Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.
I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.
Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…
But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.
I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.
I totally get where you’re coming from, and I agree Christianity did snuff out a lot of that, but not necessarily the way you may be thinking of it. Christianity was a face, tool, and motivation of empire, and empire seeks to standardize culture for the sake of stability. Christianity has deeply powerful cultural performances too. There are traditional catholic rituals that by their nature as a force of colonizing power and as part of globally dominant cultures (and as part of our own cultures) we see differently from this.
This haka was powerful and beautiful, and part of that is by its own merit, but part is that it is people and culture resisting colonial power.
Also, the modern era has been immensely destructive to culture and ritual except where it is intentionally preserved. While it would be easy to pin it on Christianity and the protestant reformation, the reality is that it’s also caused by the formation of nations (the unification of Italy for example created a shared culture between Venice and Rome for the first time since the fall of the western empire), the advent of mass travel and communication, the rise of industrialized lifestyles, and the shift from generation after generation living in the same spot to the normalization of living somewhat far from your family, all of which combined to more or less radically weaken local cultures.
might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve?
…no. As in: That’s not the kind of cultural practice Christianisation wiped out or we wouldn’t be burning stuff come spring, dance around maypoles, and whatnot. The Faroese are still into singing sagas as an actual community practice. Missionaries back then weren’t trying to regiment people into factory workers, make them sit still on chairs and such.
It’s kind of a grass is greener on the other side kind of situation. There’s a good reason stuff like Heilung is captivating, but that’s because they’re modern-day shamans speaking to instincts buried by modernity, not because they’d be historical in their music or practices. Norse folk music indeed sounded pretty much like Norse folk music does today.
I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.
But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.
But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.
If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too.
I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn’t confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn’t they copy you, long before the crusades. There’s indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.
The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn’t unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.
On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there’s some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.
Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.
I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.
Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…
But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.
I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.
I totally get where you’re coming from, and I agree Christianity did snuff out a lot of that, but not necessarily the way you may be thinking of it. Christianity was a face, tool, and motivation of empire, and empire seeks to standardize culture for the sake of stability. Christianity has deeply powerful cultural performances too. There are traditional catholic rituals that by their nature as a force of colonizing power and as part of globally dominant cultures (and as part of our own cultures) we see differently from this.
This haka was powerful and beautiful, and part of that is by its own merit, but part is that it is people and culture resisting colonial power.
Also, the modern era has been immensely destructive to culture and ritual except where it is intentionally preserved. While it would be easy to pin it on Christianity and the protestant reformation, the reality is that it’s also caused by the formation of nations (the unification of Italy for example created a shared culture between Venice and Rome for the first time since the fall of the western empire), the advent of mass travel and communication, the rise of industrialized lifestyles, and the shift from generation after generation living in the same spot to the normalization of living somewhat far from your family, all of which combined to more or less radically weaken local cultures.
…no. As in: That’s not the kind of cultural practice Christianisation wiped out or we wouldn’t be burning stuff come spring, dance around maypoles, and whatnot. The Faroese are still into singing sagas as an actual community practice. Missionaries back then weren’t trying to regiment people into factory workers, make them sit still on chairs and such.
It’s kind of a grass is greener on the other side kind of situation. There’s a good reason stuff like Heilung is captivating, but that’s because they’re modern-day shamans speaking to instincts buried by modernity, not because they’d be historical in their music or practices. Norse folk music indeed sounded pretty much like Norse folk music does today.
I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.
But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.
But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.
I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn’t confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn’t they copy you, long before the crusades. There’s indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.
The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn’t unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.
On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there’s some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.