I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.
But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.
But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.
If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too.
I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn’t confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn’t they copy you, long before the crusades. There’s indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.
The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn’t unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.
On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there’s some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.
I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.
But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.
But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.
I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn’t confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn’t they copy you, long before the crusades. There’s indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.
The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn’t unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.
On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there’s some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.