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IOLA, Wis. (WJFW) – A thousand years ago Vikings dominated Northern Europe. A large number of people know about their distinctive boats and raids on villages, but a central Wisconsin man is trying to resurrect another part of Viking history.
Eric Bestul spent part of day playing the talharpa, an instrument from the Viking age. The Iola-Scandinavia music teacher is trying to recreate the music Vikings would play and dance to. The hobby project started when he saw a video on Viking instruments.
“I was like, ‘”I bet I can make something like that'” and I went downstairs in my work shop and just started building some stuff and I really liked it and it just became the focus,” Bestul recalled.
He has built more than 10 of the instruments, ranging from fiddle and string instruments to horns. The only record of what the music played by Vikings is in Arabic text describing the music as the “barking of dogs”.
“We know nothing of their actual music since they didn’t write anything down,” Bestul said. “There’s not going to be some magical Viking song book that somebody has to find, because that’s not the tradition it came from.”
Bestul’s method involves first researching the earliest Scandinavian songs and some early medieval songs. Then he tries to find how they may have connected and influenced each other. The music was being played before orchestras and tuning were standardized in music, which means that Viking music was most likely simple.
“They aren’t instruments that are designed to be for playing together,” Bestul said. “Standardized tuning didn’t even exist so it was lot of someone made something that sounded kind of cool and then we wrote songs around and then somebody saw that instrument and made something kind of like it.”
Bestul has made three albums worth of songs and doesn’t see any end to how much music he can make.
“It feels like a direct connection to the music of that time, whether it’s what the Vikings’ music actually sounded like or not, we don’t know, but it’s a connection and you can kind of feel how it’s connected to that time,” Bestul said.
You can find Bestul’s music on “Bandcamp” under the name Skogtrll.
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