Resulting in the loveliest piece of medieval music you’ll ever hear.
Song: “Heyr Himna Smidur”
Artist: Arstidir
This video, recorded on a cell phone, went viral about seven years ago. A lot of things go viral: cat memes, funny drunks stumbling around 7–11, etc. Most of these shared items don’t have staying power and if you looked up your viewing history from 2013 you would probably be embarrassed by most of it. The fact that we’re still talking about a 13th-century Icelandic hymn several years later is a testament to the extraordinary nature of this performance.
First, the song itself. “Heyr Himna Smidur” (English: “Hear, Smith of the Heavens”) was composed by a powerful and deeply devout Viking chieftain named Kolbeinn Tumason in the early 1200s. Despite his religious convictions, he challenged the power of the Icelandic church and got his head bashed in with a large rock. Yikes. That’s a fate that most singer/songwriters today don’t particularly expect, and one that lends a somber tone to the composition. I’m not saying you need to be decapitated for the music industry to take you seriously. But, hey, shit happens.
There are a few different translations into English, but here is the most literal one (also the roughest):
“Hear, smith of the heavens,
what the poet asks.
May softly come unto me
thy mercy.
So I call on thee,
for thou hast created me.
I am thy slave,
thou art my Lord.”
I used to live in the Holy Land so I’m fairly familiar with my psalms, and in the age of widespread illiteracy a good religious poem crammed everything into a few short couplets: mercy, devotion, creation. In the business we’d say this song had “legs.” The lyrics have remained unchanged for 800 years, which is a pretty awesome feat considering how difficult it was in college to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original.
The tune accompanying the hymn was composed by Icelandic musician Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson. (I’m not even going to try to pronounce that.) He was a prominent figure in Nordic classical music, teaching at Reykjavik College for many years before his death in 2013. This is his best-known work and no, he did not perish violently in battle like Tumason, but you still have to take his contributions seriously, okay?
And finally we get to Arstidir, the Icelandic group where all members share vocal duties. They’ve had a revolving cast of characters since their 2008 inception and in this performance at a German train station, they had swelled to a quintet. It’s tough to find much information on them as they’re intensely private and fiercely independent (they have their own record label and even crowdfunded an album.) Kim Kardashian’s ass may be all over the Internet like white on rice, but Arstidir remain something of an enigma.
The choice of the Vohwinkel train station in Wuppertal, Germany could not have been an accident. While not a historically or architecturally significant building, it does have a barrel-vaulted ceiling which reflects and amplifies sound similar to a church nave (where the choir sings). Moreover, Arstidir control their voices by stepping in and out of the circle- effectively raising and lowering their decibels in the mix. That’s an ancient lost art that Kolbeinn Tumason may have recognized and one that lends a timeless quality to the performance.
Hey hey! Thanks for visiting- your presence is warmly welcomed. Please correct me if I accidentally got something wrong. If there are any songs, artists, or genres you’d love to learn more about, I’m always down for recommendations! This blog is free to read (and always will be) due to a fair amount of academic traffic, but you can always buy me a coffee (aka put a tip in my jar) if you enjoyed this article.
