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D i g g i n g D e e p n o r D i c r o o t s

Kari TauringIn December of 2003, Kari Tauring was teaching a rune

workshop at a Norse shamanic event in Minnesota focusing on the völva, or staff carrying women of Norse tradition. During one session, the event host suggested that

she chant the runes rhythmically using a staff for percussion. Tauring added a second smaller stick that she called a tein (based on the Norwegian word for the sucker tree that grows from the stump of a tree that’s been cut down) to tap the shaft of the staff while pounding it on the floor to create a unique rhythmic experience. This was the birth of what Kari calls “staving,” and over the next few years she developed it into a fully-formed spiritual practice called Völva Stav, a system of ritual performance that helps her reconnect with the traditions and folkways of her Norwegian ancestors.

Tauring’s musical roots are steeped in Celtic as well as Norwegian folk tradition. She learned hymns and prayers in Norwegian from her Lutheran grandmother and American folk songs both in school and at home. As a child, Tauring would watch the singing and dancing in her homemade folk costume and wish she could join in. Her musical education started with church music, then classical, then Celtic folk, for which she had a strong inclination. “I didn’t know why I had a strong urge to sing Celtic material,” she says. “We thought dad was all German but he isn’t really German at all, but rather Latvian, Luxembourgish, French-Canadian, Celtic and some kind of Indian.” These diverse influences all surfaced in the songs Tauring wrote with her first group, Rose Absolute in the early 1990s, including a song series called “7 Songs of Me” in which she explores each piece of her lineage.

Coming from primarily Norwegian stock, Tauring has made it her creative mission to mine the roots of Norwegian culture in Minnesota. And this past March, she released her third studio album, a collection of songs and spoken word inspired by Norwegian myth called Nykken & Bear on the Omnium label. In exploring her roots, Tauring says her intent is “to go deeper than lutefisk, lefse and Lutherans,” but she’s quick to point out she still respects those things. She works with the “preserved material” of Norway, songs, poetry and arts which were forced underground during centuries of Danish rule from 1349 to 1814 when what is now Norway was ruled from Copenhagen, a period of cultural oppression the Norwegians call “The 400 Year Night.”

Norway’s suppressed culture began to resurface in the 1800s when the romantic nationalist movement started to rebuild Norway’s identity. It was no accident. Those responsible for helping to bring back the old ways purposely went out and sought the forgotten material of the folk traditions, music poetry, dance, costume, and language. Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), wrote many pieces of music based on Norwegian traditional music, and writer Arne Garborg (1851-1924), whose poem “Haugtussa” formed the basis for a song on Tauring’s latest CD also helped reshape Norwegian identity by writing a play in Nynorsk (one two official standards for written Norwegian) and translating Homer’s Odyssey into the language.

It was during this renaissance that Tauring’s great-grandparents were among the nearly 800,000 Norwegian immigrants to Minnesota. The newly re-discovered material was vitally important to Norwegian identity at the time, and

by DaviD De young

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D i g g i n g D e e p n o r D i c r o o t s

Kari Tauringmany immigrants preserved it, the Norwegian-American community in the Midwest becoming something of a time capsule. According to Tauring, because of the mass exodus from Norway (in some cases entire towns relocated) there are some Norwegian dialects that exist only in the US, and Norwegian linguists often travel to Minnesota to study them. One piece of Norwegian culture that came to Minnesota was the specifically Norwegian Hardanger fiddle used primarily in dance music. And Minnesotan Karen Solgård, a major proponent of the instrument in the United States, has served as one of Tauring’s mentors over the years.

Kari explains the importance of drilling down to extract the essence of her Nordic roots by launching into a discussion of the World Tree, or Tree of Life which connects the heavens, earth, and through its roots, the underworld. The so-called tap root goes straight down, Tauring says. And at the cellular level, the Northern European memory of immigrants goes back to the ice age, passed down through the mitochondrial DNA of their mother’s mother’s mother’s mother (and so on). She points out that one reason the arts of a culture can be so healing, is that they stir memory at this deep level, especially through the vibrations of music and the movement of dance.

