American Gods: A Crucial Novel for the 21st Century American

This will not be an attempt at a traditional book review, but rather a look at the cultural and spiritual implications within Neil Gaiman’s incredibly relevant novel “American Gods.” (Spoilers ahead)

“Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the magic day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.
But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and a rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.
Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow every imagined - it is a job that takes him on a dark and strange road trip and introduces him to a host of eccentric characters whose fates are mysteriously intertwined with his own.”

These eccentric characters are revealed to be ancient gods and deities, and Mr. Wednesday, of course, is Odin.

The core concept of Neil Gaiman’s story is rooted in the idea that gods exist merely from being believed in, and their power, strength, and health is based on the amount of people who remember, worship, or believe in them. As a result, every single different culture of immigrants that came across the Atlantic or Pacific ocean brought with them powerful mythological beings. The Irish immigrants brought with them Buile Suibhne; the Norse brought Thor, Eostre, and Odin; the Polish brought the Three Sisters and Czernobog, the Egyptians brought Anubis and Thoth; the Akan brought Anansi, and many more. The whole idea is when these cultures migrated, they brought with them a strong faith in their cultural identity and religion, and as such these deities they brought with them were more powerful when they first arrived. However, hundreds of years after being separated from their homeland, the people (and the gods as well) slowly become less European, or African, etc., and instead become more American, which brings us to the religion of the “New Gods”. 

These new gods are young, erratic, arrogant, and above all, dangerously powerful. These are the gods that the youngest generation of Americans from the 20th century onwards start to worship by sacrificing nothing but “their time” rather than blood. These are the gods of Television, Media, Internet, etc. and these are the gods that are becoming more powerful as the old gods become weaker and forgotten. It is proven throughout the book that the new gods are far more potent than the old, and what makes them dangerous is how quickly they can act, or how easily they can manipulate without need for a religious gathering or ceremony. All they need to do is turn on, and they capture the attention of the entire nation. 

The conflict of the book begins as Mr. Wednesday (remember: Odin) finally says enough is enough. The new gods travel the country assassinating old gods as they become too weak and forgotten to defend themselves, and the surviving old gods feel more like prey than gods as they struggle with their own self-identity and growing anonymity. The old gods, with their power having waned drastically after hundreds of years, find themselves blending in with average people in hopes that the new gods leave them be. Mr. Wednesday believes that this is not the way gods should act, and that the time has come for the old gods to stand up for themselves and show the new gods that they will not simply be forgotten, but they will go down fighting as a real god should.

A striking tone is set every time you meet a new god, you are met with doubt that this character could possibly be anything close to a deity. The old gods are in such bad shape from lack of faith, that they seem at first to be mere bums, vagrants, whores, or drug addicts upon first impression. They are nearly indistinguishable from the bottom caste of society, and even their depressing conversations and nihilistic attitudes are reflective of how far they have fallen at the hands of the new gods. The people of America were so quick to forget their own humanity, their own culture and spirituality for the sake of riches and trends, and dialogues with these forgotten gods shows the tragedy of the situation. 

That is what these gods, to me, begin to resemble throughout the story. These gods are analogous to our humanity. In these gods you find our vanity, our pride, our fears, our strengths, our faith, our selflessness, our selfishness… everything that makes us human and the stories that we have created as a global culture for thousands of years are put into human forms in the world of American Gods to show us that that is exactly what they are: human. In one of the climactic chapters, when the old gods meet the new gods on neutral ground, the differences in how they interact and how they carry themselves furthers this metaphor. The new gods can barely hold conversation, they have nothing interesting to say, and they become so desperate for modern food that they have someone drive from Kansas to Nebraska just for McDonalds burgers, to which they all complain are colds after the several hour car journey. These new gods have so much power, so much influence, yet they are so pathetically undeveloped that all they know how to do is follow orders and speak when spoken to.

