likely with some level of layering and post-production. In this practice, Wardruna recalls numerous other recordings that use natural or diagetic sounds to establish a setting prior to the beginning of the music, whether the trope of black metal albums opening with battle sounds and the use of natural field recordings in new age music. The concept also recalls the famous opening for Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” in which the initial guitar part emerges from radio chatter as if “found” on the radio and then provides slightly staticky accompaniment for the initial guitar solo, creating an impression of being “in the room” as the song starts. The song “AnsuR” from Runaljod—Yggdraasil shows this approach, taking the “ansuz” rune as its inspiration, a rune which is affiliated with deities and divine wisdom as well as with streams and estuaries. The lyrics of the song printed in the liner notes are incomplete and relatively brief, consisting solely of an invocation calling on the wisdom of the Æsir and the strength of their roots. The track opens with sounds of a rainstorm, joined by a regular “thwack” on a piece of wood, a group of lur and/or bukkehorn, and several other rattles and other percussion instruments. The wind instruments pause, and a lone singer (presumably Selvik) enters with an invocation, sung in a tense and strained voice so as to be heard over the din of the storm and the continuing background noise of the storm and his companions. Although the regular pulse of the wooden percussion continues, the singing performance is largely non-metric and the pitch of the voice wavers in a deliberately untutored manner. After he finishes, the ensemble responds as a group in unison before splitting into harmony, as a low drone gradually enters and the natural sounds give way to the studio setting for the rest of the song. The thinner-sounding sonic setting of the field recording dramatically unfurls into the full and rich sound of the studio recording, almost as if it was manifested into existence from the initial invocation. Finally, Selvik’s invocation of runes as compositional tools and sources also invests Wardruna’s music with spiritual authority, somewhat 169

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paradoxically by minimizing his own training and intentions as a composer. As the musicologist Nina Nielsen notes, he has gone so far as to credit the runes as composer, with himself only as the instrument, a conceit which serves to place the music itself in the realm of the sacred and supernatural.38 The songs in the Runaljod albums then become music that was revealed to Wardruna as opposed to being created by them. Indeed, Selvik has described in the press that the melody of the song “NaudiR” on Runaljod—Yggdrasil came to him spontaneously as part of a vision quest in which he wandered unclothed in the mountains after two days of fasting, so he could feel and understand the rune naud’s meaning of “distress” or “suffering.”39 The music then is portrayed less as a “composition” and more as a sacred relic, with Selvik in the role of shaman or prophet returning from the wilderness with messages from the gods. Nielsen argues that effacing the role of human creators in this manner also masks the composer’s intentions regarding the music’s meaning by displacing them onto a transcendent and unknowable authority. Denying agency and intention also effectively confirms the authority of the artist as a spiritual vessel and elevates the music itself into realms beyond criticism. Nielsen relates this to the aura of genius and righteousness ascribed to canonical classical composers like J. S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and their transcendent and “timeless” masterpieces. There is perhaps a further analogy to be made between Selvik’s willing physical suffering in the pursuit of musical inspiration and revelation and the narrative of struggle and perseverance that underpins Beethoven’s legendary status in the classical repertoire. In Wardruna’s rune songs, this rhetoric combines with the power of ancient language, archaic instrumentation, and sonic geography to help convey their music and performance to listeners as primordial, authoritative, and transcendent. As a brief aside, it is worth noting that the opaque and magical nature of lyrics in ancient and inscrutable languages can also harbor hidden and personal meanings for the composers themselves. While there has been a long-lasting practice of mining the minutiae of scores, recordings, and lyrics for such “easter eggs,” using dead languages significantly raises the level of secrecy. One example is Nebala’s 2022 album Lustuz Laþu Wōþuz Alu, a concept album based around sacred sexuality by the composer 170

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Jonas Lorentzen, a former member of Heilung. Lorentzen has stated that the album came about due to connections he began to see between Norse traditions and ritual tantric sexuality in India.40 Nebala’s focus on sexuality as a component of pre-Christian spirituality could be considered as part of an erotic thread within neopaganism, neofolk music, and “folk horror” films, with heathenry positioned as a liberated counterpart to the sexual restrictions of Christianity. The album is a widely diverse affair in terms of its music, employing a number of different traditional instruments and vocal techniques, along with wide-ranging arrangements and song structures. Nebala’s juxtapositions of percussive drums, bells, and gongs, choral singing, throat-singing, and vocal inflections from Arabic, Sufi, and Indian music are reminiscent of Peter Gabriel’s polyglot world music releases in the 1980s. The album’s lyrics are in Proto-Germanic, translated from Old Norse sources with the help of Mathias Nordvig in order to “synthesize a spiritual language of aesthetic beauty and expressive power.”41 The liner notes include the lyrics, but offer brief explanatory notes for each song rather than direct translations. The album’s closer, “Blotha Huñaga Bolanan Alu,” highlights this effect, with the lyrics consisting of a list of magical words. The opening section features acapella choral vocals reminiscent of late medieval liturgical music, particularly Ensemble Organum’s 1996 recording of Guillaume Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame.42 The vocals then begin a rhythmic chant of the names of various goddesses with an energetic accompaniment of drums and bells before an extended beatless section of deep throat-singing, punctuated by gongs and singing bowls. The singers then intone “Blotha Huñaga Bolanan” in an increasingly stacked harmony before the song transitions into a climactic finale featuring improvisations on didgeridoo and Lorentzen’s throat-singing. The hidden reference of the song, however, is its title phrase, which can be translated as “Blood Sugar Sex Magic,” in reference to the 1991 song and album “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” by the alternative rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers. While the reference fits with the thematic focus of Nebala’s album, particularly the lines in its first verse about “mingling” with gods and divinity, it also highlights ways in which secret “magical” languages have the potential to smuggle inside references (if not outright jokes) within.43 171

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American Approaches—from Ásatrú to Animism

North American artists within the Nordic ritual folk music orbit often take a rather different approach than musicians from Scandinavia and the Nordic regions, emphasizing wilderness and environment over mythology and eschewing ancient texts in favor of original lyrics in English. An animist worldview is often evident in the work of American artists, but broader concerns about environment, ecology, and humans’ relationship to nature are often in the foreground. In this outlook, many of these American musicians seem to be drawing a significant amount of inspiration from the tradition of American environmental writing dating back to the Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, along more recent writers like Edward Abbey and British author Robert Macfarlane. Although a venerable literary tradition, these writers ran against the grain of the wider American settler population, who historically treated the landscape and wildlife of the continent as a resource to be exploited for profit, an extension of the Biblical conception of “wilderness” as hostile and empty. These endeavors also served an ulterior motive involving environmental warfare by denying those resources to the Indigenous populations during generations of war and displacement across the continent. Authors in this milieu argued for a different sort of relationship to nature, one in which humans thought of themselves as embedded within nature rather than exercising dominion over it. As a result, the legacies of settler colonialism in North America form a constant backdrop to this music in many respects, with issues of Indigenous rights and solidarity sometimes taking center stage. These sentiments find purchase within the music of American musicians and ensembles like the black metal bands Wolves in the Throne Room and Agalloch, along with works by Panopticon, Wayfarer, and Osi and the Jupiter. Crucially, although references to Nordic mythology and folklore are clearly at work, this music may sometimes be better understood from a broadly animist perspective rather than being strictly aligned with Ásatrú or Nordic neopaganism. In particular, there is comparatively little interest in the ancient Nordic and Viking revivalism that animates ensembles like Heilung and Wardruna, even if the symbolisms and archetypes of the Nordic story-world remain influential. 172

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From a musical standpoint, American artists also tend not to employ the vast array of archaic and obscure folk instruments found in Nordic ritual folk ensembles. Instead, they rely on more “normative” folk instruments like acoustic guitars and fiddles, and those with an interest in American roots music might include banjos or mandolins in the manner of a traditional string band. Part of this situation is no doubt just a matter of accessibility, and there are certainly North American musicians who’ve recently picked up the tagelharpa and other “Viking” instruments in emulation of Nordic ensembles. Ultimately, however, the folk music revivals in North America took a different trajectory than those in the Nordic region, to the extent that “folk music” has almost an entirely different meaning. In the United States especially, twentieth-century folk music revivals regularly focused on issues of economic justice, racial oppression, and related social movements rather than dwelling on national identity or instrumental repertoires. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of protest musicians like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, even if their deep involvement with the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights movement has arguably been white-washed from many popular histories.44 Similarly, folk and folk-rock musicians in the 1960s like Bob Dylan, Ritchie Havens, David Crosby, and Joan Baez provided the soundtrack to the hippie counterculture’s protests for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. In those contexts, musicians’ reliance on the instruments of everyday people was a powerful rhetorical tool setting them apart not only from “elite” classical music but also the slick and flashy products of the commercial music industry. It reminds of Kaminsky’s “nature” axis that prizes supposedly untutored performance referenced in earlier chapters, but with an added political dimension. Although there was definitely a commercial side to the 1960s folk revival and its musical progeny, the simplicity and approachability of the musical accompaniment underscored its commitment to community and to performing “authenticity” even in situations without overtly political intents. One of the most important wrinkles of the American folk music context is how the music became fashioned as a vehicle of intimate personal artistic and emotional expression in the hands of singer-songwriters like Dylan and Joni Mitchell, establishing an 173

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artistic lineage that could include Bruce Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, and many others besides. This interest in personal interiorities and emotional intimacy extends into American Nordic ritual folk music, with first-person introspection and narrative story-telling existing side-by-side with wilderness and spiritual concerns. As with much Romantic-era writing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Heinrich Heine’s poems in Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (1828), the desolate landscapes and vast wildernesses become metaphorically expressive of personal desolations and feelings of isolation. In the hands of American musicians who might identify as heathen or animist, this particular literary and lyrical conceit contextualizes spiritual and metaphysical connections to nature within an intimate personal frame. However, nature is not treated merely as a mirror for one’s inner world; it is also a means of restoration, healing, and a conduit for fostering deeper connections with non-human beings and kin. A few illustrative examples can be found in Agalloch’s 2002 album The Mantle and in songs by the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, both of whom hail from the Pacific Northwest. The Mantle juxtaposes invocations of the sacred within the natural world with personal laments of grief and loss, drawing on the musical idioms of acoustic folk music along with the electric guitars and growled vocals of black metal and the sweeping dramatic song forms of progressive rock.45 The album’s first proper song “In the Shadow of our Pale Companion” conjures an archetypal Romantic protagonist, alone and bereft in a numinous wilderness. He muses on the absence of God yet identifies divine presence in “pantheons of oak” and vast wild panoramas before offering a sacrifice of his blood to a river. Yet the songs “You Were but a Ghost in my Arms” and the album’s closer “A Desolation Song” are straightforward laments for deceased loved ones. Wolves in the Throne Room’s black metal music, on the other hand, is firmly centered on wilderness and regularly employs Nordic references within their odes to nature. They even think of recording and sound in natural terms, with the drummer Aaron Weaver describing how they wanted a recent record to sound warm and “orange,” like a decaying cedar.46 Their live performances contain elements from