According to Tauring, dysfunction in a culture is often the result of external factors impacting on it. In Norway, the plague of the 1340s where perhaps half the population was

killed was the environmental trauma leading up to the 400 Year Night. Then the Danes took over, replacing Norwegian music, money and dance with their Danish equivalents. What makes this personal for Tauring, or for the purposes of healing what she refers to as her Ørlög (hereafter, oorlog, which means something like fate or karma in Old Norse), is that her mother and her mother’s clan grew up the only Norwegians in a cluster of Danish farms in Wisconsin. Her great aunt tells stories of remnants of the ages-old persecution from the Danes to Norwegian children. When her grandmother was a schoolgirl, for example, the Danish kids told them they smelled bad, made them sit in the back of the classroom and cut the buttons off their dresses.

According to Tauring, prejudice can become an endemic problem within cultures because of people’s tendency to identify with their oppressors, one characteristic of what psychologists call the Stockholm syndrome. When this happens, cultural dysfunction becomes normalized, amounting to a denial of cultural identity. Sinead O’Connor, in the lyrics to her song “Famine” tells the story of the historical trauma of the Irish of the potato famine, pointing out, “If there ever is to be healing,

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there has to be remembering and then grieving.” Parallels can easily be drawn between Norwegian, Irish and even Native American experiences, and Tauring says this remembering is the inspiration and motivation behind her work in Norwegian roots. Part of the healing process is achieved by connecting with one’s ancestors in the language they would have spoken, and because of this, Tauring’s performances include music and song in English as well as Norwegian traditional folk music in the dialects of her great grandmother’s family.

Tauring uses the phrase “inherited cultural grief” to describe what is also called historical trauma. If not healed, these traumas can be handed down from generation to generation, often as traditions of addiction and passive aggressiveness. Through the vibrations of her music, Tauring hopes to create new patterns of functionality and heal the oorlog for the next generation. “You have to ask yourself,” she says, “Are you going to keep repeating a habitual phrase that’s dysfunctional and pass it onto your kids?”

Thorn, The runes, Yule shows and BeYond

In the early 1990s, Tauring formed her second band, named after one of the better known runes in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem, Thorn. Tauring had been a student of the runes since the late ‘80s, and to her the rune Thorn suggests the choices we as individuals are responsible for making and how we need to strike our own path in the world. In her 2007 book on the runes, The Runes: A Human Journey, Tauring says, “Sometimes Thorn wants us to understand the concept of universal law. In Scandinavia, universal law is known as orlag [sic], the fabric of individual destiny ... The choices we make each day send out waves to the rest of the world. Thorn helps us to make the decisions that benefit our highest path.”

Tauring’s traditional American folk music explores this highest path in many forms. Her 1998 album, Faith in Me, is full of songs foreshadowing the work she would eventually bring

Kari and Drew Miller perform at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis in 2009.

photo by David De Young

to workshops around the country and present in her seasonal shows. In the title song, she announced her intent to express the heritage of her “deeper-than-Lutheran” roots. In “Boundaries,” she discusses the importance of boundaries in human relationships, noting that “an erosion of boundaries by degrees leads to the seemingly sudden lapse of all rules until gravity is the only law that some humans adhere to.” “Mother Mate Myself” was written after her second son was born and describes the loss of self that can come from mothering small children. The song is also about the opportunity to re-build the self as better, more careful, more “safety first” and more here and now.

In 1999, Tauring presented the first of what would become seven yuletide celebration shows. The shows incorporated

elements of the world’s various festivals of light and took place over the winter solstice in Minneapolis. These multi-media events, employing music, puppets, dance, stilt-walkers, film shorts and photography were a way for people to re-connect with their cultural heritage and traditions from which they might have, for whatever reason, become divorced. An early theme was “Discovering Origins, Building Traditions,” which remains an appropriate banner for the work Tauring continues today. She released a studio album of some of those songs in 1999 and a follow-up, expanded version of it (A New Yuletide Celebration) in 2011.

When she began writing music for dance to as part of these shows, Tauring says it changed her music organically. Karen Solgård had told her several years before, “Kari, you will never really have the deep spiritual experience with this music you are seeking until you learn the dances. The dances express the spirituality through the body.”

