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Multicultural Perspectives — Final Project

December 10, 2024

Resource Document: Nordic Folk Music

Geography and Climate

The Nordic region, located across northern Europe and North America, comprises Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Åland, and the Faroe Islands. This region is also commonly referred to in English as Scandinavia, but many believe that Scandinavia only includes Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The larger region is increasingly known as the Nordics, or Norden, which translates to “northern” in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The boundaries of Norden are flexible depending on the context; certain areas might fall inside or outside of this category through a historical, artistic, religious, political, or cultural lens. The Nordic countries actually vary widely across all of these areas, requiring a flexible border.

Norden is mostly made up of islands. Only Sweden, Finland, and mainland Norway share land borders with each other, and Denmark’s only land border is with Germany. The rest of the region is all islands, ranging significantly in size. The Faroe Islands, a set of 18 islands operating as an autonomous territory of Denmark, are only about 550 square miles in total, while the main island of Greenland—another autonomous Denmark territory— is well over 800,000 square miles. Glaciers, long coastlines, forests, meadows, rivers, mires, mountain ranges, Arctic tundra, and both active and dormant volcanoes characterize these islands. Within the Arctic circle, the border of which passes through five Nordic countries, inhabitants experience extended periods of almost constant sunshine around the summer solstice and almost constant dusk or darkness around the winter solstice.

History and Identity

When considering the history of the Nordics, historians typically begin with the Viking era. The Vikings, pagan warriors hailing from Scandinavian settlements, spent this period of the Middle Ages raiding and colonizing European land, as well as setting up trading routes reaching as far as North America. They told dramatized stories of their conquests that gave way to some of the earliest Old Norse sagas, which initially centered around Christian saints before giving way to Norse mythological figures.

Soon, kingdoms began to take shape out of the Viking settlements. Norway came first in the ninth century, followed by Denmark and Sweden in the tenth century. In the 13th century, Sweden expanded across the Baltic coast, eventually leading to the formation of Finland, which remained under Swedish rule until the 19th century. In the late 14th century, the Kalmar Union unified Denmark, Sweden, and Norway after Margaret I (the daughter of Denmark’s king) married Haakon VI (the king of Norway and son of Sweden’s king). Once in power, Margaret took all three kingdoms under her reign. The union stayed intact for over a century, despite all three countries maintaining a great deal of political autonomy. In 1520, the Stockholm Bloodbath alienated the majority of Swedes from the rest of Scandinavia and led to the dissolution of the Kalmar Union. As the once-again independent countries sought to find their footing, they turned to Lutheranism in the Reformation. This Christianization left its mark on the constitutions of the Nordic countries; today, Iceland and Denmark (including the Faroe Islands and Greenland) formally recognize Lutheran state churches, and Sweden, Finland, and Norway have national Lutheran churches still closely intertwined with their government systems.

Since the early sixteenth century, no one formalized state has ever fully controlled the Nordic region. For several centuries, Sweden and Denmark fought for control of the Baltic Sea and also colonized parts of the Caribbean; Denmark also claimed land in West Africa, India, Iceland, and Greenland. Russia took control of Finland in 1809 and ruled it until Finland declared independence in 1918. Norway became independent in 1905, and Iceland followed suit in 1944. During the First and Second World Wars, Scandinavia was wedged between major powers Russia and Germany; this tense position led the Nordic countries to seek to strengthen their cooperation, eventually leading to the formation of the Nordic Council of Ministers in 1971.

Throughout history, the Nordic countries have found themselves drawn together by common interests and geographical fate. At the same time, they have maintained distinct national identities and supported a wide range of cultural practices. Taking language as an example: Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are very closely related and are somewhat mutually intelligible, while Icelandic and Faroese are part of the Germanic language family but more distantly related, and Finnish and the Sámi languages are members of a different language family altogether. This linguistic variety serves as a reminder that the proximity of these countries and territories does not necessarily mean that they are culturally similar. During the Cold War, the Nordic countries tried to create a distinct identity for themselves as a region. They rested this idea on their peaceful cooperation and trust in each other, signaling their belief that international conflict should be solved through diplomacy if at all possible. Despite their claims of Nordic antimilitarism, Finland and Sweden did maintain considerable military forces. In political arenas, the Nordics displayed considerable dedication to solidarity with the Third World, speaking up for those countries and factions who lacked their own platform. Finally, the egalitarian democratic models of the Nordic governments was thought or said to be morally superior to any alternatives. Recently, however, international politics has made this position of Nordic exceptionalism more difficult to maintain.