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Ásatrú rituals, including offerings of wine and wafting sage smoke over themselves and the audience, actions depicted in their videos as well. Beyond the worlds of metal, similar sentiments animate the acoustic-based music of the Ohio-based Osi and the Jupiter, a project of the songwriter Sean Kratz and a cellist who performs under the stage name Kakophonix. Much of Osi and Jupiter’s music centers on Kratz’s acoustic guitar, utilizing both standard strumming patterns and fingerpicking, along with occasional banjo, organ, and minimal percussion parts. The cellist usually fills out the lower register, while sometimes contributing melodies and solo passages. From a technical standpoint, Osi and the Jupiter rely on simplistic chord progressions and rhythms to create a hypnotic effect and the vocals are often relatively quiet in the mix, nestled within the overall sound rather than occupying a place of prominence. Much of the music on Uthuling Hyl (2017) and Nordlige Rúnaskog (2019) also draws from the wells of Wardruna and epic movie soundtracks, utilizing environmental sounds, lush string arrangements, distant indistinct chanting, and deep echoing drum sounds.47 The prominence of the cello in their music also somewhat inevitably invites comparison with Ramin Djawadi’s title music for Game of Thrones. Kratz’s lyrics are almost entirely in English, even when the song and album titles are in Nordic languages and are peppered with references to Appalachia along with references to mountains, spirits, wolves, and “old ways.” Osi and the Jupiter’s 2021 record Stave provides a neat encapsulation of this approach­, beginning with its artwork and layout. The art is drawn by hand in pencil and/or charcoal on an aged-looking sepia-toned background, featuring musicians and instruments in a woodland environment. The cover centers on a hooded musician playing a cittern while a shamanic figure in the distance holds a spear near a bonfire attended by deer moose and elk, all framed by tree trunks and branches. A cello leans against the bottom right corner while the band’s runic symbol is at the top, with the album title “Stave” is carved into one of the lower trunks. The artistic theme continues through the rest of the liner notes, which center on instruments being reclaimed by nature. The back cover includes a banjo with its neck snapped leaning on a tree next to a deer skull, while the lyric page features an acoustic guitar being explored by a 175

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pair of raccoons and a cello with an owl perched on its headstock. The art on the credits page centers on a pair of wolves while a guitar and cello lay in the background, overgrown with vines and ferns. Along with this art, the credits page features a photo of the band members in a wooded area, both wearing flannel shirts and casual jackets, and with Kratz wearing a wide-brimmed leather rain hat. Taken on its own, there is nothing in the photo that suggests alignments with neopaganism; it looks like innumerable other band photos, although the setting and practical clothing choices convey a more outdoorsy aesthetic that hints toward acoustic music. Finally, the credits page also features the following message, Sage fills the hollows of old mountains, as the pine and oak towers like clusters of giants overcasting glowing meadows, where in the openings stars rain on lightened paths where any moon may cast those beyond what lyes [sic] in the shadows, many vails [sic] and worlds. May Nature Guide You.48

As with the band photo, this statement on its own could express a generalized romantic enthusiasm for wilderness, were it not in this context. The music on Stave moves between cinematic and sonorous instrumental tracks and guitar and banjo-centered songs with vocals. The first track “To Reap what has Sown” works as an extended introduction and even an overture of sorts showcasing these disparate elements, beginning with a repeating banjo riff in D minor and gradually adding layers of low piano accents, cello, and percussion around it. Although the banjo riff remains unchanged, the piano bassline eventually begins a rising progression from D to F to G and then finally to a somewhat surprising low C, which functions as a substitute dominant leading back to D minor. The rest of the album’s guitar and banjo work is similarly rooted in open chord progressions with lightly finger-picked patterns, providing a stable foundation for the vocals and cello parts. Although this album and others in the Osi and the Jupiter catalog have a similarly melancholy and epic tone as Wardruna and others in the ritual folk world, there is nothing particularly “Nordic” about any of the musical aspects. However, the “Americana” aspects of their music speak to a similar rejection of 176

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urban and cosmopolitan in favor of a particularly American strain of rural romanticism. The albums’ lyrics and song titles focus on forests, mountains, “old ways,” and pathways. There are multiple invocations of the Eihwaz rune, a Proto-Germanic rune that is associated with the yew tree, and the Old English rune poem attests to the yew being strongly supported by its roots and a “guardian of flame.” The stave, a load-bearing post, also figures heavily in the lyrics, with the song “In Death” including lines such as “Wyrd of life and death—Staved into the bone” and “This pagan forest—Staved into my soul.” The use of “stave” as a verb implies a sense of deepness and rootedness, a mystical connection to the forests, hills, and the folkways that serve to maintain that connection. This broader idea also illuminates aesthetic connections and kinships with musicians and bands who might not outwardly seem part of that spiritual world. After all, concerns over environmental destruction, alienation from the earth, and loss of community are widespread across the arts. To take a natural metaphor, it can become rather like the underground mycelium networks that connect and communicate between trees of various species in a forest. Here, the connective tissue might be the desire to musically invoke a reenchanted world, in which humans are in touch with the landscapes and geographies that we inhabit. Further, these lands are populated with beings rather than things, many of which may also be hidden and unknowable. Thus one might consider connections between, for example, nature-focused black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Spell Songs, a folk ensemble formed as a musical complement to Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words: A Spell Book (2017), a book of art and poetry written in response to the removal of common nature words from a popular UK children’s dictionary.49 Similarly, the book Weird Walk, a collection by UK authors that builds on familiar “local colour” travelogues and nature memoirs by taking a “folk horror” perspective toward megalithic sites and rural traditions.50 Keeping to the United Kingdom, one might also highlight the rock band Green Lung, whose musical aesthetic leans heavily on British folk horror films and television series from the 1960s and ’70s, but whose name refers to areas of natural parkland set aside within urban areas with 177

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the intent of creating a healthier environment. Even if the supernatural and magical are left aside, in these works, the world becomes charged if not literally charmed, potentially creating a deeper sense of belonging and responsibility to the environment and the beings inhabiting it. It can sometimes seem as if the medievalism and traditionalism of Ásatrú and Viking revival are used as a talisman against modernity, whereas this perspective urges engagement with the present. These sorts of environmental concerns also inform many of the “extracurricular” activities offered by the music festivals Midgardsblot in Norway and Fire in the Mountains and Cascadian Midsummer in the United States. Midgardsblot is held in cooperation with the Midgard Vikingsenter Museum and archeological site, and most of the talks naturally deal with historical subjects in one way or another. As one might also expect, Ásatrú practitioners especially are often intensely interested in academic explorations of ancient Nordic cultures and artifacts, even if they are not academics themselves. However, the 2023 festival included the Sámi performers Mari Boine, Katarina Barruk, and ISÁK, all of whom tied their performances explicitly to Sámi activist concerns regarding Indigenous land rights and the protection of their language and culture. Fire in the Mountains, on the other hand, connected itself explicitly to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, with the stated vision being to “provide the avenues to reconnect profoundly with the wilderness and the raw power of nature that most people need to experience in this ever disconnecting, distracting, and complex world we live in.”51 To this end, the festival offered scholarships in which attendees spent their mornings assisting US Forest Service rangers in the restoration and removal of invasive weeds in the area, and also offered lectures and workshops on local plant life and Indigenous perspectives. While it is worth noting that these environmental efforts also worked to counteract opposition to the festival from some Jackson Hole locals, ultimately unsuccessfully, it was also a clearly central part of the organizers’ ethos. Cascadian Midsummer likewise hosted several speakers and workshops, also focusing on local flora, Indigenous perspectives, and holistic wellness in addition to mythology and folklore.52

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In considering the current cultural interests in neopaganism and the wider media fascination with Vikings, much of the community revolves around escapist spectacles of costumed fantasy acted out with a soundtrack of heavy metal and anachronistic folk music. It resembles other countercultural and “alternative” movements in this regard; many of the participants are seeking nothing more than camaraderie and merriment. The spiritual and ritual aspects may not hold any appeal beyond aesthetics. But there is perhaps potential for this musical subculture to cultivate a kind of ethic and care regardless. As with the impossibilities of musical reconstructions, the folkways of the Nordic region in past centuries and millennia are irretrievable in many respects, and there are certainly aspects that would be best left in the past. The notions of ancient peoples placidly living in harmony due to their spiritual connections with nature are rife with romanticisms; connection to nature and to one’s fellows are crucial for survival in unforgiving environments with limited resources. Yet the communities that produce the music that animates this study consider that modern society is a likewise unforgiving environment, hence the consistent undercurrents of therapeutic healing and cleansing within song lyrics and subcultural discourse. It would not be inappropriate to refer to these festivals as sites of pilgrimage, even merely because they allow participants to create a temporary community that authenticates those in attendance.53 What might be found in such music is the possibility of cultivating that “oceanic” feeling of connection to the earth and to each other, even after one has taken off the Viking tunics, put away the tagelharpa, and returned home to the mundane world. Even if one doesn’t necessarily feel the spirits or one’s ancestors, it might make the world feel a little more enchanted while waiting for the next gathering. In tracing the varied threads of the music side of this scene through exoticized visions of ancient Nordic peoples, traditional Nordic music, “landscape music,” diverse world music traditions, and the various approaches to musical “spellcasting,” the intent has been to illuminate not only where this music comes from but to possibly shed some light on how it “works.” The examples of Heilung and Wardruna demonstrate that something of a standardized musical toolkit has developed over the 179

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years, while Osi and the Jupiter show some alternative approaches drawing from American traditions. As with other sorts of ritual and religious music, the musical idiom helps to direct the experience, so its idiomatic touchstones of musical style and form work in step with its cultural background to particular ends, all also deeply informed by the expectations of the listener. If listeners expect magical forces arising from the primordial North to be at work in music, it should then be no surprise that many have those magical experiences and then seek further wisdom from the ancestors.

