What Norse Music of the Viking Age Sounded Like - feat. Ibn Fadlan 

i thought your arab accent was spot on lol should have thrown in a "Bismillah" or two XD

Really enjoyed the video and the information relayed, thank you for putting in the work to present it to us. As an aside, the first time I heard the Sámi language, and songs I immediately thought of North American Indigenous language and song, more specifically North Central U.S. to Northern Canada. It's not an exact match, but the sound is similar to my ear. The clothing and color patterns of their clothes and items are also similar. Have you listened to much of the language and song of North American Indigenous people?

To me there are 2 songs from the Ensemble Mare Balticum link that reminds me of what I would associate with a bit older traditional folk music from Sweden. The very first song, the one played on bone flute (starts at 00.00), sounds very much like the kind of melodies I would hear when people played cow horn at "fäbodar". There were gatherings to show the traditional fäbod-life where people would show kulning and play cow horns. Then the song Grímur Á Miðalnesi around 47 minutes in, this is a faeroese folk song. And if I remember right it is one of the kvaðdansur, and could be seriously old.

Are you in front of a green screen or are your actually sacrificing your toes for our sake? (Also why are you named after a car, i’m new here)

As a Norwegian schooled in old Norwegian instrument making I think I can provide some insight from the Norwegian perspective. Our folk music is distinguished from the other Nordic countries in that the most common scale used is based on the "willow flute" . It has two interlocking natural tone scales which gives you a scale so cool the Vikings definitely must have liked it. And the oldest Norwegian folk songs I know uses the scale. There's still people in the dark, remote forests that keep teaching the old songs and ways of singing them..

Sounds like a typical citizen of the Roman Empire to me. :-P

Sonne comme un gars de Montréal 🤣🤣 Gros ( vidéo super intéressant , d'un point de vue de Reconstituteur Viking 🤟)

Sounds like him and I may be related 😂

Mouthful

And Slav.

Quite historically accurate

Not only that, he's talking to a small furry animal. (not putting this down, I loved it)

Also loons when there is snow, so must be early spring.

Tropic Tunder :)

I just wonder how you can see that it is Canadian background and not Scandinavian? (To me it very much look like my neighbourhood)

He's partly Greek??

@@ianlilley2577 All greeks are arabic

He is not greek, he is form eastern region cultures

@@ianlilley2577 no

@@midnightblue3285 Cool, not everyday I see people from eastern region cultures

xD Be careful, not everyone might pick up the satire.

Excellent aha

Lol I actually began reading this seriously and it took me a few seconds to understand what was going on 😂

Lmaoo

@@faryafaraji Same, it seems so similar in style to what Romans thought of 'Barbarians'

Yeahhh i know i kept trying tell people for years they were called norsemen or norse, viking was just a profession...raider and some only did temporarilly. And i am Greek.

As a fellow dane, may I recommend a show your danish genes would absolutely love? You oughta check out Vinland Saga.

As a Faroese person im also glad that this video tells about that we are very different musically. We the Faroese are have things like Chain dance and Singing Kvæði which has been a thing for us for hundreds of years and ive never heard that anyone else in Scandinavia still do it today

It’s also the wave edgy neo-pagans who have grudges against their Christian parents and use that identity to rebel, yet their only concept comes from Hollywood and videogames 😆

@@hitrapperandartistdababy "Vinland Saga is a Japanese historical manga series written and illustrated by Makoto Yukimura." Really? Modernized mumbo jumbo about the Nordic people written by someone from the other side of the planet :P

I just love the image of a T-posing Viking spinning at the speed of light with two axes and slicing entire armies that way

Average Dane-axe user in Chivalry 2

Mlg

-noscoping- *NorseScoping* 😂😂😂

@@OceanBloke loool

Must be a pretty chill guy by now

Wondering and wandering are different words with different meanings. Go back to elementary school, and try not to fail this time.

@@slappy8941 and many times spell check will hijack the typed word before you are even aware of it, cyber bullying is not cool.

​@@slappy8941 normal people don't care

@@slappy8941 Anyone with a minimal English education can appreciate Luci Micle’s inadvertent play on words without stumbling over the word wonder, as the writer’s intent is obvious. Maybe you are the one here who needs to dedicate more time to reading…and etiquette

Collecting Farya variants like pokemon

@@theoneandonlydetraebean8286 yes, it's quite funny

The only enemies are within ourselves

How can they be an enemy when Vikings and Romans never fought?

