Making Heritage Metal: Faroese KvæÐi and Viking Metal

Abstract 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.