Notes

1. Mark Slobin, Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19. 2. Hedningarna, “Joupolle Joutunut,” on Kaksi! Silence, 1992, compact disc. 3. Simon Trafford, “Nata vimpi curmi da: Dead Languages and Primordial Nationalisms in Folk Metal Music,” in Multilingual Metal Music: Sociocultural, Linguistic and Literary Perspectives on Heavy Metal Lyrics, Edited by Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi, Charlotte Doesburg, and Amanda DeGioia (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited), 223–40. 4. Mitchell, “Sigur Rós’s Heima,” 188–91. 5. Mindy MacLeod, Bernard Mees, and Bernard Thomas Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects (Martlesham, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). 6. Nina Urholt Nielsen, “From Black Metal to Norse Revival? Mournfulness, Memories, and Meanings of Wardruna’s Rune Music,” in Musikk og religion: Tekster om musikk I religion og religion i musikk, Edited by Henrik Holm and Øivind Varkøy (Cappelen Dann Akademisk, 2022) 330–1. 7. Wardruna, Skald, By Norse Music, 2018, compact disc; Nytt Land, Fimbulvinter, Cold Spring, 2017, compact disc. 8. Vǫluspá, Vǫluspá. Self-released, 2013. Digital release. 9. Thor-Rune Haugen, Folque—Folque (Oslo: Falck Forlag AS, 2022), 5. 10. Finnish Literary Society, Suomen Kansan eSävelmät (Digital Archive of Finnish Folk Tunes) http:​//​esavelmat​.jyu​.fi​/savelma​.php​?numero​=rs1​_0463​&uil=. 11. Erkki Pekkilä, “History, Geography, and Diffusion: Ilmari Krohn’s Early Influence on the Study of European Folk Music,” Ethnomusicology 50, no. 2 (2006): 353–59. 12. Kati Hainonen, ARMAS LAUNIKSEN FONOGRAMMIT SOIKKOLASTA: laulutavan, runon ja laulutilanteen välisiä yhteyksiä kalevalamittaisessa runoudessa. (Master’s Thesis, University of Helsinki Department of Cultural Studies, 2005), 161, https:​//​helda​ .helsinki​.fi​/bitstream​/handle​/10138​/19547​/armaslau​.pdf. 13. Hedningarna, Kaksi! Northside NSD6007, 1998 (US reissue), liner notes. 14. Ramnarine, Ilmatar’s Inspirations. 107. 15. Hill, “Global Folk Music,” 62. 16. Garmarna, Vedergällningen, MNW, 1999, compact disc. 17. The Prodigy, Firestarter, XL Recordings, 1996, CD single.

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Individual Musical Approaches 18. Zero-G, Jungle Warfare, Time + Space TAS CD 62, 1995. The true origin of the loop is likely “Devotion (The Voice of Paradise Mix),” a 1989 track by the R&B group Ten City. 19. Heilung, “Traust,” from Futha, Season of Mist, 2019, compact disc. 20. “Heilung—Traust Lyrics + English Translation,” Lyrics Translate, accessed October 23, 2023, https:​//​lyricstranslate​.com​/en​/traust​-trust​.html; Stephen Flowers, The Galdrabók: An Icelandic Grimoire (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1989). 21. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 22. Heilung, Drif, Season of Mist, 2022, compact disc. 23. Robin Sylvan. Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music (New York: NYU Press, 2002). 24. Johannes Eurich, “Sociological Aspects and Ritual Similarities in the Relationship between Pop Music and Religion,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 34, no. 1 (2003): 57–70; Tim Becker, Raphael Woebs, and Linda Fujie, “‘Back to the Future’: Hearing, Rituality and Techno,” The World of Music 41, no. 1 (1999): 59–71; Scott R. Hutson, “The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures,” Anthropological Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2000): 35–49. 25. Hutson, “The Rave” 41–43. 26. Hutson, “The Rave” 44. 27. Ruth Herbert, “Reconsidering Music and Trance: Cross-Cultural Differences and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives,” Ethnomusicology Forum 20, no. 2 (2011): 201–27. 28. Richard C. Jankowsky, “Music, Spirit Possession and the In-between: Ethnomusicological Inquiry and the Challenge of Trance,”  Ethnomusicology Forum  16, no. 2 (2007): 185–208. Richard Jankowsky, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 29. Florian Fricke, “Schamanismus in der Popkultur: Musikalische Medizin,” Hörspiel und Feature, May 3, 2019. 30. “Heilung Tribe and spiritual community,” Facebook, https:​//​www​.facebook​.com​/ groups​/976730562509978/. 31. Ruben Terlouw, Ancient Resonance: The Sound of Archaeology and the Role of Audio in Museums. Saxion University of Applied Sciences. 2020 (unpublished BA thesis). 32. Trevor Morris, Vikings (Music from the TV Series), Sony Classical, 2013, compact disc; Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones (Music from the HBO Series), Varèse Sarabande, 2011, compact disc. 33. Nielsen, “From Black Metal,” 324. 34. Wardruna, Runaljod—Ragnarok. Oslo: By Norse Music, 2016, liner notes. 35. Wardruna, Runaljod—Gap var Ginnunga. Indie Recordings, 2009, liner notes. 36. Nielsen, “From Black Metal,” 323. 37. Wardruna, Runaljod—Yggdrasil, Indie Recordings, 2013, compact disc. 38. Nielsen “From Black Metal,” 317–44. 39. Nielsen “From Black Metal,” 322.

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Chapter 5 40. Jonas Lorentzen, “The spiritual side of sexuality—interview with ‘Nebala,’” interview by Dark Folk Nation, October 15, 2020, https:​//​darkfolknation​.art​/2020​/10​/15​/the​ -spiritual​-side​-of​-sexuality​-interview​-with​-nebala/. 41. Nebala. Lustuz Laþu Wōþuz Alu. By Norse Music BNM040CD, 2022, compact disc, liner notes. 42. Ensemble Organum, Messe de Notre Dame, Harmonia Mundi, 1996, compact disc. 43. I should note that this insight arose from the fact that this book’s co-author Mathias Nordvig was a collaborator on this album. Locating such an esoteric reference would be very difficult otherwise. 44. Mark Allan Jackson, “Is This Song Your Song Anymore?: Revisioning Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’” American Music 20, no. 3 (2002): 249–76. https:​//​doi​ .org​/10​.2307​/1350126. 45. Agalloch, The Mantle, The End Records, 2002, compact disc. 46. Gregory Adams, “Wolves in the Throne Room on ‘Powerful Plants,’ Transcendence, Primordial Arcana,” Revolver, July 8, 2021, accessed 29 August 2021, www​.revolvermag​ .com​/music​/wolves​-throne​-room​-powerful​-plantstranscendence-primordial-arcana. 47. Osi and the Jupiter, Nordlige Rúnaskog, Eisenwald Tonschmiede, 2019, compact disc; Osi and the Jupiter, Uthuling Hyl, Eisenwald Tonschmiede, 2017, compact disc. 48. Osi and the Jupiter, Stave, Eisenwald, 2021, compact disc, liner notes. 49. Spell Songs, The Lost Words, Quercus Records, 2019, compact disc; Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2018). 50. Stewart Lee, Weird Walk: Wanderings and Wonderings through the British Ritual Year (London: Watkins Publishing, 2023). 51. “Our Vision,” Fire in the Mountains, accessed November 1, 2023, https:​//​fitmfest​ .com​/about​-fitm​/our​-vision/. 52. “The Speakers” Cascadian Midsummer, accessed November 2, 2023, https:​//​www​ .cmfest​.org​/copy​-of​-speakers. 53. Fredrik Gregorius and Jane Skjoldli, “Pagan pilgrimage? Midgardsblot as Ritual Space,” (lecture, Midgard Vikingsenter, Borre, Norway, August 17, 2023); Corentin Charbonnier, Hellfest: Un Pèlerinage pour Metalheads (Azay-sur-Cher: Corentin Charbonnier éditions, 2017).

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Over the course of this book’s writing, the ritual, spiritual, and musical world that we’ve attempted to fashion as “Nordic ritual folk” proved itself to be a dynamic and moving subject, which is one of the simultaneously exciting and frustrating aspects of writing on any ongoing cultural movement. The book was also affected in some respects by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on performers and the wider concert industry, which affected logistics and travel well after 2020. Indeed, one might attribute much of the ecstatic energy of Heilung’s 2021 concert at Red Rocks to the rush of attending a live concert after going so long without. The varied political aspects of Nordic neopaganism continue to evolve and will certainly demand further studies as tensions continue between those for whom it is a conservative refuge from modern pluralism, civil rights movements, and multiculturalism and those who see its potential as a force for progressivism and social justice. While the festivals and musicians we’ve explored in this book state their oppositions to neo-fascism, misogyny, homophobia, and other bigotries via pronouncements both online and onstage, such associations certainly continue apace in other venues regardless of such statements. Although we’ve explored the lengthy history of various ideological and philosophical connections between Nordic neopaganism and both European fascism and its progeny, there is course a wide array of groups and individuals today who continue to mobilize ancient Norse symbols and stories in service of 183

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such agendas. The wider mainstream popularity of Viking symbols perhaps robs them of some of their signifying power in those contexts, but it also makes it harder to determine the intentions of people who wear them. Other ideological contradictions and minefields are also baked into more generally animistic worldviews, such as the fact that seemingly progressive eco-spiritualities can also cultivate strains of xenophobia and ethnocentrism. The focus on pre-Christian European indigeneity has the potential to overlap with chauvinistic “blood and soil” ideals that conceive of landscapes and regions as discrete and culturally static enclaves that need protection from outsiders who supposedly don’t belong there. A particular incident at the 2023 Midgardsblot festival perhaps shows some of the potential cracks and weaknesses. As noted previously, the 2023 festival included several Sámi performers and activists, and featured a special performance by the American Indigenous black metal band Blackbraid. Blackbraid is a relatively young band, but they have released a pair of well-reviewed albums and garnered a significant amount of press coverage in 2023, including a profile in The New York Times.1 Their performance at Midgardsblot was highly anticipated and was, by any measure, a highlight of the weekend. However, the following day, they were ejected from the festival grounds after their guitarist either fell asleep or passed out drunk on a hill next to the main stage. When he was eventually approached by security guards, the situation escalated to a conflict. This altercation could have been chalked up to several factors depending on how generous one would want to be to either party, but in the end, security was not allowed by law to let anyone who fell unconscious remain on the festival grounds. Later that night the members of Blackbraid posted to their social media accounts and accused the festival of ejecting them because of their ethnicity, claiming that they had been repeatedly harassed by security over the weekend. The reactions from Blackbraid’s fans and the online communities around Midgardsblot were as strong as one might expect, with numerous accusations and arguments, both publicly and privately, that instantly engaged an international audience. Participants in the discussion threads on the Midgardsblot community page on Facebook generally (and unsurprisingly) sided with the festival against the accusations and with the security guards as well, 184