2003 was a threshold year for Tauring. Both her boys were in school, and she had expanded her ritual shows to include the equinoxes, now doing three shows a year. Also that year, a friend had written a poem for her called “Old Norway, New Viking” predicting that she would soon connect her runic roots with her American identity and help others do the same. Studying Hardanger fiddle dances by Solgård and how their various tunings can be trance inducing was the key that helped Tauring complete the bridge between the two worlds of ancient Norway and modern Norwegian immigrants in Minnesota. She began to write for this marriage of ancient and immigrant, combining American folk tunes about seasonal change with ritual and Norwegian tap root exploration, immersing herself in the work from 2006 to 2008, researching the intersection of runes and dance, writing her rune book, and building up her repertoire of mostly Norwegian folk songs.

She released six of these songs on the Völva Songs EP in 2008, forging a musical partnership with Drew Miller of Boiled

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in Lead. Live performances of some of this material led to a live album with Miller called Live at The Capris in 2009. In 2010, Tauring released a Völva Stav manual and an iPhone rune app based on her rune book. An MP3 of her singing/chanting each rune and a recording of the medieval rune ballad, “Runarvisa” recorded in 2008 is included with her rune app.

nYkken and Bear

In 2012, the ideas that would become Nykken and Bear came together. Several years earlier, as part of her Nordic roots studies, Tauring had begun looking for troll and huldre songs – huldre being a part cow, part female creature from Scandinavian folklore. She expanded her search to include “nykken,” a male spirit said to exist along the borders of water and land to which people would sometimes pray before swimming. The nykken was responsible for teaching humans the ways of playing music to nature. “I have always been fascinated by the water entity called nykken,” Tauring wrote in the liner-notes to the new CD. “Living in the sea, the nykken has power to grant musical ability to the would-be musician (especially harps and fiddles) brave enough to seek instruction.”

Tauring had already been performing the traditional Norwegian nykken-themed “Villeman og Magnhild,” which appears on the album as a bouncy American-styled galop, and “Runarvisa,” an aching and beautiful medieval rune ballad, since 2008. For the new album, she also recorded a medieval folk song, “Heiemo og Nykkjen,” and her own interpretation of “Nekken’s Polska” from Sweden.

She introduced the bear theme to the project because the bear is sacred in Norse tradition and a symbol of the Northern experience. For Kari, the bear has shown up in dreams as a spirit guide and teacher reminding her to slow down and to face her fears. The bear section of the album includes a waltz, a longdance, a children’s game and a ritual dance. One of the bear songs, “Bjønndans ein Rituel fra Trysil” is the oldest known hunting ritual/song/dance in Norway and the only song Tauring has found in the Norwegian folk tradition that uses staff rhythm similar to what she developed for Völva Stav.

“Heiemo og Nykkjen,” which appears as a dance ballad, complete with eerie e-bowed dulcimer and creepy vocal effects, is the most important song on the album for Tauring. Traditional songs and stories about the nykken exhibit varying degrees of equality between the sexes. In “Villeman og Magnhild,” Magnhild is submerged by the nykken, but the male hero Villeman (Wildman) rescues her by playing the runes on his golden harp. In “Runarvisa,” which tells a similar story, Villeman and Magnhild are more equals, but Villeman still is the rescuer of Magnhild and her sisters. Heiemo, on the other hand, acts as her own agent in negotiations with the nykken and is strong enough

to call nature in and repel the nykken on her own.

To fully realize Nykken & Bear, Kari includes three original poems to fill in gaps and contribute to the story-like feel of the CD and also to drive home the theme of healing historical trauma. “No – I will not pass it all on / For there is sifting, healing to be done,” Tauring says in her poem “Beginnings,” written the

first time she visited Norway in 2009 as a contestant on the Norwegian reality show “Alt for Norge.” Tauring believes that by incorporating her own modern original material, she enables that healing by re-connecting the heathen, pre-Christian, Lutheran and Immigrant aspects of her ancestry.

In creating her new CD, Kari provides voice, guitar, stav, cow horn, and seljefløyte. She worked with Drew Miller on bass, dulcimer and stav. Miller had already been on a path to explore ancient and traditional folk music for years, and had been looking for new ways to bring that into modern contexts. The recording also includes contributions from producer and musician Scott Nieman at his studio dubNemo in Minneapolis, David Stenshoel (also of Boiled in Lead) on violin, and her husband Greg “Trax” Traxler on drums.

