08/18/2026
SONGS OF OUR ANCESTORS — TO THE GODS, THE DEAD, AND THE LIVING HALL
Reflecting on another Midgardsblot, I keep coming back to something much older than any particular band or festival: the extraordinary continuity of song among the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples.
Long before anyone could record music, before the sagas and Eddas were written down, memory traveled through the human voice. Myth, ancestry, religion, heroes, death, drinking, celebration and history were carried in songs.
Some of our earliest written sources concerning the Germanic peoples noticed exactly this.
Writing in the first century, Tacitus tells us in Germania that, “In the traditional songs which form their only record of the past the Germans celebrate an earth-born god called Tuisto.” That is an extraordinary sentence. Their songs were not simply entertainment. Tacitus understood them as a record of the past, carrying traditions about divine origins and the identity of the people themselves.
Centuries later, Jordanes, writing about the Goths in The Origin and Deeds of the Goths, describes much the same thing: “In earliest times they sang of the deeds of their ancestors in strains of song accompanied by the cithara.” He even preserves the names of ancient heroes remembered through those songs. Elsewhere he tells us that the Goths treasured the name Capillati and “retain it to this day in their songs.”
Again, song is doing something much greater than entertaining a room. It is carrying identity and ancestral memory across generations.
Sometimes we learn about these traditions from writers who plainly despised them. Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, complains of songs being sung during drinking and traditional observances, dismissing them as disgraceful. Yet by condemning them, he inadvertently tells us that centuries after Tacitus, people were still gathering, drinking and singing songs connected with older customs.
The same thread appears in one of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts we have of Scandinavian ritual. In 922 CE, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan witnessed the funeral of a Scandinavian leader among the Rus on the Volga. During the rites, the woman who would accompany the dead man was given strong drink. She sang over the cup, drank it, and later began what Ibn Fadlan describes as a lengthy song.
Song was present at the threshold between life and death.
Adam of Bremen, writing about the rites at Uppsala, likewise refers to ritual songs but refuses to preserve them, calling them so objectionable that, in his view, they were best left unrecorded. Whatever those songs contained is lost to us. Yet the fact that he mentions them at all tells us something important: sacred gathering and song were intertwined.
Our own surviving Norse poetry contains the same consciousness. In Gróttasöngr we hear the invocation:
“Wake thou, Frodi! Wake thou, Frodi!
If thou wilt listen to our songs and sagas old.”
Songs and old stories. The two belonged together.
This historical pattern stretches across an enormous period of time. Gods were remembered in song. Ancestors were remembered in song. Heroes were remembered in song. People drank and sang. They buried their dead with song. They carried stories in song because, in societies where writing was rare or absent, a song could travel farther than a manuscript and live longer than the person who first sang it.
That was very much on my mind at Midgardsblot this year.
The festival seemed somewhat more metal-heavy to me than in some previous years, and there were tremendous performances. SKÁLD absolutely packed the Valhalla Stage. It was the largest crowd I personally saw for any performance this year, and they delivered an enormously powerful show.
But some of the music that stayed with me came from very different directions.
Songleikr, with Maria Franz and others, was wonderful because it gets very close to the communal side of this tradition — voices coming together around older songs rather than music existing only as something performed at an audience. There is something profoundly appropriate about hearing that kind of music at Borre, surrounded by one of the great burial landscapes of the Viking Age.
Then there was Urkvinnen, one of the discoveries of this Midgardsblot for me. We caught her at Helheim almost by chance, and the energy was unbelievable. Raw, physical and almost primal. The shieldmaidens in the crowd were going wild. She is an outdoorswoman from Vestfold, and there was something wonderfully immediate about the performance — voice, rhythm, movement and energy connecting directly with the people in front of her.
Nytt Land was another highlight. I have watched them develop over several years, and this performance showed how far they have come. Their use of throat singing, drums and traditional or traditional-inspired instruments creates a completely different atmosphere. The throat singing in particular was remarkable — a reminder that the human voice itself can function almost like an instrument of percussion, resonance and ritual.
And over the years at Midgardsblot there have been quieter moments that stay with me every bit as strongly as the enormous shows. I still remember hearing Einar Selvik in an almost unplugged setting, with very little standing between the voice, the instrument, the words and those of us in the room at Midgard Talks. So many groups at Midgardsblot all the top ones: Wardruna, Heilung, Faun, Eivor, Eihwar, Skald, Nyttland and more. But this song clip “Takk” by Voluspa is the one that left the lasting impression. I heard this last year and he sings of his departed brother - about his real brother who died and he is thanking him for everything. Their song “Heathen Heart” also resonated.
All of this brings me back to Odin’s Warrior Tribe.
For us, song cannot simply be something we consume at a festival once a year and then leave behind when we go home.
It needs to be part of Tribe life.
Those who have spent time at our Viking Camp already know that our sumbels and after-sumbels are filled with songs and stories. The formal ritual ends, but the evening continues. The horn moves around the fire. Someone tells a story. Someone begins a song. Somebody else joins. A drum comes out. A horn sounds. Sometimes the songs are ancient or inspired by ancient material; sometimes they are military songs, modern Heathen songs, personal songs, poems, chants or stories from our own lives. Sometimes we sing in Old Norse, German, and when the Icelanders are there Icelandic - please come back for Glima and songs.
Increasingly, we have been bringing drums, horns and other instruments into those gatherings, and now we intend to take that considerably further.
We are currently planning the program surrounding the November raising of our Great Viking Hall and boat shelter. Tribe members and veterans will gather for days to help physically raise this enormous timber-frame structure. There will be hard work, meals together, fires at night, fellowship and our own traditions.
And we want song to be everywhere within that experience.
When the work stops for the evening, we want voices around the fire. We want instruments. We want people who know songs to teach them to others. We want stories told. We want poems recited. We want members to bring things from their own military service, families and traditions. We want the old material beside new material created by people who are actually living this faith and this life now.
That matters because the Hall we are raising is not a museum reconstruction.
It will certainly be informed by archaeology, historic craftsmanship and everything we have learned from the great reconstructed halls and Viking sites of Scandinavia.
But ours will be a living Hall.
People will actually gather around its hearth.
Oaths will actually be sworn there.
The Gods will actually be honored there.
Veterans will sit there and remember friends who did not come home.
Children will hear stories there.
And people will actually sing there.
We are setting the standard very high for November because I want those days to establish something that continues long after the timbers have been raised. Perhaps songs first sung together during the Hall raising will still be sung there years later. Perhaps people who are not yet members will someday learn them from those who were there.
That is how a living tradition is made.
Not by pretending that we can perfectly reproduce the eighth or ninth century.
Not by freezing the past behind glass.
But by knowing the sources, respecting what survived, learning from those who came before us, and then allowing those traditions to breathe again among living people.
Nearly two thousand years ago, Tacitus was told that Germanic peoples carried memories of their Gods and their past in song. Jordanes found the Goths still preserving the deeds and identities of their ancestors through song centuries later. Ibn Fadlan encountered song within Scandinavian funeral ritual. Adam of Bremen heard of songs within Heathen rites at Uppsala.
Those voices themselves are gone.
But the idea was not lost.
At Borre this year, among SKÁLD, Songleikr, Urkvinnen, Nytt Land, and memories of Einar Selvik and so many others we have heard there over the years, I was reminded again that the ancient connection between voice, memory, faith and community is still extraordinarily powerful.
Now it is our responsibility to carry our part of that thread forward. When the Great Viking Hall rises in November, let there be hammer blows during the day. And when darkness comes and the fires are lit, let there be songs.