Old Norse Religion and Mythology

Religious and cultural practices in pre-Christian Norden were only sparsely documented. Historians in recent centuries have pieced together many aspects of what they call Old Norse religion from archaeological artifacts, a handful of poems, and a few mostly hostile Christian texts. Referred to in post-Reformation texts as “the old way,” Old Norse religion was likely not a faith practice in the same way as contemporary religion is. It was probably more of a cultural phenomenon, intertwined with the daily lives of those who practiced it. Old Norse religion is also less of a specific set of religious customs than it is an umbrella term for a vast array of belief in divine powers. Polytheistic worship coexisted with many types of witchcraft, and it is likely that these practices interacted with each other in many cases. Some archaeological records point to certain locations, landmarks, and temples as hotspots for cultic activity, such as animal sacrifices and other rituals.

The Norse mythological worldview associated with both the Old Norse religion and contemporary Norse mythology addresses and explains all of existence, from the creation of the world to its destruction and the new world that rises in its stead. Most of today’s understanding of this mythology comes from the Prose Edda, an Old Norse textbook written by Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson. According to the Edda, before the world as we know it came into being, there was only a fiery realm (Muspelheim) and an icy realm (Niflheim). These realms collided, and from the melted wetness that they produced, a cow (Audhumla)  and a giant (Ymir) were born. The cow licked and melted enough ice to uncover Búri, whose eventual grandchildren were the first gods: Odin, Vili, and Vé. These gods slayed Ymir the giant and used his remains to make the world; his flesh became the earth, his skull the sky, his bones the mountains, and his blood the sea. Ask and Embla, the first human couple, were made from two pieces of wood.

The mythology that follows is just as complex as the creation story. The World Tree, Yggdrasil, stands in the gods’ realm while spreading its roots into the realms of both the humans and the giants. The three fates do their work at the base of the tree while a dragon of death gnaws on the roots in an attempt to disturb the universe. Eventually, a terrible winter and the destruction of the sun by a hungry wolf leads Yggdrasil to shake, collapsing the bridge between the realms of gods and humans. The gods do their best to fight off these evils and more, but when the giant Surtr sets fire to the world, all is lost. This is the end of the world, called Ragnarök. Eventually, a new world rises from the sea, and the remaining gods rebuild it from the beginning.

Following the Christianization of the Nordics, Lutheranism became the primary religion, but many aspects of the Old Norse religion remained. A polytheistic religious model, after all, could easily welcome Jesus into its fold without disturbing the existing belief system. Today, the majority of Nordic people are either Christian or agnostic. A small number of Norden inhabitants still practice a version of Old Norse religion, often called Norse paganism, but for the majority, the Norse gods and their backstories have remained in the cultural consciousness as familiar, benign stories. Norse mythology has become part of the folklore of these countries, along with trolls, elves, selkies, and the Kraken.

Folk Music

Because the Nordic region has such rich cultural variety, this section will begin with country-specific overviews of folk music practices before concluding with a discussion of folk trends across Norden.

Denmark

The most common traditional vocal music genre in Denmark is the ballad—narrative, strophic, and rhyming. Medieval ballads were categorized either as folk ballads, which discussed nobility or supernatural characters, or jesting ballads concerning ordinary people dealing with norms and taboos. Echoing songs, a type of ballad, were written and performed starting in the 1500s; these songs discussed the same topics within different metrical structures. Ballads written in the 1700s and onward often told stories of misfortune and war, and intersected frequently with sailor songs. Early ballads predated seven-tone modes. These tunes typically combined short melodies with the range of a fourth, fifth, or sixth, in consistent ABABC or AAB structures. 16th and 17th century ballads borrowed heavily from German music, and were consequently more modally and metrically complex. Beginning in the 1700s, folk tunes were influenced more and more by triadic harmony and reflected more symmetry in their forms. In the 1800s, a majority of melodies took either an ABCD form or AABA, in which the B was pitched higher than the A. Fiddle music followed many of these same harmonic customs, with differences in meter and form. While newer fiddle melodies are highly symmetrical and predictable, older melodies were not especially concerned with metrical consistency.