This contrast is continuously played out through various mediums within the story itself regarding how the lifestyles and personalities of the old gods and new gods differ. The old gods, as already mentioned, are very human. They work day jobs to simply keep themselves useful, and to try and keep their own existential dread at bay by partaking in hobbies that remind themselves why they exist (Anubis, for example, keeps a day job owning a morgue in Cairo, IL). They live in apartments, drive old weathered cars, or simply wander from place to place. The new gods, however, are young, rich, and reckless. Analogous to a young pop-star, they are given so much power despite being only 10-20 years old before they learn responsibility or humility, and then they are dropped and forgotten just as fast, if not faster, for new trends or technology. They look for total domination of the American faith and will not tolerate coexisting with “old fashioned” or “outdated” gods. This is tragic for the new gods in their own right: if the tragedy of the old gods is the fact that they slowly die from ambiguity over hundreds of years after thousands of years of prominence, then the new gods dying out almost instantly as new technologies and trends are invented just as quickly is tragic in its own right.

The biggest value in this book, however, lies in the message about religion and cultural identity in America. After reading this book, one is reminded that unless you are Native American, your true heritage and cultural identity’s roots are grounded in a distant land across seas and oceans. In this day and age in America, a lot of people struggle with cultural identity because we have all been here just barely long enough to forget where we all really come from. We are all faced with the question, “what does it mean to be American?” and this book, at least in my eyes, answers that question, yet not in the way that many would hope. Being American means being someone or something from somewhere else; a stranger trapped in a land that is still very much foreign and mysterious to us, and coexisting in this strange land with other strangers that have brought with them their own beliefs that may conflict, denounce, or rarely agree with our own while we are simultaneously told that we are “one people under God”. We are all from different places, yet call the same place home, and as a result mix ideas and philosophies into one new culture that doesn’t really make sense and has always had self-contained issues that don’t seem to be present in other places, yet we all seem to share one thing amidst the confusion: the new gods. Yet, unlike old gods, we have yet to fully grasp how the new gods are best used to help us deal with existential conflicts inherent to being human that previous genuine spirituality helped us reason with.

Neil Gaiman’s storytelling takes us across America, and weaves interludes that take a step back from the story to give us background on different kinds of immigrants and their stories. These interludes (subtitled, “Coming to America”) are all tied together by the same theme, which is the near-universal struggle of what level of sacrifice it took to migrate to the New World from the old. From the first humans struggling to cross the arctic Bering Strait to get to America without even knowing what was on the other side, to Leif Erikson’s bloody journey of loss and sacrifice, to 17th century Egyptian slaves suffering on a Dutch trading ship, these stories remind us what our ancestors went through to get here. Knowing the sheer level of sacrifice given by our ancestors to get us to this New World, it is tragic that so many today are willing to forget them. After all that our forefathers and mothers went to to get us here for whatever reason, so many today throw the culture and history they brought with them aside with the belief that “it doesn’t matter.” Many are so quick to forget what their ancestors had done and worked for to get to where they were with this deplorable mindset that nothing that came before us matters. This, to me, a different kind of disrespect to those who gave up so much in hopes that we, their descendents, may live a better life, and it’s a uniquely American problem.

I am of the mind, that if more people took the time to read Gaiman’s masterpiece, more people would understand why our society in America is the way it is. We’re taught of immigrants and all of their differences in origin and purpose, but in an overarching theme of modern-day thinking, we learn it as if they were a different people than we are, and we separate ourselves from them, rather than acknowledging ourselves as being a continuation of the same human story. The reality is, we are the children of the people in those stories. We are the children of those English immigrants giving everything for religious freedom, we are the children of those Germans fleeing a war-plagued Prussia, we are the children of African slaves stripped from their homeland with their histories erased before they could remember who they were, we are the children of the Scottish exiled for not accepting the rule of crown, we are the children of the Spanish searching for riches and wealth of this new world, we are the children of all of these different people who came (or were sent) to America for so many different reasons that it would be gratuitous to list each and every one. We are not a different people from those in the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries, but we act and believe as though we are and pretend that their issues, conflicts, beliefs, and trials are contained within their generations. In truth, we inherit everything given to use from previous generations, and by ignoring this inheritance we allow our own problems and conflicts to go unanswered.

