The Magic of Einar Selvik

In August 2018, I went to the Midgardsblot in Borre, Norway. Midgardsblot is a Viking metal music festival. I am not a Viking metal enthusiast, but I needed to visit Norway's ancient kingdoms of Vestfold and Agdir to do research for my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women.

Borre, in Vestfold, has several grave mounds in their original, unexcavated condition. It has a small museum of Viking archaeology. It has a reconstructed Viking feast hall. And, along with the music festival, its Midgardsblot featured a Viking encampment, with reenactors of many kinds, and a series of lectures on Viking history and lore.

I was interested in the music reenactors. Music is associated with rituals in the Icelandic sagas, and those rituals are often associated with women, making them pertinent for my study of the power of women in the Viking Age. So I made sure to get a seat in the tiny lecture hall for the two lectures by musician Einar Selvik of Wardruna.

I knew Einar's music was featured on the History Channel's "Vikings" TV show. But I didn't know what an immersive artist he was.

As he explained, "I try not to climb into trees that don't have roots. I'm a very nerdy person. I read as much as the academics, or maybe more. I try out the theories the scholars put out. I sing in longhouses in front of audiences hungry for this experience. I cultivate and feed on what works in front of an audience."

First he researched Viking Age instruments. "Instruments carry within them a lot of limitations," he said. "Whatever you do with them is authentic. The idea is to sow seeds, to make something grow again--not to put it into a museum. I went to museums and archives. I read books. I made a lot of shitty instruments. I didn't want to hear instruments played by other people, I wanted to approach it as a child. This was an initiation for me, a journey."

He made drums: "I didn't shoot the animal, but I did skin it. I put it in the river until the hair sacs let loose. Then I had the smelly work of cleaning it, but it's beautiful work too, because you're bringing the animal back to life. Every time I beat on that drum, with its own leg, she is there, singing."

He made horns from goat horns, with fingerholes and sometimes with reeds (like an oboe's) out of juniper. He made long birchbark lurs, played like trumpets (the harder you blow, the higher the tone). He made a bowed tail-harp with two horsehair strings, one for the melody and one for the drone. ("This is an instrument that does not always behave," he noted. Like a horse, I might add.)

When he created the group Wardruna, Einar said, "I decided I wanted to create music to runes. For me they are very good images of various aspects of the old way of viewing the world. Poems, proverbs, riddles--they give a view of man's relationship to nature, to each other, and to something bigger than ourselves, spiritual or philosophical. The old people did not kneel to gods. They walked among gods, and the gods helped the ones who helped themselves."

The runes are the letters of the Viking futhark (alphabet). Each also has a meaning: birch tree, water, need. "The root of the word is connected to creating sound," Einar explained. "It can mean a secret, some esoteric knowledge, to whisper, a magical song, a letter that has a sound, a riddle."

Writing a rune song he let the rune speak, Einar said. "I don't force it into a shape. I try to be the vessel. When I did the one for the birch tree, I went into the forest and played on a birch tree. I only used the branches that bent to the east. For the rune for water, all the sounds were recorded while standing in a river.

"When I recorded the song 'Need,' I fasted for days, went into the mountains with hardly any clothes on, and started to walk. I was crying, in excruciating pain. I started to hyperventilate, then I started to sing--I had people following me, of course, but I promised myself I wouldn't cheat. It's added value. I'm 100 percent convinced people can tell the difference."

The Vikings used runes in rituals or magic--exactly how, we don't know. But in some way, runes are connected with seiðr, an Old Norse form of magic. "What it is, how it was done, the gritty details--we don’t know any of that," Einar said. "We can only hypothesize or assume. It could be an ecstatic form of sorcery. Seiðr was used as a synonym for song."

A völva, or seer, conducts a seiðr ritual in a famous scene in the Saga of the Greenlanders. Though the saga was written at least 200 years after the event, the seer is described in wonderful detail. She wore a long blue gown and a black lambskin hood lined with white cat's fur. She had catskin gloves, too, and carried a brass-bound staff. Both her gown and her staff were adorned with jewels. She could eat only the hearts of animals, one of each kind. She could sit only on a cushion stuffed with hens' feathers. To invoke the spirits, she needed a helper to sing certain magic songs. Only Gudrid the Far-Traveler knew them, and she sang them expertly. Charmed by her singing, the spirits gathered and revealed many things, among them Gudrid's future.

"I'm singing to modern people," Einar explained, "to modern ears that demand a certain thing to make it resonate. The content is timeless. The wrapping is different. I don't need catskin gloves or to sit on a feather pillow like the Greenland völva--that was her toolbox. We live in a different time. They were battling nature--nature was the trolls. For us, it's the other way around.

"When I come into this room, I have to outmatch you. I have to be bigger than you collectively. To reach you, I have to sing from the heart to reach your heart. I could change the atmosphere in this room very rapidly--I could make you scared, make you bored, make you tired. Using song to create a higher state of mind--that’s real. Add pain, add exhaustion, add breath, and you get ecstasy."

And then he began to sing. I've been listening to his music ever since.

To listen to or learn more about Einar Selvik's music, see the Wardruna website, here: http://www.wardruna.com

To experience that ecstasy in a very modern setting, listen to him performing his version of Völuspá accompanied by the Bergen Filharmoniske Orkester and the Edvard Grieg Kor, conducted by Edward Gardner. The performance was part of the opening concert of the 2020 Bergen International Festival in Grieghallen, Bergen, Norway. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8ah846uyw0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1vRBnitUQRcGYN1nNXwJOpr8zRSUGAD14W5PrJNWosrKa8Y97movVJ22k

Versions of Einar's lectures on Viking Age music can also be found online. See, for example, the Winter Solstice Concert at the Viking Ship Museum, Bygdøy, Norway (advertised on the poster above), here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3e4b1QiSEQ

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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