A few instruments stood out as significant in the rural folk tradition. In the 1700s, village musicians played the bagpipe, the hurdy-gurdy, and the mouth harp, but most folk music centered around the drum and the fedel, a stringed instrument similar to a violin. By the 18th century, the violin itself was the predominant folk instrument, and clarinet, flute, and string bass were often included in folk ensembles. Accordions quickly became popular, and even as accordion construction became more advanced, the instrumentalists’ styles tended towards that of the simpler two-row accordion. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, some instrumentalists preferred to play homemade instruments such as the clarinet-shawm (a wooden woodwind), the cow horn (used as a bugle), and the rumble pot (a friction drum typically made with a pig’s bladder and a goose quill).

Most folk instrumentalists were self-taught and played their music by memory, while others might have received training in childhood or apprenticed with experienced players. These instrumentalists were hired to play at events such as dances, weddings, and season holidays. Fiddlers in particular played a wide variety of dances, including some dance tunes specific to certain regions. For many years it was understood that only one musician would play at a time during a dance, but musicians in the 19th century began to collaborated in small ensembles.

Not all musicians were professional, though. Street musicians spent their time singing and playing in public places, usually for money; they performed whatever music was popular at the time, from traditional ballads to songs made famous by radio or film. These musicians emphasized the guitar in addition to the instruments used by professionals, also embracing the banjo, spoons, and the saw blade. Many street musicians were occasionally employed in taverns. Music was also used on farms, both when the farmhands were working and when they were resting. Working songs could use any themes, but were very rhythmically even to allow for singing while working. Conversely, sailors’ and fishermen’s songs frequently referred to conditions on ships and even, in satirical verses, to specific individuals on board.

Finland

The oldest traditional Finnish song forms are the lament, or itku, and the runo. Both of these song forms are sung syllabically in a tetrachordal or pentachordal scale. These scales could be expanded, especially in the runo genre, and the third scale degree was usually unstable, sometimes switching between major, minor, or neutral in the middle of a song.

The itku, hailing from a region in Finland and Russia called Karelia, was reserved for women. The style had no fixed meter; its melodies were repetitive, slow, and descending. The itku singer started each line on a high note and ended on the tonic, improvising their way down. Lamenting in this way had several purposes. It was a socially acceptable way to express grief or sorrow following a death or other upsetting event, and it could protect the singer from supernatural powers. Compared to the fluid itku, the runo was strictly organized. Each line of a runo song contained eight, nine, or ten notes to match the number of syllables in each line of text. The melody was simple and iterative, following either an AAAA or ABABAB structure; beginning the 1700s, a four-line ABCD form was used more commonly. A runo could be in 5/4, 5/8, or 2/4 time, but it might just as easily use a mixed or changing meter. The text of the Finno-Karelian epic poem, Kalevala, was sung in the runo style for all social occasions. Kalevala songs discuss supernatural and folkloric themes, Viking tales, Christian legends, and more. After the Reformation, Finland received music from Germany that introduced new modal and harmonic information into the Finnish folk music scene. Combined with the structured runo, these new musical principles led to the development of the rekilaulu (round-dance) genre. In rekilaulu, melodies are modal or major, and the meter is usually 2/4 or 4/4. Many of these melodies were borrowed from the church or from popular ballads.

While only women sang the itku, it was mostly men who played musical instruments. Three instruments are known to be native to and popular in Finland and Karelia: the torvi (a trumpet made either from an animal horn or from tree bark), the pilli (a simple reed flute), and a duct flute made from willow wood. These instruments were used to signal or summon people across distances, and to control animals through supernatural power. The kantele (a type of zither) and the jouhikko (a bowed lyre) were once widespread, but were both gradually replaced by the violin. It was only in the 1800s that Finland saw the development of folk ensembles, now including clarinet and brass; in the 1940s, a newer ensemble was born—two violins, double bass, and school organ—that became the model for Finnish folk ensembles.