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claiming that the band members should have known and followed the rules. Some commenters also mistakenly assumed that the band members had been sleeping on the Borre burial mounds and accused the band of disrespecting sacred grounds. The assertion that a group of Native American men would violate sacred burial grounds by sleeping on them drips with irony, not only given the long history of deliberate destruction and desecration of American and Arctic Indigenous sites by Europeans, but also because the Borre mounds are not within the festival area and it would have been perfectly fine to take a nap on them. However, other commenters were sympathetic to the band, speculating that their combative reaction to festival security might have been conditioned by discrimination and mistreatment that they may have faced as Indigenous persons in the United States. Ultimately, Blackbraid deleted their initial posts after a few days, and there was never any official announcement from Midgardsblot, and eventually it seems that cooler heads prevailed and/or swept it all under the proverbial rug. The episode is hard to assess from the outside perspective, especially without observing the events in full detail or feeling the emotions of the individuals involved. On the one hand, one may be inclined to accept the formal terms set by Norwegian law and enforced by the security personnel on-site; on the other hand, it is hard to overlook the deep history of abuse that underscores the meeting between European enforcers of authority and Indigenous populations globally—and in Norway. Norwegian history is marked with cultural and linguistic suppression of the Indigenous Sámi, not least over the last 200 years, during which Sámi have suffered from genocidal suppression and assimilation by the majority population.2 Indeed, Scandinavia at large has a dark colonial history, which has left traces in its populations and their behaviors. To someone familiar with the colonial history of the region, it is not hard to see how the behavior of the security guards at Midgardsblot mirrors authoritarian enforcement of suppression of minorities such as the Sámi or Kalaallit (Greenland Inuit) in urban Scandinavian spaces. Having suffered similar social malaise as Native Americans in the United States and Canada, in recent times from residential school programs and government-run adoption programs, Sámi and Inuit have long been overrepresented 185

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among the destitute in urban Scandinavian spaces. In fact, strict laws enforced around alcohol consumption in both Norway and Sweden have a component to them that often targets those populations. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the incident with Blackbraid, in some respects, was informed by cultural stereotypes linked to Scandinavia’s own Indigenous populations, which runs somewhat parallel to the long history of degrading stereotypes around American Indigenous people and alcoholism. In turn, given the development of public discourse on non-white and Indigenous populations in North America over the last few years, where the Black Lives Matter movement has brought subjects such as the lack of safety from law enforcement to the fore, one can understand the reactions of Blackbraid’s members. The events also highlighted the tendency for white progressive spaces like Midgardsblot to ultimately value their own preservation and security above solidarity with marginalized groups, regardless of what their official statements might claim. While this incident seems like a singular occurrence, metalheads and metal scholars also have a decades-long history of loudly proclaiming that the metal subculture is an inclusive and safe space for participants who are women, persons of color or Indigenous, and/or queer or gender-nonconforming. However, members of those groups have long related repeatedly that this has not been their experience.3 Further, when members of these groups relay accounts of aggressive or demeaning behavior, they have typically been met with denials, gaslighting, and harassment from fellow metalheads. Many of these festivals have consciously curated their physical and online spaces to encourage inclusivity and discourage expressions of bigotry in order to decouple this music and its subculture from its past (and present) associations with far-right politics. As much as statements like these might articulate progressive stances from a place of genuine care and solidarity, they are also a form of reputation management and preemptive damage control designed to protect festivals, venues, and performers from economic loss. Yet the example from Midgardsblot perhaps also shows how prizing civility and comfort above all can work as a mechanism for exclusion and silencing.

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In the intersection between heavy metal-derived Nordic ritual folk music and neopaganism, this problem of exclusion and silencing of minorities is further augmented by how that scene is attached to regional and national identities and imaginary versions of history. In Metal Music and Re-imagining Masculinity, Karl Spracklen notes about a Wardruna concert he attended in Manchester that there were no non-white faces in sight, deducing that the concert functioned as a “white, northern European imagined, imaginary community expressed in [this] pre-Christian ritual.”4 Spracklen’s claim about audiences attending Wardruna concerts is that they establish a sense of identity and create a feeling of being a (white) Viking for a day. He further argues that they seek to belong there in that space, not in the multi-cultural space of Britain, generating, in his view, a desire to “live like Vikings.”5 This is likely the case for some members of the audiences in attendance at Wardruna concerts, Heilung concerts, and festivals such as Midgardsblot, and one may be led to think that the above example of Blackbraid’s experience at Midgardsblot demonstrates that these events indeed are white hegemonic spaces that allow little to no room for non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-cis-gendered identities. However, it should be critically considered if such desires are universally applicable if the audience’s intentions implicate the artists, and even if longing to live “like a Viking” then also necessarily implies racism and white hegemony. A more encouraging aspect is that some of these neopagan spaces do seem to be legitimately embracing dynamic and fluid expressions of gender identity, sexuality, and other diversities. For example, the 2019 festival featured a race in which pairs of participants attempted to paddle the fjord in unwieldy rainbow unicorn pool floats, and the unicorn float has been a mascot for the Norwegian youth advocacy organization Metalheads Against Bullying. Publications like the 2023 collection Black Metal Rainbows articulate visions of black metal that emphasize its potential to be a truly revolutionary space driven by inclusivity, queerness, and camp instead of reactionary rigidity.6 The varied transformations and shape-shiftings in the Nordic story-world, particularly concerning the trickster figure Loki, also underpin such possibilities within Nordic neopagan circles. In her 2011 study, Stefanie von 187

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Schurbein notes that neopaganism has long served as a spiritual home for sexual minorities and fetishists, and that the Icelandic Ásatrúarfélagið was the first Scandinavian religious community to officiate same-sex weddings.7 Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal’s (Wardruna, Gorgoroth) coming out as gay in 2008 could in hindsight also be considered something of a watershed moment for black metal and Nordic ritual folk, although Gaahl’s legacy is complicated significantly by his multiple convictions for violent assaults.8 Although homophobic attitudes certainly persist among some Ásatrú and neopagan groups and practitioners, the musicians and broader communities discussed in this book tend to align themselves with more progressive and liberatory ideals around sexuality. As an example, in early summer 2023 Heilung’s Maria Franz and Christopher Juul announced online that their romantic partnership had expanded to include another woman from Heilung’s troupe and were widely affirmed and congratulated by their fans. However, while such positivity might be expected from Heilung’s fan community in that instance, it is also easy to imagine a less rosy situation in the future in which such commitments and solidarities might be tested. Advocacy involving neurodivergence and mental health is also becoming increasingly visible at these musical and ritual gatherings. Participants in the large Heilung fan community on Facebook regularly engage in frank discussions of mental health struggles and the ways that Heilung’s music assists them. The presence of groups like the UK-based Heavy Metal Therapy and Metalheads Against Bullying at festivals demonstrates further potential. This aspect, in particular, is an emerging arena of study in both academic and clinical settings, taking metal’s generations of fascination with “altered states” and extreme expression as an entry point for supporting those in recovery or otherwise needing assistance.9 This relatively recent aspect is a welcome development and something that we certainly encourage scholars and clinicians in health and social science to continue exploring. These emerging trends also offer nuance to Spracklen’s discussion about the spaces in which artists like Wardruna and Heilung perform, as well as the messaging that the artists themselves present around these topics. At Wardruna’s 2022 Midgardsblot performance, Einar Selvik 188

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provided a short commentary denouncing notions of white supremacy and what he framed as “the pissing contest between cultures,” stating clearly that he does not perceive his performance and art as a project in support of those ideas.10 Selvik made a similar statement at Wardruna’s concert in Salt Lake City in 2022, so it seems to be a regular part of his performances to both acknowledge that a portion of their audience receives them in this manner and to disavow that reading. Further, Selvik described Wardruna as a contribution to a multicultural, multiethnic, and inclusive music scene. Judging from Selvik’s comments, he does not want his fans to come to his concerts and establish an imaginary version of the past to nestle in and live “like a Viking.” Similar sentiments have been expressed by Ivar Bjørnson of Enslaved, Selvik’s collaborator and co-owner of Wardruna’s music label ByNorse.11 This messaging perceivably goes along with action, considering that ByNorse has signed iconic Sámi singer Mari Boine, who also tours with Wardruna. Where Wardruna’s artistic expression and artists tend to exclusively rest in the Nordic realm, Heilung is, as noted earlier, reaching farther beyond the Nordic region. As an international troupe, the ensemble embodies multiple cultural identities, some of which are not exclusively European. Heilung’s drummer Nicolas Schipper is from Ecuador, born to parents who migrated there from Chile, and his family background includes Spanish, Mestizo, English, and Scottish. In personal communication and in social media posts, Schipper describes his artistic expression on stage as deeply rooted in cultural practices from Ecuador, particularly his black and red face paint.12 On stage, Schipper’s paint stands out in contrast to the warriors who are painted black, based on inspiration from Tacitus’s Germania, where the Roman author reported in c. 90 CE that the Germanic-speaking Harii tribe painted their bodies black before going to war. Schipper’s paint is inspired by the Wuairuro seeds that are important to Indigenous peoples in Ecuador, representing the “pain, deaths and constant fight of First Nation/Indigenous people fighting for their territories, their land and culture.”13 Schipper has explained that when he announced that he wanted to use these colors, his fellow performers supported that as a perfectly natural and complimentary contribution to their artistic expression. 189

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Schipper is also the troupe’s primary contact for Indigenous performers who accompany Heilung on stage for an opening ritual whenever the band performs outside of Europe. It is his task to find and organize dancers and performers from local Indigenous tribes in North America, Australia, and Asia, and Schipper claims that the band will not perform unless they have first received a blessing from the original peoples of the land where their performance takes place. He clearly sees this as a genuine attempt on behalf of the band to establish a space at their concerts that is not aligned with notions of white hegemony, despite their attachment to the northern European region, but the practice warrants an investigation into whether it is an appropriative practice. Appropriation is, at its core, a practice in majority populations where the cultural, economic, and spiritual aspects of a minority population are used, disconnected from their origin, and merged with the majority population’s exploitative structures. As such, appropriation is, at the surface level, a tribute to the minority population, but below the surface, it functions as a further dispossession of the minority population on various levels. In North America, for instance, Native American cultural expressions have been appropriated by Euro-descended settlers to add exoticism to commercial products, and, in recent times, to allow Euro-descended Americans to detach themselves from the aura of colonization, suppression, and genocide that is inherent to the history of the establishment of current North American regimes. Innumerable examples of such surface “tributes” in the United States range from athletic mascots like the (former) Washington Redskins and Kansas City Chiefs to outdoor vehicles like the Jeep Cherokee to military weaponry such as Blackhawk helicopters and Tomahawk missiles. The complicated history of genocide and erasure in the meeting between Euro-descended settlers and Indigenous populations across the world makes any interaction, whether intentional or not, a potential space for appropriation, exploitation, and abuse. In the conflict between Blackbraid and Midgardsblot, this should certainly be taken into consideration. In the case of Heilung’s performances, we can also look to dancers like Nizhoni Ellenwood, who has danced with them on their North American tours since 2019.14 Ellenwood is an enrolled member of 190

