Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The old heroic songs of Russia—the byliny , chanted for centuries by peasant singers in the far northern villages where the tradition survived longest—are mostly about strong men: warriors of the steppe, defenders of Kiev, lifters of impossible weights. And then, standing among them like a harp in an armory, there is Sadko : the bylina of Novgorod, the great merchant republic of the north, whose hero lifts nothing, fights no one, and conquers two worlds—the world of wealth and the world beneath the water—with a single weapon: the gusli , the Russian psaltery, a flat lap-harp of ringing strings. Sadko is the merchant's epic and the musician's epic at once: the story of a poor player who charmed the Sea Tsar, wagered his head against the wealth of a city and won, sailed as the richest man of Novgorod, was thrown to the sea as its unpaid debtor, played for the dancing king of the ocean at the bottom of the world—and had to be told, by a saint, to break his own strings to save t...

Norway is a country built vertically, and its music always knew where it came from. In every parish of the fjord-lands there was a waterfall—the foss , white and unceasing, hammering into its black pool—and in the waterfall lived a musician. The Fossegrim : a youth, fair beyond mortal looks in most tellings, seated behind or beneath the falling water, playing a fiddle whose music was the waterfall's own voice raised to melody—the tune in which, say the old accounts, you could hear the wind and the water, the forest and the seasons, all sounding together. He is the gentlest member of a dangerous family. His elder kinsman the Nøkk —Kittelsen painted its eyes rising from the tarn, two pale lamps in the black water, and no image in Scandinavian art says more with less—lured the unwary to drowning with the same beauty of sound; the nix and neck of the German and English waters are cousins in the same guild. But the Fossegrim of the falls, alone in the family, made of his music not chi...