The Widdershins Jig
In 1990, Martin Walkyier left Sabbat, the British thrash band where he had spent five years delivering breathless, rapid-fire vocals over serrated riffs. He teamed up with Steve Ramsey, formerly of Satan and Pariah, and the two formed Skyclad with an ambition that had no precedent in metal: weave traditional folk melody directly into the genre’s heavy framework. Their debut, The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth, arrived in 1991 on Noise Records. It was still mostly a thrash album, but the track “The Widdershins Jig” changed the conversation, featuring piccolo, violin, and tambourine alongside distorted guitars as compositional equals. The timing was difficult (grunge was swallowing metal whole), but Skyclad kept pushing, and by the mid-1990s the violin and mandolin had moved from accent to centerpiece.
In Dublin, Keith Fay heard The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth and recognized a template. He had been playing in a Tolkien-inspired black metal project since 1991, but Skyclad made him want to fuse Irish traditional music with extreme metal. In 1992, Fay, his brother John, and John Clohessy formed Cruachan, bringing tin whistles, bodhrans, bouzoukis, and mandolins from the Irish session tradition. Their 1995 debut Tuatha na Gael was raw, but the intent was clear: Celtic melody as structural element inside black metal rather than decorative frosting. Between Skyclad in Newcastle and Cruachan in Dublin, the genre had its two founding impulses before anyone had a name for it.
Helsinki, 1997
The genre’s center of gravity shifted to Finland at the end of the 1990s. In a Helsinki rehearsal room in March 1997, two musicians fell asleep after a session. One woke and started playing a keyboard melody with a folkish lilt; the other suggested playing it in the style of humppa, a Finnish variety of polka. Guitars and harsh vocals were added within minutes. That improvisation became Finntroll. Their debut, Midnattens Widunder (1999), welded black metal tremolo picking onto humppa rhythms, with all lyrics written in Swedish by vocalist Jan “Katla” Jämsen to match the trollish folklore the band narrated. The concept followed the troll king Rivfader and his war against Christian encroachment.
Finntroll’s early years were shadowed by loss. Jämsen developed a viral-based tumor on his vocal cords and was forced to retire in 2003. That same year, on March 16, founding guitarist Teemu “Somnium” Raimoranta died after falling from the Kaisaniemi bridge in Helsinki. He was twenty-five. The band’s third album, Visor om slutet, released shortly after, was dedicated to his memory.
Kanteles and War Paint
The Finnish scene expanded rapidly. Ensiferum, formed in 1995 by guitarist Markus Toivonen, recruited vocalist Jari Mäenpää in 1996. Their self-titled debut (2001) layered heroic clean melodies over melodic death metal riffs with kantele passages woven into the arrangements. Mäenpää left in early 2004 to focus on Wintersun, and Petri Lindroos of Norther stepped in permanently, bringing a heavier growl that shifted Ensiferum’s balance toward aggression on Iron (2004).
Jonne Järvelä took the opposite path. Most folk metal bands started as metal groups that added folk; Järvelä started as a folk musician. His Sámi folk project Shamaani Duo, active from 1993, evolved into Shaman by 1997, performing with traditional instruments and yoik vocals. By 2003 the project had changed its name to Korpiklaani (Finnish for “the backwoods clan”) to avoid confusion with a Brazilian power metal band also called Shaman. Järvelä credits his time playing live with Finntroll as the catalyst for leaning harder into metal. Spirit of the Forest (2003), the first album under the new name, featured jouhikko (a bowed lyre), accordion, and flute, designed as much for dancing and drinking as for headbanging.
Turisas, from Hämeenlinna, formed in 1997 under vocalist Mathias Nygård, naming the project after a Finnish god of war. Their 2004 debut Battle Metal replaced traditional guitar solos with electric violin solos. The Varangian Way (2007) traced the historical route of the Varangians from Scandinavia to Constantinople across a single conceptual arc.
Cousins Ville and Henri Sorvali had formed Moonsorrow in Helsinki in 1995. By the early 2000s they were composing pieces that dwarfed anything else in the genre. Kivenkantaja (2003) ran over an hour. Viides luku, Hävitetty (2007) contained exactly two songs, each roughly half an hour long. Henri Sorvali, performing under the name Trollhorn, was simultaneously Finntroll’s keyboardist, a shared membership connecting two very different bands: Finntroll compact and raucous, Moonsorrow sprawling and grave. The band called their music “epic heathen metal,” noting that Finns have no Viking heritage.
Beyond the North
Chrigel Glanzmann founded Eluveitie in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 2002 as a studio project pairing melodic death metal with the acoustic instruments of Celtic Gaul: hurdy-gurdy, tin whistles, uilleann pipes, gaita, bodhran, and harp. Some lyrics were written in reconstructed Gaulish, an extinct Celtic language; Glanzmann worked with academics in Vienna, Cambridge, and Zurich on pronunciation. Nuclear Blast signed the band in late 2007, and Slania (2008) broke them internationally, reaching number 35 on the Swiss charts. “Inis Mona” became the closest thing folk metal had to a crossover hit. The live lineup numbered nine members handling different combinations of acoustic instruments and standard metal gear.
In Moscow, Maria “Masha Scream” Arkhipova cofounded Arkona in February 2002, both she and cofounder Alexander “Warlock” Korolyov being members of a Slavic neopagan group. Named after the last pre-Christian Slavic fortress city, the band drew on Russian folklore and incorporated balalaika, shaman’s drum, and komuz. Their 2004 debut Vozrozhdenie (“Revival”) placed Russia on the folk metal map. Arkhipova handled vocals, keyboards, percussion, and songwriting, establishing herself as one of the genre’s most versatile frontpeople.
The Instrument Problem
Folk metal’s defining challenge is logistical. A standard metal band needs two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, and a vocalist. Folk metal adds fiddle players, pipers, flautists, and hurdy-gurdy crankers, sometimes all at once. The economics are difficult: more members means splitting fees more ways, and folk instruments are fragile on the road. Humidity warps wooden bodies; heat melts the rosin on hurdy-gurdy wheels. Some bands solve this with keyboards and samples, but audiences are unusually resistant to substitution. Part of the appeal is watching someone play a nyckelharpa (a Swedish keyed fiddle) or a kantele (a Finnish plucked zither) on a metal stage, and audiences can tell the difference.
The genre has never dominated charts, but it has proven durable. New bands from Taiwan to Argentina have adopted the template, swapping Finnish and Celtic melodies for their own regional traditions. The core idea, that the oldest music in a culture can be fused with the loudest, turns out to be inexhaustible.
Essential Listening
- Skyclad – The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth (1991)
- Cruachan – Tuatha na Gael (1995)
- Finntroll – Midnattens Widunder (1999)
- Ensiferum – Ensiferum (2001)
- Moonsorrow – Kivenkantaja (2003)
- Korpiklaani – Spirit of the Forest (2003)
- Ensiferum – Iron (2004)
- Turisas – Battle Metal (2004)
- Arkona – Vozrozhdenie (2004)
- Moonsorrow – Verisäkeet (2005)
- Turisas – The Varangian Way (2007)
- Eluveitie – Slania (2008)