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NiMiiPuu (Nez Perce), a cultural educator, dancer, actor, and performing artist. In her social media, she describes Heilung as a project that increases diversity and intercultural communication, noting the beauty, healing, and community that she feels from it. Many of her posts are joyous group photos from before and after concerts and tours in which she welcomes Heilung to her homeland. Although there may be more complicated feelings and situations behind her effusive posts, they also evince a feeling of belonging and connection with Heilung and their troupe. Other posts by dancers Rhyia JoyHeart (@joyheartrhyia) and Candido Cornejo (@kissedbyloki) are similarly positive in tone, and also demonstrate the connections between these dancers and professional troupes like Denver’s United Indigenous Dancers and Indigenous casting agencies working with performers like The Halluci Nation and shows like Reservation Dogs. Of course, we should note that it is also unsurprising that members of the performing troupe would view Heilung’s performance aesthetic and approach positively, otherwise they wouldn’t be involved in the first place. Nor should a reader presume that they speak for anyone but themselves; some members of their Indigenous communities might have understandable misgivings about Heilung. It is also worth considering instances in which rhetoric urging togetherness and connection has served to paper over injustices, perhaps even unintentionally. But their perspective at least tempers the default tendency to view the sorts of cultural encounters Heilung creates as a sort of one-way street or neocolonial cultural extraction. The situation also brings to mind numerous Indigenous musicians and bands like Blackbraid who have adopted transnational musical styles like metal, rock, techno, and hip-hop as vehicles for the expression of Indigenous identity. As one example, Maria de la Luz Nuñez details how Peruvian metal bands assimilate metal into their own local musical styles as a form of mestizaje, with the transnational style acting as a means for disseminating Indigenous culture. Crucially, within the mestizaje conception, the Native culture is not seen as having been diluted or destroyed in the process, even as it is transformed by the exchange.15 The potential for cultural pageantry and exoticism remains, however, as Nelson VarasDiaz suggests regarding the popularity of the theatrical “Aztec” Mexican 191

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band Cemican on the European festival circuit and as explored in this book’s earlier chapter on world music.16 Yet there remains a possibility for a different sort of relationship in which Indigenous epistemologies are privileged within the music. Although the creative trio behind Heilung may be rooted in Scandinavia, a similar goal seems to animate their project, and they also seem to recognize that collaboration and leadership from Indigenous performers are crucial. While their choices may not be universally accepted, it also seems clear that the Indigenous performers we conversed with view Heilung as an appropriate and effective vehicle for conveying their message to wider audiences. This warrants reconsideration of the notion that performances by Heilung and Wardruna necessarily establish white hegemonic spaces that encourage their audience to imagine a “Viking world” or Nordic past in opposition to the current multicultural and globalized reality. While Spracklen may have observed an exclusively white crowd at a Wardruna concert in Manchester, the skin color of everyone in that audience is hardly indicative of their intellectual and emotional life, unless one subscribes to race essentialism. As Owen Coggins writes in his review of Spracklen’s book: “I was at one of the specific concerts described, and I can confirm I do not want to live as a Viking.”17 Similarly, many neopagans (including Dr. Nordvig) would describe their attachment to a northern European identity, framed in the distant past, as being far removed from the white supremacist imaginary. Observing the racial composition of a concert audience and then imagining their thoughts and feelings are perhaps also insufficient methods for gauging the roles that music might play in a subculture. To be sure, it is easy to regard Nordic ritual folk music and “revivalist” cultural practices with cynicism, given the long history of white supremacist appropriation. From the Aryan myth to Indianthusiasm to “playing Viking,” Euro-descended audiences have been and are still being roped into ideological and political projects designed to establish, reinforce, and expand European supremacy, white supremacy, racism, and nationalism. This is a serious problem that requires constant attention but is hardly solved by scholarship that declines to approach musicians and their audiences with genuine inquiry.

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Even admitting that there is an undeniable element of fantasy cosplay also at work in Nordic ritual folk music, there are particular joys and benefits that come from role-playing as a part of a fandom or reenactment community. In a venue like Midgardsblot, it can also become a spiritually meaningful experience, even for those who don’t approach it as heathen practitioners, with seemingly “unserious” ludic and carnivalesque elements playing a key role. Indeed, playfulness is fundamental for creating a sort of magic frame around these events and allowing participants to collectively conjure up a temporary alternative world, a prerequisite not only for roleplay but also for ritual and religious practices.18 For example, this close sociological affinity between religion and fantasy role-playing likely accounts for much of the 1980s moral panic around the game Dungeons and Dragons in the United States, in which right-wing Christian organizations claimed the game was a tool of Satanic indoctrination.19 In a study of American participants at “mountain man” rendezvous, Civil War reenactments, and Renaissance fairs, Patrick McCarthy considers that the space-time environment of reenactments enters into what one might term “Sacred Time” or “Primordial Time,” which invokes a sense of ritual timelessness free of “clock time,” and which allows participants to temporarily liberate themselves from social demands, rigidities, and conventions.20 The sacralized environment is heightened by the merging of past and present through the emphasis on “living history” and its physical separation from the everyday. To this end, festivals like Fire in the Mountains and Cascadian Midsummer take place in a wilderness shelter, a mountain plain in the first instance and a Cascadian cedar forest in the next, although, of course, neither were truly “primitive” given the logistics of mounting a metal concert with hundreds of attendees. The festival grounds at Midgardsblot are likewise nestled next to the woods of the Borre National Park, which gives the area a wilderness feeling even though it is located on the main coastal road. Yet, in each instance, there is just enough seclusion to create a sense of entering a mystical and sacred realm for a weekend, along with a cadre of fellow revelers, oddballs, and forest creatures, in order to return to the mundane world refreshed and renewed.

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Finally, it is worth considering that these sorts of cultural expressions among Euro-descended audiences are more than cosplay and disingenuous detachment from urban life, or simply a place where one gets to revel in identitarian practices. Such festivals could potentially become functional arenas for reimagining our place in the world and for resituating whiteness as a product of European culture within a diverse, egalitarian, and multicultural world. Some readers will undoubtedly consider this notion to be its own kind of fantasy, born out of misplaced optimism or, perhaps more cynically, both authors’ own admitted closeness with these musical and spiritual communities. But while vigilance is warranted and missteps are inevitable, it may yet be possible for the ancient past to enact some modicum of healing on the present and the future, if we’ll let it.

Notes

1. Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Meet Blackbraid, a Black Metal Musician with Native American Roots,” The New York Times, July 5, 2023, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2023​/07​/05​/arts​ /music​/blackbraid​-native​-american​-black​-metal​.html. 2. Minde, 2005. 3. Laina Dawes, What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Brooklyn: Bazillion Points, 2012); Rosemary Lucy Hill, “Metal in Women: Music, Empowerment, Misogyny,” in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music, Edited by Jan-Peter Herbst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 144–55. 4. Spracklen, 2020: 114–15. 5. Spracklen, 2020: 115. 6. Daniel Lukes, Stanimir Panayotov, and Jaci Raia, ed. Black Metal Rainbows (Oakland: PM Press, 2023). 7. Stephanie von Schnurbein, Norse Revival, 246–47. 8. Amber Clifford-Napoleone, Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent (New York: Routledge, 2015). 9. Kate Quinn, “Heavy Metal Music and Managing Mental Health,” Metal Music Studies 5, no. 3 (2019): 419–24; Paula Rowe, “Metal Identities and Self-Talk: Internal Conversations of Belonging, Empowerment, Well-being and Resilience,” in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music, ed. Jan-Peter Herbst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 131–43; Jasmine Hazel Shadrack, Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2020). 10. Unrealize, “Wardruna—Helvegen—Midgardsblot Festival 2022 – Norway,” YouTube.com https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=SQ8Xwi​_6vQg. 11. “Mirrors, Revolving Doors, and Wormholes: Music’s (fuzzy) Connections to Cultural Pasts,” Panel discussion, Fire in the Mountains, Moran WY, July 24, 2022. 12. Personal communication between Mathias Nordvig and Nicolas Schipper, Nov. 6–7, 2023.

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Aftermath 13. Instagram post on @schippermusik, accessed 12/7/2023, published on Instagram c. 110 weeks ago (2021). 14. Instagram.com/ellenwoodnizhoni. We did have a more extensive discussion with Nizhoni Ellenwood on her participation in Heilung’s performances, but we never received her release form and so were unable to include more specific thoughts. 15. Maria de la Luz Nuñez, “The stones sing: The mestizo metal music of Kay Pacha and Yana Raymi,” Metal Music Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 129–38. 16. Nelson Varas-Díaz, Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America (Chicago: Intellect, 2021), 30–31. 17. Owen Coggins, “Metal Music and the Re-imagining of Masculinity, Place, Race, and Nation, Karl Spracklen” Metal Music Studies 7, no. 1 (2020):182. 18. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 9–14. 19. Joseph P. Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 13–17. 20. Patrick McCarthy, “‘Living History’ as the Real Thing’: A Comparative Analysis of the Modern Mountain Man Rendezvous, Renaissance Fairs, and Civil War Reenactments.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 71, no. 2 (2014): 106–23. http:​//​www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/24761920.

