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1 – 10 of 20Zech’s so-called Nachdichtung or ‘adaptation’ Die lasterhaften Lieder und Balladen des François Villon is one of the most printed books of German lyric poetry and has been widely…
Abstract
Zech’s so-called Nachdichtung or ‘adaptation’ Die lasterhaften Lieder und Balladen des François Villon is one of the most printed books of German lyric poetry and has been widely misinterpreted as a translation of French medieval poet François Villon. The erroneous attribution of these texts has caused an immense amount of confusion and misinformation to spread in relation to the authorship of several poems due to the popularisation of these supposedly medieval texts by medieval metal bands In Extremo and Subway to Sally. Zech’s fascinating artistic fraud forms the framework for questioning how source material, which ranges from authentic historical texts through to ex nihilo pseudo-medieval writings, is situated between the related, at times conflicting, norms and traditions of medieval market music and mittelalter metal.
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Ruth Barratt-Peacock, Ross Hagen and Brenda S. Gardenour Walter
In this chapter, the authors situate metal medievalism in the discourse on medievalism and neomedievalism. Detangling the ways in which historicity and authenticity are perceived…
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In this chapter, the authors situate metal medievalism in the discourse on medievalism and neomedievalism. Detangling the ways in which historicity and authenticity are perceived and negotiated in metal cultures reveals how metal medievalism’s relationship to the past illuminates perceptions of post-modernity. The disparate pieces of the Middle Ages (both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’) form a bricolage through which post-modern meanings are expressed. Metal musicians and consumers use these fragments of the past as a means of collective resistance against the post-enlightenment, capitalist and machine-mediated present. The Middle Ages represent attempts at the re-enchantment of the present with a transcendent, organic, and carnal past. The meanings which are created this way are far from uniform or absolute however, but spiral between historical and imaginary, collective and individual, and continue to spin on in ever more complex permutations with no sign of abating.
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Johannes Hellrich, Christoph Rzymski and Vitus Vestergaard
This chapter explores metal albums as media, and their relationship to medieval media, as well as secondary media as a resource for reception studies. Examination of metal music…
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This chapter explores metal albums as media, and their relationship to medieval media, as well as secondary media as a resource for reception studies. Examination of metal music as media reveals broader trends in modern media representations of the medieval in respect to race, gender, and cultural identity. Albums are composite object, using different media and secondary media products. The methodology used to approach these media and which elements of an album are examined in combination have a significant effect on the results. This chapter brings together three authors to discuss and compare methodologies and make the case for a combination of contextual analogue and quantitative digital approaches.
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This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and…
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This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and more specifically view the process where medieval media cross the borders and find their way into metal album covers as media transformation. Four different types of media transformation are analysed, and it is argued that the medievalism of album covers can be defined in terms of media transformation. Likewise, neomedievalism is defined in terms of second-order media transformation. The album cover is described as a media patchwork, and the chapter gives examples of the patches in terms of relationship and properties.
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Johannes Hellrich and Christoph Rzymski
The digital humanities offer many new methods to scholars interested in metal studies. This chapter demonstrates two such methods, that is, stylometric clustering and topic…
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The digital humanities offer many new methods to scholars interested in metal studies. This chapter demonstrates two such methods, that is, stylometric clustering and topic modelling, by interpreting the collected lyrics of over 8,000 metal bands. This allowed the authors to identify general trends that would be hard to derive by personally reading lyrics. This analysis showed several recurring medieval topics in metal lyrics, for example, a Fight for Glory expressed with words like ‘die’, ‘glory’, ‘warriors’, and ‘victory’. The authors were also able to distinguish metal bands with medieval references from those without – a line of research that could help in categorising (new) bands – and track the stylistic development of bands over time. Such statistical methods might help scholars not only by allowing for large-scale studies, yet also by providing inter-subjective feedback for theories.
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In 2001, Faroese Viking Metal band Týr entered a Faroese music competition with their song ‘Ormurin Langi’, which was a reinterpretation of a famous Faroese kvæÐi (a form of…
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In 2001, Faroese Viking Metal band Týr entered a Faroese music competition with their song ‘Ormurin Langi’, which was a reinterpretation of a famous Faroese kvæÐi (a form of European ballad believed to derive from the Middle Ages) by the same name. Hearing this piece of medieval Faroese heritage represented through metal music was not something anyone had ever experienced before. This chapter will therefore explore how Faroese Viking metal – through its musical and visual style – interprets Faroese kvæÐi, which are themselves interpretations of a Faroese medieval past. The combination of Faroese traditions and contemporary metal music does have a societal and cultural effect. What, therefore, happens when the local and the global intersect and create something that cannot be considered global, but is however not purely local either, as it is in Faroese Viking Metal? The interpretation of several kvæÐi in Faroese Viking metal does not exactly perpetuate the authentic, but rather it presents them in a new form and ensures their circulation and repetition through a more globalised and popular media and Viking romanticism is therefore caught up with contemporary sociocultural imaginings of Faroese identity.
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This chapter explores how, by drawing inspiration from Islamic sources for a song about Alexander the Great, death metal band Nile have created space for a more complicated view…
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This chapter explores how, by drawing inspiration from Islamic sources for a song about Alexander the Great, death metal band Nile have created space for a more complicated view of the Middle Ages than is traditionally found in either heavy metal or Western medieval studies. Even though the historical Alexander the Great was not a medieval figure, legends about him were especially popular in the Middle Ages, and his figure in Muslim traditions was influenced by his reception in the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great is a transcultural figure. He bridges East and West, both in the trajectory of his life, and in the diffusion of his legends, which survive in multilingual and multicultural medieval versions. His story also transcends boundaries of strict periodisation: the medieval Alexander materials are as influential to current ideas about him as are materials from his own era. In this context, Nile’s 2009 album Those Whom the Gods Detest offers an interesting case study for thinking about metal medievalism. This study opens new ways of thinking about the cultural scope of heavy metal and how metal might contribute to a broadening of studies in medievalism.
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