Séminaire “Représentations modernes et contemporaines
des Nords médiévaux”

1e journée: Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III, 5 février 2016

Simon Trafford

(Institute of Historical Research, University of London)

‘Runar munt þu finna’: rock and pop songs in Old Norse

With their well-established popular image as hell-raising antiheroic mavericks, the Vikings have long held a special appeal for rock musicians. As portrayed in film, novels and popular history, the Vikings are the quintessential barbarians: dangerous ruffians with a hearty taste for excitement and adventure, a profound hatred for Christianity and prodigious appetites for food, drink, women and wealth. These traits correspond closely with the romanticised image that many rock stars have traditionally held of themselves, and it comes as no surprise that bands from Led Zeppelin in the early 1970s onwards have enthusiastically taken up the Vikings as subject matter and inspiration. Heavy metal bands in particular have come to see them as spiritual brothers; indeed, a new sub-genre of so-called ‘Viking metal’ emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s which saw the existing interest grow into a full-blown obsession, with bands dedicating their entire output to the early medieval north and moulding their whole image to the purpose of evoking it.

Although the Viking metal subculture became popular around the world in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, it originated in Scandinavia itself and that remains its undisputed centre. It has strong patriotic or nationalist overtones: performers frequently express a pride in their Scandinavian heritage, which links them to the heroic primordial Viking golden age. As such, it might legitimately be seen at least in part as a response to growing challenges to Scandinavian and European identities: most obviously the impact of globalisation and mass migration, but also the erosion of distinctive Scandinavian social democracy and the diminishing significance of Europe as a whole on the world stage. Equally clearly, however, it is also an exercise in escapism into a stirring – if largely imaginary – world that seems more colourful, more exciting and less constrained than the present.

Viking metal bands express their interest in the old North in a number of ways: the most basic approach is to write songs that describe the familiar Viking behaviours of sailing, fighting or raiding, or which revolve around the gods and legends of Norse paganism, but most bands also adopt other devices besides this. Many exploit the familiar visual signifiers associated with the Vikings: longships, Norse art styles and archaeological artefacts adorn album covers and publicity materials, whilst band personnel dress in armour and helmets or in (allegedly) Viking-style clothing; they are happy to be photographed brandishing axes against appropriately epic backdrops of forests, mountains or the ocean. Some performers try to make their music appropriately medieval, generally by adopting folk melodies or by deploying traditional acoustic instruments. Perhaps the most extreme approach of all, however, is to adopt the Vikings’ own language and sing in Old Norse (ON). This, however, brings considerable problems with it: ON is, for most Europeans – and even for most Scandinavians – a dead and incomprehensible language; only Icelanders and Faeroe Islanders can read or understand it with relative ease. Lyrics, though, have always been amongst the primary appeals of pop songs; the commercial disadvantage of rendering their meaning completely obscure to the vast majority of potential listeners are very obvious. Perhaps for this very reason, only relatively few bands are prepared to take this step, and they tend to have smaller and more select audiences than their peers who sing in English, the lingua franca of global pop.

Despite – or because of – its lack of commercial viability, however, singing in Old Norse has a number of benefits and uses for those who do it. The very ‘difficulty’ of ON is key to its appeal; using an obscure language is a direct challenge to the flattened, homogenised and simplistic character of globalised mass culture. It is a rejection of the mainstream and of general popular acceptance that can bring enormous sub-cultural capital within the deliberately elitist, arcane and uncommercial extreme metal scene. For early participants in the scene, use of ON was a way of distinguishing themselves from their peers in a crowded field: the Norwegian band Enslaved, for instance, were the first Viking metal band to record a song in ON, for their first album Vikingligr Veldi in 1994; three other songs on the album were in modern Icelandic, explicitly chosen because of its resemblance to ON. The practice can also serve as a kind of guarantee of authenticity: the overwhelming majority of the Faeroese band Tŷr’s songs are in English (presumably with a mind to the commercial realities of the international market), but on each album they release, a couple of songs are adapted from traditional Faeroese folk songs, with lyrics in their native Faeroese, a language that is sufficiently similar to ON that the band are able to claim a direct and unbroken continuity with the middle ages, if not the Viking age itself. For some bands, though, the almost numinous inaccessibility of Old Norse means that it becomes the principal component of their appeal and so the majority of the songs that they sing use the language; this is very much the case with the ambient folk project Wardruna (the success of the strategy is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that Wardruna were selected to provide music for the History Channel tv series The Vikings). It should be noted that not all of the bands that use Old Norse in their songs are themselves Scandinavian: several bands from the German ‘mittelalter musik’ scene, such as Corvus Corax and Faun, have also flirted with the language, but these are performers who sing in a wide variety of other ancient and dead languages, including Latin and various medieval forms of French, German and other tongues; ON is just one amongst many and does not have the special connotations it does for Scandinavian performers.

In conclusion, the appearance of Old Norse in the lyrics of popular music is almost entirely a phenomenon of the last 20 years. Although it has always been a practice only of a small minority of performers, it is nonetheless of interest for the light it throws upon tactics for negotiating Scandinavian identity in a globalising world with reference both to linguistic nationalism and to contemporary popular cultural production.

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