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216

Index

4AD (record label), 20, 123 Aarseth, Øystein, 22, 95 Abbey, Edward, 172 Accordion, 23, 91, 98, 99 Adam of Bremen, 6, 15 Adams, John Luther, 75, 77 Æsir, 9, 10, 11, 150, 169 Afro-Cuban music, 106, 114–15 Agalloch, 172, 174 Alcuin of York, 15 Alfred the Great, 16 Alsherjargodi, 22–23 Ambient music, 4, 76, 127, 138, 164 American Indian music, 149 Americana, 176 Amled, 55, 56 Amorphis, 21, 98 Amundsen, Roald, 43 Animism, 115, 119, 127, 140, 155, 160, 172, 174, 184 Annwn, 129 Antiquitatum danicarum de causis contemptae a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis, 34 Appalachian Spring, 75 Arabic Music, 110, 131

Arcomnia, 129 Ari Þorgilson inn fróði, 34 Ariosophy, 13 Aryan, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 57, 61, 116, 142, 192 Asalære, 10 The Asatru Community, 13 Ásatrú, 5, 9–13, 16, 21–23, 27, 97, 112, 121, 147, 155, 163, 172, 175, 178, 188; Ásatrúar, xiv, 16; Rökkrtrú, 11; Thursatrú, 11; Vanatrú, 11 Ásatrú Alliance, 22 Ásatrú Folk Assembly, 13, 22 Ásatrúarfélagið, 22, 188 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, 24, 59, 164 Astralseid, 155, 163 Aswynn, Freya, 22 Atland eller Manheim, 34 Atlantis, 34, 57 Authenticity, 3, 9, 10, 12, 19, 24, 26, 58–59, 71, 85, 90, 92, 94, 105, 108–109, 117, 120, 121, 123, 125, 141, 168, 173, 179

217

Index

Avengers, 11 Babylonian mythology, 160 Baez, Joan, 173 Baghdad, 7 Bagpipes, 21, 78–79, 98, 128 Balkan music, 113, 116–117, 135, 140 Ballad, 21, 98, 131, 151, 153–55 Banjo, 173, 175–76 Barren Grounds, 36 Barruk, Katarina, 178 Baryton, 79 Bathory, 21, 58 Beinteinsson, Sveinbjörn, 23 Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, 19 Bergen, 50, 88, 89, 164 Bindrunes, 194 Binkley, Thomas, 110 Birgisson, Jón Þor “Jónsi,” 76, 125 Björk, 22, 77, 120 Bjørndal, Arne, 88 Bjørnson, Ivar, 26, 59, 96, 164, 189 Black metal, 1, 4, 15, 21–22, 58–59, 71, 80–81, 83, 94, 98–99, 105, 108, 130, 147, 164, 169, 172, 174, 177, 184, 187–88; And crime, 95, 97; As cultural Norwegian music, 80, 94–96; And landscapes, 80–81, 98; And museums, 95–96;

Musical and sonic qualities, 80–81; As neopagan/heathen music, 96–97 Blackbraid, 184–86, 191 Blackfire, 140 Blake, William, 16, 35 Blast-beat, 80 Blavatsky, Helena (Madam), 13 Blót, 163 Blues, 17, 90, 112, 128 Boine, Mari, 107, 139–40, 178, 189 Borealism, 15, 25, 27, 35, 45, 47–49, 57, 60, 73–75, 82, 85, 96, 99, 123; In music, 73–75 Borre National Park, Norway, 25, 185, 193 Braaten, Kjell, 120 Braveheart, 116 Bronze Age, 94 Bruun, Amalie, 123 Bukkehorn, 2, 91, 94 Bulgarian choirs, 19, 123 Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, 20, 123 Bulgarian Voices Angelite, 121 Bull, Ole, 88–89 Burton, Richard, 37 Burzum, 58 ByNorse, 59, 189 Cage, John, 75

218

Index

Capitalism, 11, 39, 111, 118, 138, 160 Carmina Burana, 125–26, 130–31; “Alte Clamat Epicurus,” 129, 132–33 Cascadian Midsummer, 150, 163, 178, 193 Castlefest, 25–26 Catholicism, 16, 97 Cello, 76, 79, 175–76 Celtic harp, 21 Celtic music, 21, 98, 113, 116, 128, 135, 141 Celtic Thunder, 116 Celtic Woman, 116 Cemican, 192 Changes (band), 22 Chant, 1, 8–9, 18–19, 118, 132, 137, 157–59, 163, 166, 167, 171, 175; Gregorian chant (plainchant), 8–9, 18–19, 166, 167; Taiwanese chant, 19; Tibetan chant, 118, 122 Chapman, Tracy, 174 The Chemical Brothers, 154 Choral music, 19, 99, 121, 123, 134, 160, 164, 171 Classical music, 8, 76, 79, 85–86, 94, 107, 124, 131, 134, 173; Folk music tropes, 86 Cocteau Twins, 20 Codex Regius, 6 Codex Runicus, 9

Coil, 166 Coldness, 54, 80–83 Cole, Ross, 18 Colonialism, 27, 35–36, 42, 45, 78, 111–12, 116, 118, 141–42, 172, 185, 191 Cooper, James Fenimore, 42 Cornwell, Bernard, 16 Corvus Corax, 21, 128, 130, 132 Cosmopolitanism, 20, 86–87, 92, 100, 106, 113–14, 117–18, 122, 135, 139–40 Council of Gallows, 150 Crosby, David, 173 The Crusades, 21, 107, 125–26, 133, 135 Crusade songs, 21, 107, 125– 26, 135 Crymogæa, 34 Cultural appropriation, 20, 28, 96, 115, 117, 141, 190, 192 Dahl, Christian, 80 Dahlhaus, Carl, 86 Darkestrah, 120 de Saint Quentin, Dudon, 7 Dead Can Dance, 20, 123, 166 Dead languages, 21, 59, 125, 148–50, 170–71 Death in June, 22 Deep Forest, 111–12 Deniker, Joseph, 38–39 Denmark, x, 6, 10, 16, 22, 33–35, 43, 45, 48, 50–51, 55, 60, 77, 94 Des Teufels Löckvogel, 132

219

Index

Didgeridoo, 21, 114–15, 171 DiFranco, Ani, 174 Dimmu Borgir, 58 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 50 Djawadi, Ramin, 175 Drones, 1–2, 75–76, 78–79, 84, 85, 119, 124, 153, 158–59, 169; Open-fifth, 75–76, 78–79; Pedal tones, 75 Drone metal, 76, 108 Druidry, 10 Du Contrat Social (book), 48 Dungeons and Dragons, 193 Dylan, Bob, 173 Early Music Consort of London, 127–28 Early music, 8, 18, 20, 21, 109, 110, 124, 125–28, 133–35, 166, 171 Ecology, 11–12, 78, 172 Eddic poetry, 6, 23, 125, 160; Prose (Snorri’s, Younger) Edda, 6, 125, 150, 160; Poetic (Elder) Edda, 150 Ehwaz, 120 Eiríksson, Leifr, 43 Elder Futhark, 2, 14, 148, 166 Electronic music, 21, 128, 147, 154–56 Ellenwood, Nizhoni, 190–91 Eluveitie, 99 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 172

Émile ou de l’éducation, 50 Encyclopedia Metallum (Metal Archives), 80 Enigma, 19, 111–12 Ensemble Organum, 171 Enslaved, 21, 58–59, 95 Environmentalism, 5, 23, 54, 135–36, 138, 140, 172, 177–78 Enya, 116 Epic poetry, 23, 52, 92, 98, 151, 156 Erebus (ship), 36 Espedal, Kristian, 1–2, 83, 164, 188 Estampie, 129 Ethnocentrism, 10, 106, 130, 133, 184 Eugenics, 14, 40–41 Euronymous. See Aarseth, Øystein Eurovision Song Contest, 59–60, 138 Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, 59–60 Euzen, 4 Evola, Julius, 39 The Exorcist, 97 Exoticism, 15, 19–20, 24–27, 42, 73, 95, 106, 108–109, 115, 118–20, 125, 154, 179, 190–91; Self-exoticization, 112, 117 Exploration, 36, 108 Fairport Convention, 151 “Fanitullen” (tune), 90 Faust, Kai Uwe, 4, 122, 155–56

220

Index

Femininity, 15, 134 Feminism, 39, 93, 153 Ferrell, Will, 59–60 Fiddles, 2, 21, 79, 87–91, 98, 99, 137, 153–55; Competitions, 85, 87, 91–94, 99; And the devil, 90; Melodic modes, 90–91; And nationalism, 87–92; Tune naming, 88 Field recordings, 2, 114, 156, 166, 169, 175 Film scores, 17, 19, 23, 80, 109, 116, 131, 147, 166 Fin de siècle, 39 Finland, 4, 45, 48, 92, 113, 115, 135, 151 Finnish Folk Tunes (Suomen Kansan Sävelmiä), 151 Finnish Literary Society, 152 Finnmark Act, 135 Finntroll, 98 Fire in the Mountains, 163, 178, 193 Fjeldeventyret, 87 Fjellheim, Frode, 107, 139 Fjölnir, 56 Flamenco, 131 Flowers, Stephen, 14 Folk dance, 164; Slått, 90; Springleik, 88; Gammeldans, 91 Folk horror, 106, 171, 177

Folk revival, 5, 17–19, 27, 71, 84, 87–88, 90, 92, 106–8, 113, 148, 153–54, 192; In Finland, 92, 113; In Norway, 5, 87–88, 90; Sámi music, 45, 107, 135– 38, 142; In the USA, 17, 108, 173 Folk Metal, 97–99, 127, 130– 31, 133 Folk och Rackare, 92, 151 Folk-rock, 138, 151, 153–54, 173 Folket Bortafor Nordavinden, 120, 163 Folkish, 12, 79 Folklore, 27, 47, 83, 86, 88, 98, 99 Folque, 5, 92, 151 Forests, 46–47, 80, 92, 96, 99, 168, 177, 193 Forn Siðr, x Fornaldarsögur, 6 Fram (ship), 36 Frame drum, 128, 137, 166 Frankenstein, 174 Frankish kingdom, 6 Franklin, John, 36 Franz, Maria, 4, 155, 158–59, 188 Frazer, James, 18 Friluftsliv, 48–51 Frozen, 139 Gaahl. See Espedal, Kristian Gabriel, Peter, 140, 171 Gad, Emma, 50 Gaiman, Neil, 16 221

Index

Gakti, 138 Galdrabækir, 14 Galdrabók, 14, 157 Game of Thrones, 16, 54, 60, 166, 175 Gangar, 5 Garmarna, 5, 21, 151, 153–54 Germany, 9, 10, 17, 21, 22, 39, 40, 42, 43, 50, 51, 126, 133 Gerrard, Lisa, 20, 123 Gesta Danorum, 6, 15, 55–56 Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, 7 Gjallarhorn, 114–15, 123 Glittertind, 98 Globalization, 11, 112, 120, 192 Glossing, 167 Glossolalia, 125 Gnosticism, 13–14 God of War Ragnarök, 59 Goertzen, Chris, 79, 87–88, 90–91 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 50–51 Gogol Bordello, 117 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 109 Gorgoroth, 1, 4, 58 Gothic literature, 33, 35, 127 Gothic music, 4, 20–21, 123, 125, 127–28, 166; Darkwave, 20–21, 127 Gothicism (Sweden), 33, 57 Goths, 33 Grant, Madison, 39 Gray, Thomas, 16, 35

