Chapter 1: Introduction, Context and Methods

I am at Tilburg in the Netherlands to watch the Norwegian band Enslaved. Ivar Bj⊘rnson, the guitarist of the band and one of the band’s founding members, is officially curating the Roadburn Festival. Roadburn is an alternative metal festival that has grown out of its doom/stoner focus to be experimental and extreme. The role of curator for Ivar Bj⊘rnson means he has chosen some of the bands and the special theme for the night Enslaved headline. The presence of the band and their guitarist as the curator means the band have been accorded credibility as musicians and artists. I have followed the career of the band ever since I first heard the album Below the Lights (2003), back when I was returning to be a fan of heavy metal and extreme metal. I was attracted to the combination of black metal with songs drawing on Viking themes, and the epic progressive rock that Enslaved combined with the fierceness of the metal. From Below the Lights, I went back earlier in the catalogue and found Eld (1997), which starts with the epic song “793 (Slaget om Lindisfarne)”. In fact, the song starts with the sound of people rowing a boat, obviously Vikings on their way in 793 CE to attack and ransack the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Lindisfarne. As a review of the album puts it¹: