Comment by JuniperMesos
6 hours ago
Viking metal is a folk music tradition of Europe! Just a very modern one that postdates the invention of the electric guitar and Tony Iommi losing his fingertips in an industrial accident :)
A lot of Viking-themed metal is pretty historically uninformed and cheesy, although that's true of lots of metal and for that matter lots of other art.
Yes, I'll accept that it's a modern folk tradition. And I'm actually OK with cheesy too, as long as something doesn't pass itself off as more historically accurate than it is. As Farya Faraji pointed out, we don't know what Norse Viking music was like, but it's unlikely to have included throat singing, and we know they liked pan pipes. (Invading England to a George Zhamfir soundtrack?)