Green Lung, 177 Greenland, 43, 45, 185 Grieg, Edvard, 76, 86, 98 Grimley, Daniel, 86–87 Grógaldr, 157–58 Growling, 174 Grundtvig, N. F. S., 10 Guðnadóttir, Hildur, 76 Guénon, René, 39 Guthrie, Woody, 173 Gylfaginning, 150 Gypsy punk, 117 Hætta, Mattis, 138 Halluci Nation, 191 Hamlet (play), 55, 56 Hammered dulcimer, 128 Hamsun, Knut, 44 Hardingfele, 2, 71, 79, 88, 90–91, 93, 99, 153; Tunings, 79, 90 Harii, ix, 189 Hávamál, 23, 60, 150, 167 Havens, Ritchie, 173 Hearne, Samuel, 36 Heavener runestone, xiv Heavy Metal Therapy, 188 Hedningarna, 5, 21, 93, 114, 123, 147, 151–55 Hegemony, 19, 148, 187, 190, 192 Heilung, 4–6, 15, 19, 24–27, 62, 115, 120–22, 147–48, 155–64, 171, 187–92 Heima, 78 Heine, Heinrich, 174

222

Index

Hella, Lindy-Fay, 1–2, 58, 123 Henotheism, 11 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 38, 50 Heterophony, 152 Hildegard von Bingen, 124 Hilder, Thomas, 136 Hill, Juniper, 92–93, 114 Hilmarsson, Hilmar Örn, 22–23 Hip-hop, 19, 112, 138, 191 Hippie counterculture, 17, 173 Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, 15, 33 Historia de Omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque Regibus, 33 Historia Normannorum, 7 Hitler, Adolf, 40 Hof, Wim, 82–83 The Holocaust, 14, 40 Homophobia, 183, 188 House music, 155 The Hu, 120 humppa, 99 Huntington, Samuel P., 52 hurdy-gurdy, 21, 79, 99 Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, 160 Huun-Huur-Tu, 120–21 Hygge, 49 Hyperborea, 34, 74 ibn Fadlan, Ahmad, 7, 121 Ibsen, Henrik, 50 Iceland, x, 6, 9, 10, 14–16, 22–23, 33–34, 37, 43–45, 48, 51,

54–56, 59–60, 76–78, 120, 125, 150, 157, 166, 188 Icelandic sagas, 6 Idisi, 157, 159 “Immigrant Song,” 56 Immortal, 58 In Extremo, 21, 128–29 Indian classical music, 76, 115 Indian Wars, 42 Indianthusiasm, 42, 192 Indigeneity, 45, 136, 184 Indigenous activism, 107, 109; Sámi activism, 107, 135–36 Industrial music, 5, 21, 133, 147, 151, 154, 164 Industrialization, 15, 77, 84 Inuit peoples, 43, 45, 118, 122, 185 Iron Maiden, 56–57 ISÁK, 178 Islam, 52, 53, 126, 130, 133 Íslendingabók, 34 Íslendingasögur, 6 Jackson, Peter, 52, 53 Jazz, 93, 112, 138 Jensen, Johannes V., 44 Jew’s harp, 110, 164 Jewish music, 110, 116–17, 131, 149 Johnson, Robert, 90 Jónsson, Arngrímur, 16, 34 Jötnar, 11 Juul, Christopher, 4, 26, 155– 56, 188 223

Index

Kakophonix, 175 Kalenda Maya, 129 Kalevala, 52, 92–93, 98, 152 Kalevala, Kertoa, 150 Kalmar Union, 33 Kaminsky, David, 84, 86, 87, 92, 94, 116–17, 153, 173 Kansas Joe, 128 Kantele, 92–93 Kanteletar, 98, 152 Kárahnjúkar, 77 Karelia, 114–15, 151, 154; Ingria, 151 Kautekeino Easter Festival, 138 Kjellsberg, Sverre, 138 Klezmer, 113, 116–17, 131 Knáttleikr, 56 Konungasögur, 6 Korpiklaani, 98 Kratz, Sean, 175–76 Krohn, Ilmari, 151–52 Kulning, 87, 123–24 Kulokk, 87 Kurki-Suonio, Sanna, 153 Kvædi, 98 L’individuo e il divenire del mondo, 39 L’uomo come potenza, 39 Laestadianism, 137 Landscapes, 12, 27, 45, 48–49, 56, 59, 71, 75–78, 80–86, 88, 90, 92, 99, 172, 179; And folk music, 71, 86, 88, 90, 168;

“Landscape music,” 76–78, 80–82, 179; And national identity, 85, 86, 88, 92 Landkjenning, 98 Langeleik, 79, 91 Lanz, Jörg, 14, 40 Launis, Armas, 151–52 Laxness, Halldór, 44 Lebensborn, 40 Led Zeppelin, 56, 58, 128 Levin, Theodore, 120 Lévi, Éliphas, 14 Lewis, C. S., 17 Lindisfarne, 15, 55 Liszt, Franz, 90 Loki, 11, 187 Lönnrot, Elias, 52, 92 Loop Station, 156 Looping, 122, 127, 154–56, 157–60 The Lord of the Rings (book), 17, 52–53, 57–58, 109 The Lord of the Rings (cartoon), 52 The Lord of the Rings (movie trilogy), 53, 60, 109 Lord of the World, 39 Lorentzen, Jonas, 171 The Lost Words: A Spell Book, 177 Lur, 58, 87, 91, 94, 110, 164, 169; Brudevælte Mose, 94 Lycia, 166 Lyre, 94, 110, 164–65, 168; Kravik lyre, 58, 164–65; Tagelharpa, 79, 173, 179; 224

Index

Stråkharpa, 151; Talharpa, 94; Jouhikko, 94 MacFarlane, Robert, 172, 177 Magnus, Johannes, 33 Magnus, Olaus, 15, 33 Mandolin, 173 Mandylion, 129 Männerbünde, 40 Manowar, 57–58 Markens grøde, 44 Martin, George R. R., 16, 54 Masculinity, 10, 15, 19, 27, 35–38, 40–45, 48, 142, 187 Mattson, Hållbus Totte, 151 Mayhem, 22, 58, 95, 96 Mediæval Bæbes, 128–29 Medieval music. See Early Music Medievalism, 24, 130, 178 Meditation, 17, 73, 76, 119, 161 Meistersänger, 126 Memphis Minnie, 128 Mental health, 82–83, 188 Merseburg Charms, 125, 157–59 Mestizaje, 191 Metalheads Against Bullying, 187–88 Metamorphoses (book), 47 Midgardsblot, 25–26, 163–64, 178, 184–88, 190, 193 Midsommar, 106 Migration Period, 7 Minimalism, 148 Minnesänger, 126

The Minutemen, 22 MíO, 5 Mitchell, Joni, 173 Mittelalter music, 21, 106, 128, 132 Modernity, 11, 17, 18, 24, 39, 44, 78, 120; Antimodernity, 178; Postmodernity, 52; Pre-modernity, 17, 20, 108–9 Moe, Jørgen, 90 Moraharpa, 164, 168; Basmoraharpa, 153 Morris, Jackie, 177 Mountains, 45, 60, 75, 80, 83, 87, 88, 90, 99, 119, 170, 175–77 Moynihan, Michael, 22 Multiculturalism, 100, 107, 113, 117, 189, 192, 194 Munnharpe, 1, 91 Museums, 1–3, 14, 25, 95–96, 178; Midgards Vikingsenter, 178; Rockheim Museum, 95; Viking Ship Museum, 1–3 Music education, 85, 92–94, 134 Music Norway, 95 Mutterrecht, 40 Myrkur, 123–24 Myth, 10–11, 22, 34, 38–39, 46–47, 52–54, 57, 71–73, 86, 92, 96–97, 141; In modern media, 52–54, 57; National mythologies, 71–73, 92

225

Index

Mysticism, 2, 14, 22, 40, 109, 117, 130, 149, 166, 177, 193 Nansen, Fridtjof, 36–37, 43, 47, 51 National Fiddler’s Association (Landslaget for Spelemenn), 87, 91 Nationalism, 20, 23, 27, 38, 45, 77, 83, 85–88, 92, 96, 99, 106, 113, 115, 120, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 148, 152, 192; “blood and soil,” 133 Naturvölker, 42 Nazism, 14, 40–42, 95, 116, 126, 133 Nebala, 155, 163, 170–71 Neo-völkisch, 13 Neofolk music, 4–6, 21, 22–23, 95, 127, 131–33, 166, 171 Neopaganism, xiv, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 25, 26, 27, 132, 163, 171, 172, 176, 179, 183, 187, 188 New Age, 14, 83, 112, 119, 141, 167; New Age Music, 18, 76, 169 “New Folk” (Finland), 93, 100, 106, 147, 151, 153, 164 “New Old Europe Sound,” 116–17, 141–42 Nielsen, Carl, 76 Nielsen, Nina, 170 Nietzsche, Frederich, 40, 48 Nigun, 149 Noaidi, 137

“Noble savage,” 42 Nonesuch Records, 20, 123 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 46 “Nordafjells” (tune), 98 Nordic exceptionalism, 46 Nordic heathenism, 10 Nordic heathenry, 10 Nordic ritual folk music, 5, 17, 20, 23–24, 27, 71, 84–85, 93, 94, 96, 105–9, 118, 120, 122, 125, 130, 134, 147, 172–73, 174, 176, 183, 187, 188, 192–93; Definition of, 5; Development and influences, 17–24, 85, 93, 105–8, 118, 120; Instruments, 93–94, 173; Multiculturalism in, 105–8, 120–22, 134, 141; Indigenous influences, 134, 136, 141, 192–93 “Nordmannen/Mellom bakkar og berg” (song), 98 “Norge i rødt, hvitt og blått” (song), 98 Norse paganism, 10 North Pole, 36, 38 The Northman, 55–56, 61 Northside Records, 115 Northwest Passage, 36 Norudde, Anders, 151, 153 Norway, xi, 10, 16, 22, 25, 33, 35, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 55, 58, 59, 71, 85–88, 90–92, 95–98, 135, 178, 185, 186

226

Index

Nostalgia, 24–25, 78, 86–87, 111–12 Nyckelharpa, 21, 71, 79, 93, 153 Nytt Land, 122, 150

Paradise Lost, 97 Pastoralism, 17, 23–24, 78–79, 87 Paulasto, Tellu, 153 Pearce, Douglas, 22 Pendderwen, Gwydion, 17 Penka, Karl, 38 Percy, Thomas, 16 Phurpa, 122–23 Piano, 82, 85, 86, 176 Pink Floyd, 169 The Pogues, 98 Polytheism, 11–12, 16–17 Post-punk, 20 Post-rock, 76 Powwow dances, xii–xiii The Prodigy, 154 Progressive rock, 127, 174 Projekt Records, 20 Psychedelic drugs, 161 Psychic TV, 23 Punk, 5, 23, 140, 98, 117 Purrkur Pillnikk, 23

