Fun fact, in my first-year Classical Mythology class back at Carleton, we had an assignment that was basically “Do a write-up about media that’s about Mythology.”
I chose And Then There Was Silence, German Power Metal icons Blind Guardian‘s song about the Trojan War.
Now, as part of that assignment, we had to include either a link to or a copy of the thing we were writing about.
Even after single-spacing the lines, getting rid of the paragraph breaks, and reducing the font size, the copy of the lyrics I attached to my assignment still came in at 7 pages.
The actual assignment was, like, 3 and a half.
Granted, And There There Was Silence is 14 minutes long.
Clearly, Blind Guardian’s greatest strength is their subtlety and fondness for understatement…
Aeneas’ Flight from Troy: Federico Barocci. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Fittingly recorded for the album A Night at the Opera, And Then There Was Silence is certainly operatic — as the aforementioned 14-minute length may indicate.
Blind Guardian’s vocalist Hansi Kürsch is described by TV Tropes as having a “nearly superhuman vocal range.” And Then There Was Silence is pretty concrete proof of that. If it is indeed an opera, then Hansi is singing every role — up to and including being his own backing vocals.
And Then There Was Silence is about the Trojan War, so the epic grandeur fits the source material. Now, the lyrics can be a bit cryptic if you aren’t well-acquainted with the sources — Who’s talking here? Why is denying wisdom and power a bad choice?
Why are they singing about Rome?
On the other hand, there are direct references (or at least paraphrases) to the actual text of the Iliad — for example Achilles‘ famous boast to Hector:
And as the lion
Slaughters man
I am the wolf
And you’re the lamb.
I’m not going to go so far as to say that And Then There Was Silence is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but it probably is one of the most immediately-impressive things I’ve ever listened to…
So, clear your schedule and take a listen:
The official Music to Write Realmgard to playlist is here:
For more music, stories, and everything I else I do, follow me here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