Iceland

Icelandic folk music was primarily vocal, and took two main forms: rímur and tvísöngur. Rímur (rhymes), long epic poems, were extremely popular for nearly six centuries. They were most frequently chanted informally at evening family gatherings called kvöldvökur, but also performed while fishing, traveling, or in other contexts. Rímur performance required an intense guttural technique somewhere between singing and speaking. These songs were strophic and used a very short repeated melody that might vary over time and with certain lines of text. The full performances, however, could be extremely lengthy, containing thousands of stanzas and passing by at a slow tempo. Throughout a ríma, the performer would lengthen the final note of each strophe and introduce other metrical variations in order to hold the attention of their audience during the narrative. Despite an attempt by the church to suppress rímur singing in the mid-16th century, the genre remained an important part of Icelandic culture. Iceland’s other major traditional vocal style, tvísöngur (two-singing), was used to enhance the performance of various sacred and secular melodies, including rímur. Simple tvísöngur singing involves a second voice, or group of voices, accompanying a vocal melody at a distance of a parallel fifth. More elaborate versions of this technique might include octave doublings. The tvísöngur has been used in a variety of vocal settings, including rímur, Gregorian chants, courting songs, and psalm tunes.

Icelandic musicians developed two bowed zithers native to their island. The fiðla had at least two horsehair, metal, or gut strings. The instrument was played lying flat on a table or on the lap of its player, the small bow held like a pencil. All the strings but one functioned like a drone; the melody string was stopped from below. The langspil had between two and six horsehair, gut, or wire strings. Like the fiðla, the langspil was a drone instrument with a single melody string. The primary difference between these instruments was their shape; the fiðla was slightly trapezoidal, while the langspil was narrow, rectangular, and flared on the end.

Norway

In Norwegian mountain communities, women worked on the sæter, a summer farm used for grazing cows and goats. As the women worked, they developed a style of singing unique to the sæter. This tradition included songs for each specific farm activity, such as making butter. Aspects of the sæter songs assisted the women in communicating with each other across long distances. Most notably, sæter songs included a large number of highly ornamented, even microtonal animal calls (or kulokkar); these calls appeared in songs alongside shouting, yodeling, and chanting.

More mainstream vocal performance in Norway occurred through the form of ballads. These historical and folkloric narratives concerned heroes, nights, romance, the supernatural, and religious themes, both Christian and otherwise. These songs typically took a strophic form and followed a common stanza structure taken from the stev style, which used trochaic tetrameter and trimeter in an ABCB rhyming form. The most famous sacred ballad, Draumkvædet, combines Old Norse religious elements with popular Christian beliefs. Draumkvædet tells the story of a man in a supernatural sleep beginning on Christmas Eve who experiences visions of heaven, hell, and doomsday. It contains four melodies, each to accompany a specific section of the story, and the melody is believed to be as old as the text itself.

The most significant Norwegian folk instruments were in the string family, although wind instruments were used in pastoral settings. The langeleik, a slim zither, has eight steel strings, seven of which are drones. The performer stroked the melody string with a plectrum and plucks the drone strings between strokes. The langeleik was typically a women’s instrument and was often played at concerts on Sunday evenings, during which time the sæter women embroidered or engaged in social dancing. After the violin was introduced in Norway in the 1600s, the langeleik mostly fell out of use in favor of bowed strings. Norwegian musicians developed two physically different types of violins, each with their own playing techniques. The traditional European violin, called the flatfele (flat violin) or vanleg fele (ordinary violin), was heard in northern, central, and eastern Norway. The hardingfele (Hardanger violin), unique to Norway, was played in the west and some southern valleys almost exclusively by men. The hardingfele was highly ornamented and had four or five sympathetic strings under the fingerboard. It was smaller than the flatfele, with a rounder body and a shorter neck, and its decorated peg box almost resembled the figurehead on a Viking ship. This construction resulted in a sonic texture thick with harmonics. Traditional hardingfele music used at least 20 different tunings, each with its own connotation and customs for when and how it should be played. Hardingfele tunes were usually created from multiple disconnected tetrachord, resulting in a melodic footprint more complex than that of simple tonal harmony. The rhythmic system for this music was equally complex, layering rhythmic patterns of different lengths over a repeating beat cycle. The hardingfele traditionally accompanied indigenous Norwegian dances, and was also played in public settings for listening.

