Hey people! 🙂
I’ve shared a song by a Danish singer with you yesterday, and today we have a Danish band. Asynje is closely associated with another highly successful Danish (and Faroese) folk band called Valravn. Their name, as far as I’m aware, means a female As in Old Norse, with As (plural Asir) being the Old Norse word for god.
The title of this song – “Hugormen” – is the Danish word for a type of snake which is apparently called the vipera berus in English. The Scandinavian name roughly means the striking snake. I haven’t found any translation of the lyrics, but looking at them and trying to deduce things by myself, what I do know is that the lyrical subject is addressing this snake, and I’m pretty sure she’s asking it for something, and my best guess is that she’s asking it not to harm (to “preserve” literally) her and her species, or perhaps her offspring, so then she’ll preserve its species/offspring too. Quite an interesting alliance. As in a lot of Nordic folk, here you can also hear the vocalist (Nanna Barslev) use a vocal technique called kulning, which was, and perhaps still is, used by shepherdesses to call their flocks, or communicate with each other from a longer distances. It literally means cow calling. I guess I’ve never ever shared any music where kulning would be used, and I really like it, hence I’m mentioning it now.
My Inner MishMash 