If more people read American Gods, then maybe we could begin to truly answer not only the question of what it means to be American, but also the question of what it means to be human in America, and why the answer lies within celebrating our differences between cultures, faiths, and nations.

Baldrs Draumar: That One Time the Son of Odin and God of Light Suffered From Depression

“Ho∂r will the hero; helward send; he will Baldr slay; the blameless god; and end the life; of Ó∂inn’s son.”
-Baldrs Draumar, Poetic Edda

Since the first time I was exposed to the story of the death of Baldr back in 2012 when I listened to Amon Amarth’s “Hermod’s Ride to Hel”, this lay from the Norse Eddas has fascinated me more than all others (yes, even the one that ends with Thor crossdressing and slaughtering a room of giants while wearing a wedding dress). However, it didn’t fascinate me because of incredible feats of strength or heroism, or intrinsic morality being shown through deeds, or some great moral to take away from it at the end, but rather because this lay actually tackles the topic of depression, which is hard to wrap your head around when you come to find this pre-10th century story understands and explains depression far better than most do today, more than 1100 years later.

Baldr, son of Odin and the God of Light, went through weeks of nightmarish fits. He didn’t feel right. No matter what, no matter how hard those around him tried to help, he couldn’t shake the feeling of dread. These nightmares would haunt him with omens of his death and losing those he loved. His brothers and sisters worried about him, his friends worried about him, and his mother most of all worried about him because this perfect child - for that is what Baldr was, a beautiful man with few flaws and unrivaled kindness - was depressed. Baldr, above all, was the most beloved of the gods. He was generous, joyful, brave, and kind, and his kin loved being around him, for he always gladdened their hearts and left them better and happier people. For what reason did someone such as this have to be depressed? Nevertheless, he was, and his parents, Frigg and Odin, could not bare it any longer.

Odin wasted no time in investigating the source of his depression. He mounted sleipnir, his eight-legged steed, and rode to Hel to consult a dead seeress who undoubtedly had answers. He arrived in Hel to find the halls decorated as if they were preparing for a party or an honored guest. Odin, under the guise of a wanderer, asked the seeress “for what reason are the halls of Hel decorated in such a splendid manner?” and the seeress, not knowing who the wanderer was, answered “why, we await the arrival of the beautiful Baldr.” with a twisted excitement.

Odin hastily returned to Asgard to tell Frigg of this. “Nothing shall harm my beautiful son!” Frigg swore, and she would have the entire world swear this as well. Frigg journeyed to every corner of the cosmos, and had each and every entity living and dead swear an oath to never harm Baldr. Well, all except one: the anodyne mistletoe. 

Though this did not ease Baldr’s mind, and depression remained a heavy weight on his spirit, his kin made a game of throwing rocks and various weapons and objects at him which had swore to never harm him. Rocks, axes, bricks, plates, and cups all bounced off of him without harm, and many spectators gathered to watch what would strike Baldr next with barely a tickle. Baldr’s twin brother, Ho∂r, stood away from the game, as he was the blind god of shadow, whom the other gods ignored and had no interest in, except for Loki. Loki convinced this poor, blind, misunderstood god to participate in the game by throwing a sharpened branch of mistletoe at his brother. Ho∂r, of course, had no way of knowing mistletoe did not swear the oath, but Loki did, and Loki only wanted chaos. 

One can imagine the look of confusion on Ho∂r’s face when he threw the branch, and all he heard were the screams and cries of gods around him. The branch had pierced and killed Baldr. The gods were dumb and silent in fear, for the death of Baldr was the portent of the apocalypse (a future topic). 

You, as the reader, probably already came up with several different layers of metaphors and morals one can take from this short story, and that is the beauty of it. In this short story more than a thousand years old, it demonstrates such depth of narrative that it may boggle one’s mind to see the literary talent those of the early middle ages held for those the rest of the civilized world regarded as mere “savages” and “barbarians”.

