Steingerðr's Beauty - Old Norse Song

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Music & vocals by Farya Faraji, lyrics by Kormákr Ǫgmundarson. Many thanks to my friends Delphine and Étienne for lending their IKEA-level Nordic looks to this video. This is another attempt at conveying a historically plausible rendition of what Scandinavian music of the Viking Age would have possible sounded like.

Whilst the Norse (more specifically the Vikings) are more popular than ever in pop culture, and Norse-themed music is everywhere, almost all of that music is creative in nature and doesn't seek to be historically accurate--the current audience is therefore inundated with tons of examples of very enjoyable music that is more modern and fantastical in nature than historically accurate. I wanted to add my humble contribution to the Norse-music landscape by providing a more historically informed example of what the actual music of the Norse may have sounded like, rather than music that evokes our modern pop culture idea of the Vikings like with the excellent Wardruna or Heilung bands.

The guiding principles are that the song is in a diatonic mode, given diatonicism's high statistical distribution over Europe in that era, monophonic, therefore without any harmony, and uses the instruments of the era: the lyre, pan flute, bone flute, and simple drums, as well as the sound of a bowed lyra, an instrument which I believe was, with a high degree of likelihood, imported into Scandinavia by the end of the Viking Age. I made sure that the melody always accents the first syllable of a word to reflect Old Norse prosody. For more info on the subject, watch this informational video dedicated to the subject: https://youtu.be/_qZI4e4yVio

The pronunciation is reconstructed Old Norse, and I based it on the reading provided by Dr. Jackson Crawford in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16nG8Hb_WJA Please note that this means it will sound unlike most readings of the poem which use modern Icelandic pronunciation. It’s a common convention to use the latter since it’s phonology changed the least from Old Norse, however it isn’t the same.

The poem is found in both the Gunlaug saga, as well as Kormákr Ögmundarson's sagas. In the story, he recounts him falling in love with the beautiful Steingerðr who loves him back, but is married with another man. The poem recounts the instant they both fell in love, and the knowledge of the impeding doom that this spells for them in the future. The poem was written in Iceland in the 900's.

The clip was filmed in Banff National Park, in Canada. I actually filmed it almost a year ago, but massive editing delays meant I couldn't finish the clip until after winter, and it just felt weird to release such a winter-themed clip at spring's door, so I just waited and thought I'd open this year's winter season with this clip.

Lyrics in Old Norse:
Brámáni skein brúna
Brims und ljósum himni
Hristar hǫrvi glæstrar
Haukfránn á mik lauka;
En sá geisli sýslir
Síðan gullmens Fríðar
Hvarmatungls ok hringa
Hlínar óþurft mína

English translation (Jackson Crawford’s):
The linen decorated woman’s hawk fierce eyes shone beneath her fair forehead upon me.

But the shining light from that woman’s eyes is preparing ruin for me, and no less for her.