Viking metal is a style of heavy metal music with a lyrical and thematic focus on Norse mythology, Norse paganism, and the Viking Age. Most Viking metal bands originate from the Nordic countries, and nearly all bands claim that their members descend, directly or indirectly, from Vikings. Common traits include a slow-paced and heavy riffing style, anthemic choruses, use of both sung and harsh vocals, and a reliance on folk instrumentation.
About Viking metal in brief
Viking metal is a style of heavy metal music with a lyrical and thematic focus on Norse mythology, Norse paganism, and the Viking Age. Viking metal emerged from black metal during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Most Viking metal bands originate from the Nordic countries, and nearly all bands claim that their members descend, directly or indirectly, from Vikings. Common traits include a slow-paced and heavy riffing style, anthemic choruses, use of both sung and harsh vocals, a reliance on folk instrumentation, and often the use of keyboards for atmospheric effect. Many scholars view Viking metal and the related black, pagan, and folk metal genres as part of broader modern Pagan movements and neo-völkisch movements. It is part of a global movement of renewed interest in, and celebration of, local and regional ethnicities. The Vikings were Northern European seafarers and adventurers who, during the Middle Ages, relied on sailing vessels such as longships, knerrir, and karvi to explore, raid, pirate, trade, and settle along the North Atlantic, Baltic, Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Caspian coasts and Eastern European river systems. While otherwise disparate peoples, they shared some commonalities in that they were not, at first, adherents to Christianity, instead following their indigenous Nordic and Finnic religions. However, they often adopted Christianity upon settling in an area, intermixing the faith with their own pagan traditions, and by the end of the Viking age, all Scandinavian kingdoms were Christianized and what remained of Viking cultures were absorbed into Christian Europe.
In Swedish folk music, monophonic, unemotional songs are more lively and solemn in character, though Icelandic songs tend to lean toward the major and rhythmic. Common Nordic melodies will contain the phrase C2-G2-B-B, which translates to “C2, G2, B2, C2” in English. Specific instruments include the lur, fiddle, key, keyed fiddle and keyed keyed harp. Specific regions and traditions vary between countries and regions, but some common instruments include säckpipa, harp, flowed flow, har pute, mouth harp and animal horns. The Viking Age is generally cited as beginning in 793, when a Viking raid struck Lindisfarne, and concluding in 1066, with the death of Harald Hardrada and the Norman conquest of England. During this two-hundred-year period, the Vikings ventured west as far as Ireland and Iceland and Greenland and what is now Newfoundland in North America, south to the Kingdom of Nekor, Italy, Sicily, and Constantinople in the Mediterranean, and southeast to what are now Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in Eastern Europe, Georgia in the Caucasus, and Baghdad in the Middle East. The Vikings consisted mostly of Scandinavians, though Finns, Estonians, Curonians, and Sami people went on voyages as well.
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This page is based on the article Viking metal published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