One may take note of how incredibly well the vikings seemed to grasp the concept of depression. Though, it makes sense, doesn’t it? As mentioned in my very first post, “What is a Skald?”, I alluded to the fact that the vikings spent absurdly long amounts of time huddled indoors around a fire. If we think we get bad seasonal depression here in the United States, one can only imagine what seasonal depression meant for people who didn’t see the sun for months, or didn’t have netflix to take their minds off of the weather, or couldn’t simply fetch their comfort food from the fridge and heat it in the microwave.

Further, they understood that depression need not have a source. Depression doesn’t have a face, depression doesn’t have a target demographic. Depression can happen to anyone, yet no one seems to understand it, and what better way to portray the indiscriminate nature of this condition than to give it to the god of light; the god who, to everyone else, seems perfect, beautiful, and kind?

The way his friends and family handle the situation is oddly comparative to how it is handled today. Everyone wants to help, yet no one can really help. Depression can simply be an imbalance of chemicals, or it can be caused by an experience, outlook, philosophy, or upbringing that has ingrained this sense of dread into one’s mind when it contrasts with reality. These “nightmares” haunt those with depression, and make it hard to feel, hard to care, and hard for those who care enough to help. Frigg believes that simply having every conceivable cause of pain swear an oath to not harm Baldr was the solution, yet it was still the nightmares, these inner demons, that were causing him the distress, rather than some outward source of pain.

As someone who doesn’t suffer from chronic depression, but commonly finds himself close to those who suffer from it, I can relate to the position of Frigg and Odin. They desperately try to find logical causes, and fix or prevent those potential causes for depression. Yet, after theoretically eliminating all logical causes for depression in Baldr, he continues to not only feel depression, but eventually meets his worst case scenario: dying by the hand of a weapon thought too minor to harm anyone. And that’s really what this is all about isn’t it? Causes of depression to others may seem small and insignificant to others, and result in the attempted therapy session being a simple “How can that be depressing you? Here is a list of logical reasons it shouldn’t depress you.”

And this, this is why these stories hold so much weight to me and many others like me. These stories are supposedly from a time without heart, a time without morals, a time without God or enlightenment. The fact that we can look at these stories a thousand years later and still learn lessons of our own being, and realize that humans have always been keenly aware of the many facets of existence (such as Lao-Tzu’s “Tao” philosophy turning out to be true with the discovery of the concept of energy) and what it means to be human even from a time when we were supposed to be backwards savages who didn’t know left from right is quite a magnificent thing to take away from these stories. Maybe we aren’t as far ahead of the people who told these stories a thousand years ago? Sure, we have technological marvels that could be perceived as magic in the right context, but do all of our advancements truly make up for the fact that we’ve seemingly forgotten our humanity, or where we come from in our modern age? Or, should we continue the ideals of the romantic era and look to our roots to learn the best way forward? Perhaps there isn’t a correct answer, but it is an important question nonetheless that best be answered sooner than later.

The White Noise: Why We Do What We Do

“Suddenly, a mist fell from my eyes and I knew the way that I had to take.”
-Edvard grieg

I, as I assume many others my age on their way out of their fleeting childhood, yet on their way in to the search for meaning of why we are here or why we do what we do, constantly find myself wrestling with the concept of death and our own mortality. I find myself wondering “what’s the point?” or “If we avoid extinction on earth, the sun will swallow us whole anyway, eventually making all human advancement ultimately pointless in the grand scope of existence”. It comes off as depression, or it comes off as a bit nihilistic, but I have taken a different approach to the subject as I find myself slowly finding what the purpose of my life, and life in general, is. This approach is how I’ve managed to find solace in the seemingly inherent futility of existence, which may not be all that inevitable in the end.