@@snail1720 haha yes I know, since they are northern people similar to the Germans let's consider them enemies

Definitely, these bands have always been very open about the nature of their music. Any of the blame concerning how people think this music is historical lies on the audience, not on them; they’ve never mislead anyone and have provided us with incredible music over the years (that said I’m probably biased because I’m a massive Einar Sevik fanboy haha)

Einar is awesome

Einar is an amazing artist!

It's the fans we should fear

Sigurbodi is historical

Wasn't it Saxon King Alfred the Great who built and maintained a navy himself? With their own ships serving as early warning lookouts and also to cut off any raiders' escape route, the Viking longship advantage was finally negated. It is striking in all of human history, that nations without much of a naval tradition, can catch up within a generation to build and operate a very effective (French) or even superior navy of their own (Romans).

@@AudieHolland It's absolutely true that technological advantages diminish over time as those on the losing end adapt to them. The Brits in World War II put radar on the rear of their bombers to detect fighters. It worked very well, for a while. Then the Germans learned to jam the radar, then follow it. In a short time it was a life-saver, then useless, then a liability.

This is a very standard break down. I don't go with the ghost occupation view. They had their own kings and their own ceremony. There was also something about ships also, they have ships they dug up which were iron lined and not flat, and once you include Normans as Vikings you have to leave the simple communal raids theory. Vikings were their own culture and lived along the sea traveled and had their own kings. The common people of the north were cow herders and just lived in those places.

Same copy and paste of " it was an occupation"

in norwegian traditional music from the 1800s, there is "trampetakt" where you stamp the floor to keep the rythm. the sami drum tho is a VERY old traditional instrument, and it has been found all the way from the south to the north, AND the viking age.

yes! in traditional dance we rely on the fiddler's foot while the hardingfele can sometimes be hard to follow. Yes the Sami drum is very old and they lived all over Norway - but the Indo-European Norsemen did not use it in mystical practice. There is no mention of it in any Edda, Saga, or grave find of the völur or other spiritual or religious figure - @@Dejawolfs

Drums were present in Sami populations, under the name "runebomme" in Norwegian. Our earliest written source of this is from 1100-ish, so we're not entirely sure how far back they go or if there was any overlap of such a fashion between cultures. I wouldn't rule out drums, but as you say, there's little evidence to confirm it.

@@KazeinHD there is archeological evidence dating further back.

@@KazeinHD well. it seems to me that drums had become associated with the devil, and unchristian. the runebomme is directly connected to pagan magical rituals. the carolingians doesn't seem to have used drums, yet, they were a revival of the western-roman empire, which had used drums, the tympanum, which itself derived from an ancient greek instrument. it seems strange that the romans, which had such a large influence culturally through the iron trade on norway, not to mention the rest of the world, did not also have some influence musically.

Good point, I focused mostly on a Mediterranean source but one to the east and the steppes would make sense too

@@faryafaraji Being Swedish I remember something of being taught in history class that while old norseare most know for their viking raids into Europe, they had a (now) lesser known trade network that was pretty damn huge for it's time in the east. The kinda stuff that eventually led to Kiev being founded around year 400. Correction after a short wiki dive. Kiev was probably founded 400 CE by trade between the east and Scandinavia, this is a few hundred years before the "Viking age" which began around 800 CE.

Not only a spiritual successor, an actual successor/offspring. Wardruna's Selvik and Gaahl were both in Gorgoroth, and countless nordic folk artists overlap with black metal.

it is clearly an artistic expression of the romanticised view of the savage people. The image of the noble savage always works in pop culture.

We may know that they're going for an artistic play on "Viking/pagan" tropes, but my experience with fans of this genre is that it's being taken as literal historical representation of the culture/music. It's cashing in on the average Joe who just got done binge watching Vikings on Netflix and now wants to channel their inner Ragnar. And imho the music sucks 😂

​@@prestonhebb1380 thats so true, specially among nerds (video game nerds, fantasy nerds, anime nerds, etc), they don't care about history or culture, they only care about things that a child would find "Bad ass". Folk Metal has always sounded "fake" to me, and these "not Metal" folk ensembles of today still carry some of that "fakeness" for me. Like they trying way too hard to sound ancient and esoteric.

​@@pst5345 Savage?

It's the songs and melodies that have their roots in the far future that one needs to worry about.

That doesn't mean they came from the viking age though, especially since the Christian church and rulers made our ancient animistic ways illegal.

@@sykotikmommy And yet, ironically, they worship a Satanic character (rather, that should be plural, as the bible has multiple gods, but not the trinity they pretend I'm referring to).

@@sykotikmommy Like much of Christian religion, they just overlayed their tradition, holidays etc. on top of standing pagan ones, so it is likely that the lyrics would change, but the type of music would remain similar.

