Heavy Mithril: The Magical Mixture of Metal & Fantasy
/The connection between music and the fantasy genre runs deep. Musicians may have a mystique and allure of coolness around them but many, if not most, are big nerds at heart. This should come as no surprise to anyone who took part in a high school band class. This is reflected in the many nerd-centric genres of music; nerdcore rap, filk, chiptune, even music festivals like Nerdapalooza. But perhaps no genre has fully embraced and unabashedly celebrated its nerd roots like Metal.
Metal wields fantasy themes with all the power and grace of a +2 longsword.
Rainbow’s Rising - 1976
Fantasy has been a part of metal since the formation of the genre. Black Sabbath, often credited as one of the founders of heavy metal, had a song on their debut titled “The Wizard.” It's hard to look anywhere in the early days of metal and not find an elf or an orc hiding in the liner notes. Bands like Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Rainbow, or anything Ronnie James Dio was involved in, all heavily featured themes that would be equally at home on a table top covered in graph paper, polyhedral dice and Mountain Dew as they would be layered on top of a shedding guitar riff.
But why are Metal and Fantasy so interlinked like rings in a coat of mail?
Like trying to mine a vein of Mithril, we need to dig back to the bedrock that built the foundation upon which Heavy Metal was forged.
The earliest recognized Heavy Metal bands all started in England in the 1960’s during the postwar boom period where British culture exploded onto the world stage. This is the Britain that gave us The Beatles and The Stones. As the Swinging Sixties swung along, music got pretty mind bending thanks to Psychedelic Rock bands like Pink Floyd. As the themes of the music became more esoteric, and less sock hop, the now familiar tropes of fantasy began to appear.
We can almost see that gleaming Mithril ore now, but we still need to go a little deeper.
Uriah Heep’s Demons and wizards -1972
England in the 1950’s was a very different place. The country was still reeling from the end of the Second World War. Suffering from the destruction of the bombings, its resources were strained thin, and its people were exhausted from the largest world conflict to date. But something very special came out of the dark beginning of this decade.
Fantasy classics began to appear at a staggering rate. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series all had their beginnings in the 1950’s. Tales like these breathed new life into the pulp Swords and Sorcery genre that started in the 1930’s, inspiring a generation of young Brits to weave these heroic and fantastic themes into their music.
Rhapsody of fire’s legendary tales - 1997
The need for escapism and mental adventure has persisted long past postwar England and is felt by all of us at some point in our lives. And that need has seen the themes of fantasy blend together with Metal like an alchemical elixir.
The love of fantasy in metal has spawned countless sub-genres but perhaps the pinnacle of this is Power Metal. Bands across the world like Italy’s Rhapsody of Fire, Germany’s Blind Guardian, Finland’s Nightwish, and Canada’s own 3 Inches of Blood, all take the fantasy theme to its ultimate conclusion with soaring anthems of epic quests, rampaging monsters, valiant warriors, and magical mysteries.
There is no shortage of theories on how and why fantasy and metal became linked. Complex theories on the sociopolitical landscape after the Second World War and the way this influenced the themes of escapism and ideology in the arts. But ultimately I think it is just that people are always looking for an escape from the everyday. Some of us find it in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, others in swords, sorcery, and fantasy.
And for some of us, we find it in all of the above.
Alex is a second year student in the Algonquin Professional Writing program, but if you are here you probably already guessed that.
He’s got a bass collecting dust in his closet so he’s a huge fan of Rush’s gnarly bass lines and lyrics about quests for the fountain of youth and riding a spaceship through a blackhole to mythical ancient Greece.
But since he’s from Halifax he can’t help himself sing along and stomp his foot to Barrett’s Privateers if it hits his salty ears.