I believe that this is the natural state of mind for a human being before it finds its purpose; that humans are naturally drawn to negative thoughts and emotions, and the true primal purpose of our life lies within purpose itself. Purpose, however, to me, has a very different meaning than it does to most I know, because I fail to find a better word for it. Think of the spirit, soul, conscience, however you want to call it, as a radio that can only tune into one station. When we are not tuned to that channel, all we hear is static, white noise. This white noise is all of those negative thoughts and fears and doubts that fill the empty space in our minds not dedicated to passion. Those fears of what happens after we die, those doubts surrounding if anything we do is truly worth it, or those negative thoughts that we will never succeed, those are all this white noise. However, as we tune closer and closer to that one station, the signal becomes more apparent, maybe only subtle and faint in the beginning. The closer we get to finding the frequency of that one station, the less white noise we hear as we tune that knob, and the more clearly we can hear the music of that one station we search for. This one station, is our purpose, and it plays the clearest, most pure music that we will ever know. A music that some may find the frequency for overnight, and others sadly, spend their whole lives looking for, only to never find it in the end. However, if you are one of the lucky ones that finds your station, you will, without a doubt, never go a day without listening to it again.

This purpose is what drives us as human beings ever forward into the jaws of the unknown. Beethoven did not write his Moonlight Sonata because he was told “if you write this, you will become Beethoven”. Thoreau did not write Walden because he was told “if you write this, you will become Thoreau”. The Wright Brothers did not invent the miracle of human flight because they were told “if you do this, you will become the Wright Brothers”. Alexander Fleming didn’t slave over his studies for years to discover penicillin just because he was told “if you work for this, you will become Alexander Fleming”. These were people, just like you and I, who simply followed their purpose, their job in this life that truly gripped them and absorbed them into a feeling of bliss and euphoric cacophony to drown out the white noise which screamed “there’s no point.” No, they were simple men who only did what gave them peace of mind in this world, who are all proof that so long as you follow your purpose with zeal and fanatic dedication, you will find truth and success, or at least, contentment. In Edvard Grieg’s words yet again:

“To have the ability to withdraw into oneself and forget everything around one when one is creating - What, I think is the only requirement to for being able to bring forth something beautiful. The whole thing is - a mystery”.

Or in the words of the venerable Martin Luther King Jr., ”If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. … [for] No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

Before Martin Luther King marched for freedom, he was just another man. Before Beethoven revolutionized the symphony, he was just another man. Before Thoreau wrote Walden… the point has been rightfully beaten to death by now, but the emphasis has hopefully been placed on how easy it is to go from a regular man or woman on the streets struggling for importance to a historical icon of human ingenuity simply by following your heart to what makes you feel human and complete, which in and of itself is the true essence of why one must find purpose. It was only because these people found their purpose and dedicated their lives to it with stubborn reckless abandon that we were given the miracle of x-ray, or flight, or the radio, or the printing press.

To this end, if we humans continue to follow our purpose with religious zeal as we do now and as we always have, we never know where we may end up, but we know it will be forward. Think of all the things thought impossible, or diving, or of the arcane only a hundred years ago. Imagine talking with your friend across the ocean in Madrid while you’re in Philadelphia in real time FaceTime and checking the news of an event that just happened four minutes ago in Beijing all while microwaving your instant dinner in the year 1889. Imagine simply not dying of an infection in the year 1927. The point is, that we have no idea what we’re capable of in the future while living in the present moment. The fact is, we are either a fleeting earthbound race at the end of their rope at the hands of climate change or mutually assured destruction, or an interstellar species at only the dawn of their existence just now learning how to evade all forms of extinction and how to travel through space to other habitable planets. The only thing that separates us between these two realities is how well we as a species can put our heads down, find our purpose, and work until our job is done.

This is not to imply, of course, that our existence rests solely in the hands of the scientists, engineers, and doctors. For all of its importance for us to press ever onward into our hazed future, what good is perpetuity and eternity if there is nothing to eternally exist for? The scientists, doctors, and engineers work so that we may continue to have writers, musicians, and artists. The beloved excerpt from the Dead Poets’ Society contains several musings pertinent to the subject at hand, yet one resonates stronger in me than the rest:

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

We all contribute to this tapestry of human existence no matter how small our contribution is. At one point or another, or at least I hope, one of us has shown one other person that there is something worth living for. Within that web of 8 billion people all showing each other just once in their lives that this life is worth living, we are cultivating a world of motivation to keep this flame burning. The scientists keep the authors alive, and the authors give the scientists reason to want to stay alive. The engineers work for ways to avoid tragedy, so that the musicians may continue to play, giving reason for the engineer to want to avoid tragedy. This positive feedback loop of people dedicating themselves to their purpose so they may experience the purpose of others is a magical human experience that happens to also be the only chance we have that one day our species may soar among the stars and experience true eternity in the human spirit.

