Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music [Hardcover]

Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Musicoffers 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 offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.

Ross Hagenis associate professor of music studies in the Department of Music at Utah Valley University.
Mathias Nordvigis visiting assistant professor of Nordic and Arctic studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado.

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 scenes intense emotional appeal is entangled with deeply troubling discourses, the authors argue for Nordic ritual folk as a progressive space where lӝ