Sweden

Swedish folk music practices were highly regionalized, to the point that the country could be divided according to the character in which locals played the polska dance. The polska was played and danced in 3/4 time, and was an extremely popular genre among Swedish fiddlers. Much of southern and eastern Sweden showed influences from the music of Danish and German culture. In these regions, polska tunes were often major, especially in the 1800s; their predominant polska style was sextondelspolskor (polska in sixteenth note rhythms). Conversely, central and western Sweden seemed to prefer minor modes for their polska tunes, and the western region in particular gravitated towards triolpolskor (polska in triplet rhythms). Folk music in northern Sweden was uniquely influenced by the musical practices of the Finnish and the Saami.

The oldest folk music in Sweden was likely of medieval origin. These songs, ballads, and styles of herding and dance music shared commonalities in their use of modes, narrow ranges, and repetitive melodies. The scale degrees 1, 4, 5, and 8 were very stable in this music, but the other degrees could vary even within a single melodic phrase. Ballads have been praised as the most important folksong genre in Sweden, though they also have parallels across the Nordic region. In the 1700s, Swedish musicians borrowed many of their musical practices from Baroque dance tunes, resulting in music with wide ranges, arpeggios, dense sixteenth note textures, and a theme-development-theme form. The following century saw many new dance styles introduced to the Swedish public, and their accompanying dance music used simple melodies and tonal harmony. Swedish society also enjoyed erotic songs and drinking songs, many of which are still in use today.

The musical instruments used in Swedish practice were similar to those found elsewhere in Europe: the hummel (a plucked dulcimer), the mungiga (a mouth harp), the spelpipa (a duct flute), the säckpipa (a bagpipe), and the vevlira (a hurdy-gurdy). The Swedish lute, the Swedish clavichord, the Swedish organ, and a type of keyed fiddle were all designed as part of a domestic interest in instrument-building that began in the 1700s. Around this same time, the violin came to Sweden. Rural Swedish musicians continued to play traditional tunes, but also adopted techniques from Baroque and Classical violin practices. The accordion gained popularity in the 19th century, especially in urban areas. Despite some debate about whether the accordion belonged in authentic Swedish folk culture, the violin and the accordion soon led dance ensembles along with guitars, string basses, and drums. In the early 20th century, Swedish musicians developed the spelmanslag (fiddler’s ensemble), which included anywhere between five and 50 fiddlers and a handful of accompanying instruments.

Discussion

Just as in historical, political, or geographical contexts, the Nordic countries are simultaneously similar to and unique from one another in their traditional musical practices. Most of the Nordic countries boasted strong ballad traditions for several centuries. Some developed their own varieties of zither, and some leaned more towards woodwind instruments. They had strong dance traditions and borrowed dances from each other as well as from their neighbors. All of Norden eventually fell in love with the violin, which became a central figure in the region’s folk music traditions. At the same time, each country maintained its own idiosyncratic musical customs and quirks: the Danish saw-blade-playing street musicians, the Finnish Kalevala, the Icelandic tvísöngur technique, the Norwegian hardingfele, the Swedish instrument-building tradition.

What remains remarkably consistent across all of these countries and cultures is the stubbornness with which their folk music practices have survived and adapted in times of persecution, even by their Nordic neighbors. Former Danish territories Iceland and Norway demonstrated this commitment to the folk in the 1600s, when the Danish Reformed Church tried to make church music the standard; even several centuries later, Icelanders and Norwegians were singing hymns and psalm tunes with the odd metrical patterns and melodic ornaments to which they were accustomed. Norden maintains a vested interest in its own musical history, as shown by each country’s independent efforts to revitalize aspects of their respective folk traditions. Denmark and Sweden, alternately allies and political adversaries, found common ground in the twentieth century when they established organizations for the preservation and continuation of folk music and dance. In recent years, Finland and Norway have seen folk instruments—the kantele and the hardingfele, respectively— make appearances in contemporary popular music groups. Iceland always had a strong vocal music tradition, so it is the vocal genre of rímur that is making a comeback within the context of rap music. Given the strong national and cultural identities of the Nordic countries, it comes as no surprise that these folk traditions should persist throughout history in this way. As the Nordics continue to strengthen their regional collaboration while digging deep into their own individual legacies, it is likely that the vast and indefinable genre of Nordic folk music will continue to astound audiences around the world.

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