And this is why we do what we do. This is why I spend hours a day learning Scandinavian languages, or compositional skills, or devouring musicology and history books, why I dedicate so much time to exploring new musics and literature, why I play music, or why I may sit for hours beside a river just listening to what it has to say, because though I don’t know right now what the fruits of these labors will be, I do them simply because I know that is the right thing for me to do, and that it is my verse that I must contribute to this great play we are all a part of. I do it because for these moments or hours when I am pouring every ounce of my being into this work and research, I forget everything that tries to drag me into the abyss. I forget that I am mortal. I forget that I will probably be forgotten. I forget that no one will ever care about what I do. I forget everything, and simply “do”. If for no other reason, this is why we do what we do, because it is the only thing that keeps us from the white noise, and the only thing that keeps us moving forward into a bright future we can all believe in regardless of how dark things may seem.

The Scandinavian Soundscape

"The North is most assuredly entitled to a language of its own"
-Robert Schumann

I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the “Nordic sound”, or how the music from scandinavia has a particularly unique aesthetic compared to the rest of Europe, yet I rarely find a chance to go into detail about what that really means. Now, as I sit here in an uncharacteristically humid and hot day in New Hampshire, my mind is wandering to colder places (though it normally does anyway) and while my mind is sitting on the cliff perched above a fjord or on a rocky skerry on the barents sea trying to ignore the pool of sweat I’m sitting in, I may as well take this time to write about it to keep myself there.

It’s hard to find a place to begin on this topic, because there are so many components to the scandinavian soundscape. From the rich mythology I ramble about, to political reasons pervading the classical and romantic eras, to stubborn cultural and aesthetic differences from the rest of Europe, to basic geography, it’s impossible to pin the difference on one of these topics.

At the most basic place, one must look at what was happening between the cultures of the German musical powerhouse and our arctic cultural island of Scandinavia. From the horrors of the 30 years war with Sweden leading the protestant militaristic charge against catholic Germany itself to Karl the 12th keeping the Swedish dominance in Europe alive until the Battle of Poltava in 1709, Sweden was too preoccupied with trying to be (and paying to be) Europe’s “big brother” to focus on the arts. Even when musically active, the composers and performers of baroque and classical Sweden had no outlet for their music, as they were surrounded by enemies on all sides. Just as a match that can’t breathe, composers of this time in Sweden found their flames dying out without neighboring countries with which to share their creations.

Hop on over to Norway and one will find the opposite situation affecting the arts equally. In John Yoell’s words in his book “The Nordic Sound”:

“From the 15th through 18th centuries a credible, if not crushingly original, musical tradition grew up alongside the royal courts in Copenhagen and Stockholm. [but] What was going on in Norway during these years? ‘Not much’ makes a fair reply. Norwegians are by no means devoid of creative genius, but political and economic reverses conspired to punch a hole in the country’s history. During the baroque and classical eras the cultivation of music depended on a leisured aristocracy; [but no such aristocrats] lived in Norway.”

Norway was simply a province of Denmark, used for its timber, mining, labor and fishing, while barely being allowed to have its own language. This kept Norway a peasant country for most of the Classical Era and into the mid-Romantic era when Norway finally gained independence in 1814 (and it did not take long for budding composers to bare fruit under this newly found independence). On the other hand, while this situation was less than ideal for art music and concert halls, this peasant culture formed a fertile breadbasket for folk music, which is a topic that deserves its own essay later.