In the end, Kari feels the CD turned out to be more of an old fashioned listening album than a concept album. The recording has the relaxed feel of her live solstice and equinox shows and demonstrates her strengths as a storyteller and a weaver of parts into a cohesive whole. She feels it’s more accessible than anything else she’s done in this genre, and feedback has been quite positive.

The positive feedback Kari has already received for Nykken & Bear is an invitation to write more original material. “In past recordings,” she says, “I’d been interpreting songs from my own perspective. Now I feel like I can express my original voice more clearly. I have a sense of bravery that I didn’t have before.”

DiscographyA Yuletide Celebration, 1999, Kari Tauring, #50097A New Yuletide Celebration, 2001, Omnium Faith in Me, 2001, Kari Tauring Völva Songs, 2009, Kari Tauring, #2105Live at the Capri, 2010, Northside Arts Collective

contacts:Booking: kari@karitauring.com, 612.454.6594

on the Web:<http://www.karitauring.com>

photo by Heidi Ehalt

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K ari Tauring writes: “The lyric for this song is adapted from

t h e m y t h i c a l e p i c ‘ H a u g t u s s a , ’ written (scandalously) in Nynorsk at the hight of the Norwegian na-t iona l roman t i c per iod by Arne Garborg (1851-1924). Grieg meant t o w r i t e m u s i c f o r i t b u t n e v e r qu i te go t i t . Olav Sande (1850-1927) from Kyrkjebø in Sogn (near my home fjord) wrote the tune in 1899. It has been used as a dance tune ever s ince in bo th Norway and America. I made it my own by simply changing it to a minor key and through the English lyric inter-pretation. In Haugtussa, Veslemøy (the heroine) wavers between the Christian world and the Heathen world, the living and the dead, the angels and the ‘demons.’ She has always interacted with the huldre, ‘the hidden folk’ and in this song she is close to marrying the mound man, a huldu who shape shifts into bear form during the daylight hours and into a musical lover after the m i d n i g h t b e l l s r i n g . W h i l e s h e would become an immortal being herself, it would ruin her chances to go to heaven and join her dead sister. As you can guess, the sister appears in her ghostly form to give warning and comfort to Vesslemøy .. . but this song snippet leaves us wondering!

“The Norwegian verses are in dialect qui te c lose to my grand-mother’s Sognef jord dialect and my cousin who still runs the goat dairies in Underdal sang this song f o r m e a t my w e l com e par t y i n 2011. I learned it from the Seattle, WA, Leif Erikson Sons of Norway Lodge’s Leikarringen book and cd set (2008). I sing them in English after the Norwegian.”

You can hear Kari ’s per for -mance on her Nykken and Bear CD, available from Omnium Recordings (P.O. Box 7367, Minneapolis, MN 55407; Ph: 612-375-0233; Web: <http://www.omniumrecords.com>).

Fram Dansar ein Haugkallw: Arne Garborg (1895), m: Olav Sqande (1899)

Arr. Kari Tauring © Kari Tauring

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Fram dansar eith Haugkall fager og blåMed Gullring om håret som fløymer,Han giljar for Veslemoy til og frå,Og Tonar i kring honom strøymer.Å hildreande du! Med meg skal du bu,I Blåhaugen skal du din sylvrokk snu.

Out dances the mound man, handsome and blueA gold ring on hair, long and flowingHe seduces a young maiden to and froAnd all around melodies flowingTo bewitch just youWith me shall you liveIn the blue mound, spinning on a silver wheel.

In daylight hours I am the brown bearWho bounds in the forest wideAnd bathes my fur in the deepest lakesAnd wades in the swift flowing streamsAnd plays on the strand and master of the landAs far away as your eyes can see.

But when it rings, the midnight bell,And day of the hill is goneYou’ll hear my songs and graceful play,Locking you in my armsI will come to you from the wild waysAnd sleep with you in my arms until I wake

Med du skal jitja i Blåhaug brurI silke og sylv så det bragarOg aldri kjennast sår eller sturI alle dei levedagarÅ hildreande du! Med meg skal du bu,I Blåhaugen skal du din sylvrokk snu.

Yes, you shall sit as a Blue Mound brideI silk and silver it dazzlesAnd never will you know sorrow or careIn all of your long living days.To bewitch just youWith me shall you liveIn the blue mound, spinning on a silver wheel.