The Northern Path

The Icelandic documentary Screaming Masterpiece includes an excerpt of the ancient Icelandic poem Odin’s Raven Magic. This work is an extraordinary musical performance on a large scale. While Screaming Masterpiece covers a lot of ground in the Icelandic alternative music scene, and is jammed full of exciting music, Odin’s Raven Magic was a real high point for me.

According to the Reykjavik Arts Festival website, the Icelandic group Sigur Ros collaborated with composer Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson and ballad chanter Steindor Andersen to stage this poem in the Edda tradition:

Here they embark on their most ambitious work so far: restoring Odin’s Raven Magic, a forgotten masterpiece of ancient Icelandic poetry, to its rightful place of honour. Here, Iceland’s ancient song tradition merges with the most exciting new horizons in modern Icelandic music. New light is shed on the past, ancient motifs are revitalized in our modern age. Also engaged in the performance are a string section, a choir and a huge harp hewn from Icelandic rock by sculptor Páll from Húsafell. Choir conductor: Árni Hardarson. This work has been eagerly awaited ever since word first got around that it was being specially produced for Reykjavík Arts Festival.

Odin’s Raven Magic is an Icelandic poem in the ancient Edda tradition, thought to have been composed in the 14th or 15th century. Its anonymous author clearly had an intimate knowledge of the Edda literature and mythology and alludes to a number of pagan motifs which are now lost. The poem recounts a great banquet held by the gods in Valhalla. While they are absorbed in their feasting, ominous signs appear that could foretell the end of the worlds of the gods and men. Odin’s Raven Magic had been relegated from mainstream ancient literature ever since 1867, when Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge claimed it was a 17th century fabrication. This theory has since been toppled with literary and linguistic arguments, and Jónas Kristjánsson, probably the most renowned scholar of ancient Icelandic literature today, has even hailed it as “a new Edda poem”.

Curious readers can examine a side-by-side translation of the Icelandic text into English. Sigur Ros plan to relase a  CD and DVD in early 2008. The band has also provided some video and audio clips, but the Screaming Masterpiece video material is way better. (Screaming Masterpiece is also available on Netflix.)

Between this piece and the upcoming Sequentia concert, this is turning out to be an exciting season for Heathen-themed performance works.

Sequentia, led by Benjamin Bagby, will be performing The Rheingold Curse at the Boston Early Music Festival in June. I’ve just gotten my tickets in the mail.

I’ve been “prepping” for this concert for awhile already, listening to to Edda - Myths From Medieval Iceland. I’m glad that I’ve spent some quality time with this CD, because even if one has some familiarity with early music, foreign language operas, modal Scandinavian folk music, and even Old Icelandic, this is just … really, really different.

The Edda CD was quite inexpensive. Now that I’ve been listening for some time, I’m ready to take the next step, and I’ve ordered the Rheingold Curse CD.

At first I was quite put off by the use of reconstructed 13th-century Icelandic pronunciation and the original modal musical “language” that Sequentia employs on the Edda disc. I was searching for something “authentic,” but found myself listening instead to a new idiom that no one had ever heard before. But this is really not all that different from the project of “reconstructing” Northern culture or spirituality: we use the research that’s available, but we fill in the gaps with our own creativity, and the product is something new and beautiful. It’s not quite the music that was heard a thousand years ago, but the song itself lives on.