More from John Yoell on the topic: “In those days Norway could support few professional musicians and these worked in widely scattered posts. The governing upper crust of Dano-Norwegians naturally looked to Copenhagen for musical stimulation, leaving Norway’s ‘national voice’ slumbering in the ignored world of folk music.”

So, now knowing that Sweden was busy fighting against the very musical powerhouse of Europe for the Classical and early Romantic eras, it makes it quite obvious to see why Sweden had little influence coming from the strides in advancements Bach and others were making in art music. Even then, if they did happen to receive any influence, they were too deep into post-war political and economic upheaval to pay it much mind. Conversely, Norway was too busy laboring away and fighting for Denmark to have much time to learn, play, pay for, or watch operas or sonatas of the time.

Even then, why is it that when Scandinavian music finally did start to come around, that it had such a distinctive sound despite being exposed to the same operas, concertos, symphonies, and sonatas the rest of Europe had already been familiar with for decades? The answer to this comes from the peasant culture discussed earlier, nourished mostly in Norway with a struggling Sweden lagging behind.

Folklore in Europe was intrinsically tied to heathen, pagan, pre-christian beliefs. Further, when Christianity came to a tribe, it was not content to exist side-by-side with other belief systems, but existed in absoluteness. As a result, when a culture was converted to Christianity, its folklore was forgotten and unwritten, and very often made heresy to even speak of, meaning the folklore of mainland Europe was forgotten when conversion was completed before the 10th century even came into sight. Pagan beliefs of what is now Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, or even England were completely eradicated by the sword and had no time to be recorded.

Scandinavia had the unique history of being converted by (mostly) choice rather than by the sword. Simply, they couldn’t be converted by force. As a matter of fact, Christians feared fighting Vikings so deeply because Vikings didn’t fear death as the rest of Europe did, but came looking for it. Christian afterlife was decided by God, and judged based on a series of rules you had to follow, and if broken, you could be denied entrance to heaven (later, sent to hell, which was ironically a germanic-norse concept). Vikings had a glorious afterlife awaiting them, so as long as they died in battle, they looked at an eternal battlefield with endless mead and feasting. Put these two beliefs against each other in battle and it doesn’t take much guesswork to see who would be the most reluctant to fight whom.

After a few hundred years of the church failing to force the vikings into conversion, they had no choice but to play the long slow game of trying to achieve conversion of these pagans diplomatically, as much as it pained them. This was a blessing in disguise for scandinavian culture, as it was during this time that Christians adopted many Viking traditions such as Christmas, Easter, adding the -son suffix to names, language, sagas, and even the modern concept of a comb. Christianization of the vikings didn’t come to fruition until the 11th century after countless instances of murder and betrayal of key pagan leaders by prominent norsemen promised fame, power, and fortune by the church for carrying out God’s will.

From the 9th to 11th century, though it ended in blood and conversion, monks and missionaries lived side-by-side with the vikings, and they learned much from each other. Where the Vikings taught the Christians craftsmanship and lore, Christians taught Vikings to read and write. This gave a 200 year window for the Viking folklore to be written down and recorded as well as shared with their educated neighbors, which in the end, even after conversion, allowed their culture and heritage a chance to live on and inspire us into later centuries where other culture’s beliefs and stories were not so fortunate. With this knowledge of how simple folk life and folklore was allowed to survive and grow well into the classical and romantic era when common musical practice of mainland Europe finally reached an independent Scandinavia, we can see the beginnings of the nordic sound come together.

Jump forward the 19th century, in the heat of the romantic era, where nationalism and folklore were the most abundant stimulus for fueling the flames of art and music of the time. From John Yoell’s “Nordic Sound”:

“For almost 500 years the Nordic peoples had received a steady flow of foreign ideas. They showed some flashes of response in science and literature, but musically they had largely remained a colony. But by glorifying the ancient past, romanticism caused the resurrection of the entire panorama of the old Nordic world. Read again after centuries of neglect, the sagas and eddas gave the modern Scandinavians a badly needed link with the past to bolster their cultural confidence. 