@@ankiking very good point.

Totally agreed, the weight of pop culture often takes over factual reality from: Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn al-ʿAbbās ibn Rāšid ibn Ḥammād, AKA Antonio Banderas from the 13th Warrior

Pretty much all modern culteral understandings of vikings are wrong. Why would our interpretation of their music be right?

Don't Hungarians have some cultural connections to Huns? Like in myth?

@@robinrehlinghaus1944 Well, both used to be steppe nomads and raided Middle Europe

@@robinrehlinghaus1944 They were called the Magyars (which many still call them including Hungarians themselves) and they migrated from central asia like a lot, and I mean a lot, of different tribes and steppe people during the invasion of the Huns. They all used to be Tengri at that point in history and were culturally very similar because of that and the nomadic lifestyle.

@@robinrehlinghaus1944 are you joking? All slavs are basically the result of a persian woman that was assaulted by a mongol or a hun, haha. They think they are europeans but even with their aryan features they cannot fool anyone these neanderthals.

@@seanvandiijk2889 Come again?

This! I can also plug Otyken as a Russian/si eria example of the same thing. It's so cool that we can blend cultures together with music

I don't know how traditional the indigenous elements of ATCR are, but Wardruna has very little/almost nothing in common with Scandinavian folk music (same with the costumes and face paint and all that), it's more straightforwardly new age/fantasy. nothing wrong with that, but it's definitly not a fusion of tradition and modernity, it's a wholly modern riff on the contemporary fantasy viking.

Yeah it’s mainly a Karelian/Finnish instrument; it has no known usage historically within Scandinavia outside of the modern neo-folk genre :)

Interestingly though, it is also a traditional instrument in Estonia among swedish-estonians in particular, and is sometimes referred to as a "swedish kannel" over there. So if we assume the swedes brought it there, it raises the question why it never became popular in sweden? It's not easy to find much info on it online, but there's apparently a book that wikipedia links to that talks about it (The Rough Guide to World Music)

An almost exact instrument exists in the Shetlands called the gue. It's a bowed lyre, and seems to have been introduced during the "Viking Age" by Norse settlers, as well as the language, which evolved into norn, which was spoken in the area until relatively recently. The word fiddle in english was also introduced from norse fiðla. I personally feel that due to it's similarity, the jouhikko was probably introduced by scandinavians, and maintained in Karelia.

@@varangjar1544 it is propable that the scandinavians may yabe introduced atleast the predecessor of the modern day jouhikko to the karelians and finns (maybe they got it from trade along the volga when they met nomadic peoples like the bulgars?). Also i really hope that norn can be revived

@@lovebaltazar4610 I’d only say we should be careful when it comes to nomenclature, almost every time a culture names something after another culture, it’s not an indication of its origins. Were we to take the name Flamenco at face value, we’d assume the musical style came from the Netherlands, because Flamenco means “Flemish/Fleming,” but obviously that’s not the case, and its roots are instead Ibero-Andalusian rather than Flemish. In most of these cases, it’s always that an arbritary association was formed between the element and that foreign culture. Of course the “Swedish” part can actually mean it’s from Sweden, but the possibility of it being a “Flamenco” case is also an option to be considered. At the end of the day, no evidence of bowed instruments has been found in Viking Age Scandinavia. It’s possible that the instrument is called Swedish because the Swedish community in Estonia began using it in Estonia, and their consistent usage generated an association with that community, from which point was called Swedish.

I'd take it a step broader, though, and say that lullabies are a good starting point to understand the musical language of a culture. Then you try to connect with the religion and personality of the people, but for real.

Great point, I should have mentionned those!

* we don't worship false gods either, we converted to Christianity❤️

it's only a modern evolution of ancient music in the way that most music is an evolution of older roots. nothing about it is particularly more historical to the setting.

We have found bronze lures in Denmark that date from 1000 BCE.

Traditional Scandinavian folkmusic is almost the oppsite of Irish, its more often than not - not jolly at all. It tend to be something in the lines of: "Three boys are lost, years later three sisters are raped and murdered on their way to church, the three murderers go to the sisters parents disguised as pilgrims for lodging, and bed the mother before its discovered that they murdered the sisters and then in the chaos its revealed that they where infact the lost sons, and they raped and killed their sisters (and fucked their mother)... Then more ppl dies violent deaths...

Sad Irish traditional song. The Croppy Boy. Even if you don't know the story or lyrics. Centuries of lost wars gave them plenty of mournful songs, but they're not the ones you play to have a good time at the pub.

Traditional Irish sean nos music can be pretty sad.