Odin, 3, 56, 150; Odinic, ix, 10; Odinism, 10, 14 Œgishjálmur, 14 Of the Wand and the Moon, 23 Omnia, 129, 132–33 Opera, 80, 87, 98, 126, 131 Orff, Carl, 126, 131 Organum, 167 Orientalism, 35, 73–74, 106, 110–11, 120 Oseberg ship, 1–3 Osi and the Jupiter, 147, 148, 172, 175–77, 180 Oslo, 1, 50, 96 Ostara (journal), 40 Ougenweide, 127–28 Overtone flute, 78, 110 Overtone singing. See Throat-singing Overtones, 78, 91, 110, 118– 19, 124 Ovid, 47

Qntal, 21, 127–28, 134 Queerness, 186, 187

Paakunainen, Seppo, 139 Paganini, Niccolo, 90 Palästinalied, 21, 107, 125–34, 139, 142, 155 Palestine, 131 Panopticon, 172

Räfven, 117 Ragnar Lothbrok, 54 Ramnarine, Tina, 92–93, 114 Rasmussen, 60 Rasmussen, Knud, 36–37, 43 Rave subcultures, 148, 155–56, 160, 161, 163 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 171

227

Index

Red Rocks Amphitheatre, 158– 59, 162 Reenactments, 3, 21, 27, 121, 150, 193 Renaissance music. See Early Music Revivalism, 9–10, 172, 178, 192 Rhineland, 6 Riddu Riđđu, 140 Rímur, 23, 78 The Rite of Spring, 156 Riverdance, 116 Rock ’n’ roll, 112 Rock music, 124, 128, 138, 139, 140, 148, 151, 160, 171, 177, 191 Roman Empire, 6, 33, 74 Romani music, 113, 116–17, 142 Romanticism, 12–13, 15, 33, 42, 50, 86, 111, 174, 176, 177, 179; National romanticism, 78, 80, 85, 88, 117, 133; Neo-romanticism, 12; And nostalgia, 111, 141 Rosemary’s Baby, 97 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 48, 50 Royal Deceit, 55, 56 Rudbeck, Olof, 33–34 Runes, 2, 7, 13–15, 22, 40, 148–50, 156, 166–70, 177; as musical inspiration, 2, 148–50, 156, 166–70, 177; in neopaganism, 13–15 Runaljod (Wardruna albums), 166–70

rune poems, 166–68, 177 rune-singing, 4 Rus, 7 “Sámiid Aednan” (song), 138–39 Sacred music, 8, 18–19, 124, 167, 171 Sacrifice, 158–59, 174 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 139 Sámi culture, 6, 45, 107–8, 135– 42, 178, 185, 189 Sámi music, 21, 107–8, 134–41, 149, 178, 184, 189; Joik, 21, 136–40, 149 Sámi Grand Prix, 138 Sampling, 19, 111–12, 115, 128, 139, 151, 154–55, 156 Satanism, 95, 97, 193 Satyricon, 58, 95, 96 Saxo, 6, 15, 55–56 Schiller, Friedrich, 50 Schipper, Nicholas, 189–90 Schubert, Franz, 174 Sea shanty, 23 Seeger, Pete, 173 Selvik, Einar 1–2, 24, 26, 58–59, 96, 109–10, 150, 164–70, 188–89 Sexuality, 106, 170–71, 187–88 Shamanism, 108, 109, 112, 115, 118, 122, 136–37, 141, 160–61, 170, 175 Shawm, 122, 128 Shelley, Mary, 174 Shore, Howard, 166

228

Index

Sibelius Academy, 92–93, 114, 151 Sibelius, Jean, 76 Sigur Rós, 23, 76–78, 125 Sigurdrífumál, 23 Simon, Paul, 112 Skald, 168 Skyrim Elder Scrolls, 59 Slobin, Mark, 123, 124, 147 Smith, Harry, 17 The Soil Bleeds Black, 129 Sol Invictus, 23 Song collecting, 84, 126, 151–52 A Song of Ice and Fire, 16, 54 “Sønner av Norge” (song), 98 Space music, 76 Spelemannsblad, 88 Spell Songs, 177 Spellcasting, 157, 179 Spellemannprisen, 95 Spengler, Oswald, 39 Spracklen, Karl, 120, 187, 188, 192 Springsteen, Bruce, 174 Star Trek, 75 Stave, 177 Storm, 98 Stravinsky, Igor, 156 String-stopping, 168 Studio der Frühen Musik, 110, 127–28 Sturluson, Snorri, 6 Sturm und Drang, 50 Sufi music, 171

Sweden, 4, 6, 7, 10, 16, 22, 33, 34, 35, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 58, 84, 113, 135, 186 Sympathetic strings, 2, 79, 115 Syngspiel, 87 Tagaq, Tanya, 120 Taylor, Robert N., 22 Techno music, 127, 148, 155, 160, 191 Techno-shamanism, 160 Tengger Cavalry, 120 Teoria dell’individuo assoluto, 39 Terror (ship), 36 Theosophical Society, 40 Theosophy, 13, 40 Theozoology, 14, 40 Therion, 57 The Third Reich, 38 This Mortal Coil, 20 “Thor” (song), 57 Thor (Marvel franchise), 11, 16, 54, 59; Thor: Love and Thunder, 54 Thoreau, Henry David, 42, 172 Thorsson, Edred. See Flowers, Stephen Þorvaldsdottir, Anna, 76–77 Thrane, Waldemar, 87 Throat-singing, 1, 106, 118–24, 134, 136, 140–41, 158–59, 163, 171; Historical accuracy, 121; Kargyraa, 118, 122; Katajjaq, 118–20, 122, 140;

229

Index

Xöömii (Khoomei), 119, 122 Thule, 34, 37 Thun, Helle, 123 Tibet, David, 22 Tibetan music, 118, 122 Tilak, Bâl Gangadhar, 38 Titanic (movie), 116 Titanic (ship), 36, 41, Tolkien, J. R. R., 16, 17, 52–53, 57–58 Toronto Consort, 129 Tourism, 12, 14, 49, 77–78, 82, 85, 91, 98, 108 Traditionalism, 178 Trance music, 155, 160 Trances, 90, 122, 137, 159–62 Transjoik, 139 Trees, 3, 47, 166, 167, 175 Trolls, 46–47, 73, 88–90 Fossegrim, 88–90 “Troll tuning,” 90 Trondheim, 50 The Troth, 13 Tuivelsminne, 129 Tuvan music, 118–22, 124, 134 Tvisang, 166 Tyr, 98 Übermensch, 40, 48 UBISOFT, 59 Ultima Thule, 37 Untergang des Abendlandes, 39 Unto Ashes, 129 Uppsala, 7

Väinämöinen, 92 Valhöll, ix Valkeapää, Nils-Aslak, 138 Van Langen, 129 Van Zandt, Townes, 174 Vanir, 11 Värttinä, 93, 123, 151, 153 Végvisir, 14 Vietnam War, 173 Vikernes, Varg, 22, 95 Viking Age, 3, 5–9, 14–16, 25–26, 48, 52, 54, 59, 60, 121 Viking markets, x, 106 Viking metal, 22–24, 58–59, 97, 120 Viking reenactment, x, 3, 27, 121 The Vikings (1958 film), 52 Vikings (History Channel series), 11, 16, 24, 54, 164, 166 Vinland, 43 Viola da gamba, 79 Visit Norway, 49 Vocables, 137, 139, 149, 152 Vogelweide, Walther von der, 125–26, 132 Volga Bulgars, 7 Völkisch, 12, 13, 14, 22, 41 Voluspa (band), 150 Völuspá, 23, 150 Völva, ix, 150, 157 von Schnurbein, Stephanie, 11–13, 16 Von List, Guido, 40–41 Wagner, Richard, 16, 126

230

Index

Wakeford, Tom, 22 Wardruna, 1–6, 15, 19, 24–27, 58–59, 120, 123, 147, 164–71, 175, 179, 187–92 Weird Walk, 177 White supremacy, 5, 12, 28, 116, 189, 192 Whiteness, 27, 142, 194 Wicca, 10 The Wicker Man, 17, 106, 109 Wilderness, 15, 24, 27, 41, 48, 75, 83, 92, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 193 Wilhelms, Jenny, 123 Winterreise, 174 Wolfmare, 128–29, 131 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 16 Wolves in the Throne Room, 172, 174–75

World music, 4, 19, 20, 27, 58, 93, 100, 105, 107–8, 112–13, 115, 117, 120, 135, 138–41, 171, 179, 192; Billboard category, 2, 4, 108; And exoticism, 112, 120, 125, 141; And Sámi music, 135, 138–40 World Trade Center, 52 World War I, 41 Worm, Ole, 34 Wotanism, 10 Xenophobia, 85, 133, 184 Yothu Yindi, 140 Zamata Quipse, Carlos, 140 Zimmer, Hans, 166

231

About the Authors

Ross Hagen is associate professor of music studies at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT. Hagen received his BA in music from Davidson College and his MM and PhD in musicology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has been at Utah Valley University since 2010, where he teaches classes on popular music, the European notated tradition, and world music. He is an active composer and performer specializing in extreme metal and experimental electronic music. Hagen’s research interests include black metal music, medievalism, ritual studies, avant-garde music, and ecomusicology. His publications include Darkthrone: A Blaze in the Northern Sky with Bloomsbury’s 33 & 1/3 book series (2020) and Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet (2019, co-editor). He has also published chapters in the edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (2020), The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023), On Extremity (2023), and The Weird: A Companion (2024). He is also the reviews and short articles editor for the journal Metal Music Studies. Mathias Nordvig is a visiting assistant professor of Nordic and arctic studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He teaches subjects on Viking history, Nordic mythology, folklore, arctic culture and society, and Danish language. Nordvig earned his PhD in Nordic mythology in 2014 at Aarhus University in Denmark, his native country. He moved to Colorado in 2015. Nordvig has a BA degree in Nordic languages and literatures with a minor in Viking studies. His MA degree includes studies in medieval 233

About the Authors

Icelandic history and saga literature, Viking age archaeology, Nordic mythology, and Old Norse language. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the relationship between Old Norse myth and the Icelandic environment. The dissertation is titled: Of Fire and Water: The Old Norse Mythical Worldview in and Eco-mythological Perspective. He is the author of Ásatrú for Beginners: A Modern Heathen’s Guide to the Ancient Northern Way (2020) and new translations of Völuspá: The Vision of the Witch and the Danish and Norwegian rune poems with Hyldyr Press. He is also the host of The Sacred Flame podcast. Nordvig’s research interests include myth and environment, pre-Christian Scandinavian religion and mythology, Old Norse memory culture, Indigenous studies, Inuit, and Sámi folklore, mythology, and religion. He also takes an interest in contemporary cultural use of Nordic mythology and the Viking age in media, music, and Neo-paganism.

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