Folklore, the ‘living’ past and presumed key to ethnic idenity, broke to release a flood of previously disregarded songs, dances and tales to enrich both music and literature. The twin rivers of romanticism and nationalism began flowing together … By no means does all worthwhile Scandinavian music fall within the romantic ear, but this was a time when northern composers began to put their best foot forward; for the first time, a few of them even managed to draw the attention of the entire world.”

When you are born and raised in a land of dwarves, elves, trolls, ettins, wizards, world serpents, fearsome winged valkyries, wandering wizards, towering mountains, vast glaciers, magical runes, gaping fjords, and apocalyptic battles between gods and giants in the heavens, it is only natural that the music made from the cultivation of these tales, sagas, and stories would be of equal imagination, wonder, and mysticism and take on the very aspects and aesthetics of such mythology and landscapes. Grace the ideals of the romantic era regarding national identity, the inherent bond between music and literature, nostalgia, preoccupation with nature and the arcane, and freedom of expression into these lands and it evidently did not take long for Yoell’s proverbial flood to surge out from Scandinavia.

Yet, the literary and folklore culture of Scandinavia only serves as a muse for the music, and literary inspiration can only do so much to drive the sound of the music it sparks. So one question remains, where does the actual sound come from? As alluded to earlier, Scandinavians only had exposure to two musical settings in their daily lives: the wholesome choral music of the Protestant church, or the lively organic folk music from their dance halls and farmhouses. While the rest of Europe was listening to compositional titans of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Couperin, and Beethoven, who made relentless advancement in how harmony and melody can be experimented with, our Scandinavians were humming simple peasant fiddle tunes, or those harmonies stuck in their heads from church that morning. In their culture, music was all-pervading in its most wholesome and organic state of chorus and dance.

After Scandinavian countries were first exposed to the Romantic era of the rest of Europe, it did not take long at all for the first composers of the time to start making waves across Europe with these very dispositions towards how music should sound. These composers had no need to try to one-up Beethoven or Chopin in what and what can't be done with harmony. These composers simply wanted to put their humble countries on the map by setting themselves apart with their own homegrown sound. To listeners south of the Baltic, the lands of the cold north were still a land of mystery to a vast majority of them. Thanks to composers such as Ole Bull, Edvard Grieg, Johan Svendsen, and Hugo Alfven, to name a few, with northern harmonies like hearthfires and melodies of northern lights were soon brought to the unwitting listeners from the south. In this culture around mainland Europe that had grown so use to the harmonic advancements being made since the 16th and 17th centuries in their art music, this garden of organic harmonic simplicity in the north that had been untouched by these experiments were allowed to grow in an alternate reality of "what if that harmonic convention never happened to music?" Simply, when listeners around the world would first hear Nordic composers, they would hear music as if it were from another ancient time that they had left behind, and that is what made it so enchanting. This music perhaps may have spoken to those listeners of Germanic descent in particular, as a theory steeped in more than fantasy is that the Scandinavians were the rightful heirs and guardians to the untouched Germanic tradition due to the aforementioned events leading to the northern peoples keeping key aspects of their culture even after conversion. (Yoell, 17)

As discussed in the previous essay, music serves to bring people places they never thought they would go. The music of Scandinavian romantics brought German, Italian, French, English, Spanish, and even African and Asian listeners of the time to the foot of a Norwegian fjord or the streets of a Hardanger town from the unexpecting comfort of a concert hall chair. With these composers bringing a little piece of their faraway homeland through their music wherever it went, the organic folk root simplicity and wide scope of the Scandinavian soundscape proved it had the power to inspire people from all corners of the world to feel as though they were in a place of unparalleled beauty and wonder. 

Listening examples:

Ola Gjeillo, Tundra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn_JxxDAr5A

Edvard Grieg, Piano Concerto Mvt. II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU4vPj4c3fU

Edvard Grieg, Peace of the Woods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgRvjTtrzEo

Hugo Alfven, Dalecarlian Rhapsody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtBcubFeES0

Ole Bull, Saeterjentens Søndag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXqnLooMLO0