Chapter 02
Rímur, Stemmur, Tvísöngur and the Return of Old Instruments
5 min
Rímur are stories under pressure
Rímur are long narrative poems built in demanding metrical forms. A cycle may retell material from a saga, romance or other story across many sections. In performance, the verse is kveðið: delivered through a melodic pattern known as a stemma. Translation usually calls this chanting, but that English word can mislead. The voice is neither ordinary speech nor a fixed liturgical chant. It moves through a flexible melodic contour that serves metre, memory and verbal force.
The first thing to hear is the text's engine. Alliteration, rhyme, syllable count and stress create a framework within which the performer shapes pace and pitch. A skilled kvæðamaður or kvæðakona does not merely recite lines over a tune. The melody must carry a large amount of language without becoming monotonous, while the delivery keeps listeners oriented inside the story. Different stemmur can serve different passages, singers and moods.
Rímur lasted because people used them, copied them, requested them and remembered them. Manuscripts preserve many cycles, but manuscripts reveal only part of the practice. They show words, metres, ownership marks and routes of copying. Sound survives through later notation, collectors and recordings. The gap matters. A beautifully old page should not be made to sing more confidently than the evidence allows.
Women's labour belongs inside this history. The survival of Mábilar rímur, for example, is connected to women who remembered, requested and transmitted the cycle. That does not make rímur a women's genre, but it breaks the lazy image of male poets and male chanters carrying the tradition alone. A good listening history follows the people who kept material in circulation, not only the authors whose names reached print.
Bjarni Þorsteinsson and the collector's ear
Bjarni Þorsteinsson began collecting Icelandic songs in the nineteenth century and spent roughly twenty-five years assembling the material published as Íslenzk þjóðlög between 1906 and 1909. The collection includes sacred melodies, folk songs, rímur tunes and information about instruments. It is monumental, but it is still a collector's work: a shaped record created through interviews, notation, correspondence and choices about what to preserve.
The most rewarding place to encounter Bjarni's legacy is Siglufjörður. The Folk Music Centre occupies the town where he worked and presents recordings, manuscripts and instruments. Visitors can hear people from different parts of Iceland singing and chanting, then try replicas of langspil and fiðla. That movement from document to sound to touch is valuable. It shows cultural memory as something practiced, not merely admired.
Current performers extend the material rather than embalming it. Bára Grímsdóttir and Chris Foster, working as Funi, sing older and newer texts with voices, langspil, Icelandic fiðla, guitar, kantele and other instruments. Their arrangements are openly contemporary. This honesty makes the music easier to trust: an inherited song, a newly made setting and a modern recording can meet without pretending to come from the same historical moment.
Two recordings make that distinction audible. Steindór Andersen's “Jómsvíkingarímur,” on Rímur: Icelandic Epic Song (2003), places the narrative force of one experienced kvæðamaður in the foreground. Funi's “Krókárgerði,” from Gárur (2026), gives an exact modern answer from Bára Grímsdóttir and Chris Foster: voice, arranged strings and environmental recording carry a poem about an abandoned farm without disguising the recording as an untouched survival.
How the langspil speaks
The langspil usually places a melody string alongside one or more drones on a long wooden body. A player may pluck with fingers or a feather, strike the strings, or use a bow. The drone fixes a tonal field while the melody string articulates a narrower line above it. The resulting sound can be dry and intimate when plucked, more continuous and grainy when bowed.
Construction and technique varied. Modern workshops therefore do more than reproduce a standard museum design. Makers and players compare surviving objects, photographs, written descriptions and remembered testimony. Eyjólfur Eyjólfsson's workshops at the National Museum turn that research into practice: children handle feathers and horsehair bows, learn songs from Bjarni's collection and connect the instrument to the old baðstofa, the shared living and working room of the farmhouse.
The Icelandic fiðla requires equal care. It was a bowed zither-like instrument, not simply an early violin. By the time collectors documented detailed memories, continuous use had already weakened. Rebuilt examples can reveal possible posture, string response and tuning, but a reconstruction remains a proposal grounded in evidence. That uncertainty is not a flaw. It is part of the instrument's modern sound.
Tvísöngur: two lines, one friction
Tvísöngur is a form of two-part singing associated with parallel fifths and a modal sound that can feel austere to ears expecting conventional functional harmony. The two singers move together, and the intervallic relationship produces a bare, resonant friction. In the right room, overtones and vocal grain become as noticeable as melody.
It is tempting to call this sound medieval. Resist the shortcut. The musical practice has historical depth, but a modern performance occurs through living voices, present tuning choices and often a revival setting. Hear it first as two people coordinating breath and pitch. The historical question can follow without cancelling the immediate physical fact.
For a precise recorded selection, hear Funi's “Gott ár oss gefi / Give Us a Good Year,” the closing track on Flúr (2013). Bára Grímsdóttir set a seventeenth-century hymn text in the parallel-fifths language of tvísöngur. The voices exchange and join roles inside an arrangement that is contemporary, clearly credited and musically rooted in the older practice.
Rímur, langspil, fiðla and tvísöngur do not form a single traditional package. They have different histories and evidence. What joins them now is the work of people who study, teach and perform them. A listener's best route is likewise human: begin with one named singer or player, follow the exact item, and then compare another version.
