Overview

Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music offers a detailed exploration of Nordic ritual folk music, a music scene focused on the revival of ancient folkways and archaic music that has found remarkable popularity around the globe. Once the domain of Viking reenactors and neopagan practitioners, the niche sonic and visual aesthetics of this music have found widespread visibility through a new generation of popular films, television series, and video games. The authors argue that many of these musical and media products connect with longstanding cultural attitudes about the Nordic region that conceive of it as wild, exotic, and dangerous, while also being a place of honor, community, and virtue. As such, the Nordic region and its music often becomes a vessel for reactionary escapes from all manner of modern discontentment. However, the authors also posit that spending time re-creating the music of an imaginary past also offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.

Full Product Details

9781666917567

Table of Contents

Reviews

Nordvig and Hagen combine their enthusiasm as fans and participants in the scene with their clear-eyed insight as scholars to explore and unravel how a complex mixture of nationalism, environmentalism and pagan spirituality - together with the wildly differing musical traditions of Scandinavian folk, world music, black metal and S�mi joik music - gave Nordic ritual folk its purpose and its form. Though the romanticised image of the wild Scandinavian past that powers the scene's intense emotional appeal is entangled with deeply troubling discourses, the authors argue for Nordic ritual folk as a progressive space where identities can be explored, re-imagined and re-combined. Full of detail, but approachably and enjoyably written, this volume is an indispensable and authoritative examination of where Nordic ritual folk music has come from and how it achieves its remarkable power, which will enrich any listener's enjoyment of the music itself; highly recommended for academic specialists and fans alike. --Simon Trafford, the Institute of Historical Research

Nordvig and Hagen combine their enthusiasm as fans and participants in the scene with their clear-eyed insight as scholars to explore and unravel how a complex mixture of nationalism, environmentalism and pagan spirituality - together with the wildly differing musical traditions of Scandinavian folk, world music, black metal and Sámi joik music - gave Nordic ritual folk its purpose and its form. Though the romanticised image of the wild Scandinavian past that powers the scene's intense emotional appeal is entangled with deeply troubling discourses, the authors argue for Nordic ritual folk as a progressive space where identities can be explored, re-imagined and re-combined. Full of detail, but approachably and enjoyably written, this volume is an indispensable and authoritative examination of where Nordic ritual folk music has come from and how it achieves its remarkable power, which will enrich any listener's enjoyment of the music itself; highly recommended for academic specialists and fans alike.

Author Information

Ross Hagen is associate professor of music studies at Utah Valley University. Mathias Nordvig is visiting assistant professor of Nordic and Arctic studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available