​@EmilReiko Yea.... There is a quiet heaviness about Scandinavians. The loud, boisterous, cheat beating Vikings are nearly certainly false. Those wild Celts are projecting themselves onto us. One thing I note about modern Scandinavians is that they often actually strike me as creative and off the wall in their own unique way. And theres a sort of deadpan humor, but with a lot of snark. I.e. at a hotel in Berlin, someone hit the elevator button too fast when it was full and a Norweigian guy on the elevator said "first time with elevator?" And Scandinavians all make fun of their neighbors. But also I suspect there was a sense of spreading their own way of life, taming and controlling new areas. My mostly Swedish dad is a really odd person. His humor is definitely on the "wtf even is that" spectrum. Personality traits I get from him that make me think of what Vikings were actually like are things like tending to prepare for situations such that the chance of success is very high, as well as a mindset of seeking unorthodox methods of getting ahead, or trying to find new clever ways of doing things. It's like "find what works and do that, fuck all the people talking about this wrong stupid way of doing it"

Yea there are too little ethnomusicology content on youtube - I'm hoping to contribute one day if I actually have the time to make videos :)

agus is breá liom Sean Nós

Keening would be a good one too.

I have a lot of information about the lur. We still practise the old tradition in Twente and it's a proto-germanic tradition that has survived 😊 there are archeological findings from the early ironage from Denmark that contain all the elements of our tradition as how we still celebrate it today in the eastern Netherlands. The tradition almost disapeared during ww2 but it's now making a revival and it's getting more popular again amongst younger people. The lur played a shamanic role in pre Christian Europe. In Sweden they practise kulning which is connected to the same tradition as it was to cause an echo to appear. People though the echo were spirits answering your call, so when people were about to pass, the spirits would be called and they would answer to guide the person who was dying into the spirit world. It was done to make your presence known, to attract the good spirits and ward off the bad ones. In Twente during midwinter we still play the lur (midwinterhoorn) above a well so the echos reach far throughout the whole area. The echo is called "the ancients call" and it's played with a warming drink and good company. After the player is done playing, the neighboring neighborhoods now answer the call letting the player know that he is not alone. So they play back n forth. This stems from the echo that was the spirit answering the call of the lurplayer, letting him know he was in good company. By playing across the land people asked the bad spirits that would take life away to leave and to ask the good spirits to seep new life back into the earth again so the daylight may return and spring may appear for a new cycle. It was the transformative magic of yuletide/joelentied/jultid and with that death was seen as the beginning of new life and not as the end. Joelen in Dutch and low Saxon still means "to howl." Also wolves would answer the lur's call as well and together with the high pitched howling of Kulning, this tradition is the origin of the Mythological creatures of the white women/Tuatha de Dannan (these were the Völva/Veleda), the goddess Danu/Tan(m) (Tamfana) and Nerthus, hellhound and the banshees (from the time when the British isles were still connected to Doggerland.) It's very likely that the lur was originally the shamanic instrument of the ancient Völva to communicate with, and guide the spirits. But with this I'm talking about proto Germanic and proto Indo-European times. The oldest lurs were cowhorns or horns carved out of treestumps. (In Twente we still play the treestumps, only in the town of Markelo they still use the cowhorn.) For the medieval Vikings this had developed to the call to the Valkyries to pick up the dead and bring them to Valhalla/Walhalla.

Glad it was helpful!

Just checked those out that was amazing.

Thank you! Interesting- I will try to find some examples off Sean - nos 🤗🙏❤️. As a person from the west coast of Norway with a DNA with 34% irish- without a clue were it comes from.. so this is interesting

Draumkvedet (dream quad) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_pyNyV0pRvQ.html

Bergatrollets frieri (an old Germanic myth, same as Beowulf and Grendel), Swedish version ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-X_BpmQqErks.html

Scaldic poetry to king Harold Hardrada ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6cQI6XdHPDY.htmlsi=acocOad5CDors-GR

Draumkvedet m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gQnqd_Mm3I0.html

Anglo saxon is germanic migratied angles and saxons from denmark and north germany so no wonder the similarities

Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were mutually intelligible languages

So, again, it might provide some influence and that would be an interesting theory but we can’t say “all of their music was based on that of Carthage”. Discussions very easily devolve into a negating of local culture in favour of exotic inspiration. Influence, however, is not impossible.

@@thegreenmage6956 I totally agree... I can never assert or believe that one civilization inherited its art or culture completely from another one! There are always touches of modernization and adjustments for any legacy; whatever its classification. But at the same time, we can always relate some legacies to its earlier origin in an attempt to understand "where was the idea originated."