Named for The Gods of Bal-Sagoth, a fairly obscure but pretty good non-Conan story by Robert E. Howard, Bal-Sagoth was (formed in1993, broke up in 2013) a British Symphonic Black Metal band that came by the name honestly.
[Incidentally, though best known today for Conan, Howard was a prolific writer despite only living to the age of 30, wrote numerous other characters beyond Conan and was actually most popular in his own lifetime for his Western stories.]
The Howard-esque influence is very obvious. I’ve described Bal-Sagoth more than once as “Conan set to music.” Their songs are basically Pulp Fantasy yarns. And, honestly, most their verbose song titles are virtually stories unto themselves.
Standouts include In the Raven-Haunted Forests of Darkenhold, Where Shadows Reign and the Hues of Sunlight Never Dance, Six Score and Ten Oblations to a Malefic Avatar, and my personal favourite: The Dark Liege of Chaos Is Unleashed at the Ensorcelled Shrine of A’zura-Kai (The Splendour of a Thousand Swords Gleaming Beneath the Blazon of the Hyperborean Empire, Part II) — it’s the “Part II” that really seals it…
FYI, there’s only sentence in that paragraph…
If you’ve ever read a Conan story, or even a remotely Conan-adjacent or influenced story, you know what you’re getting into: barbarian heroes, sorcerers, eldritch things that crawled out from the stygian voids between worlds, plenty of words like “eldritch” and “stygian”…
Admittedly, it can be hard to take seriously, but Bal-Sagoth presents their sprawling mythos with a musical complexity and aptitude, and a sense of unironic self-seriousness that helps to sell the whole endeavour.
Today, I’m looking at the title track from their second album, Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule.
In real life, Thule — pronounced either like “thool” (think “spool” with a th sound), “thoo-lay”, or “too-lay” (basically the second pronunciation but with a hard t instead of a th) is a mythical land posited by ancient geographers to lie either at or beyond the edge of the known lord. In theories that suggest Thule is supposed to be a real place, it’s either Ireland, Iceland, or Greenland.
Because of the association with being located at the remote north of the world, Thule is namesake of the Greenlandic settlement now known as Qaanaaq and subsequently the proto-Inuit culture first attested to thanks to archaeological discoveries near the settlement.
Now, that is an interesting historical aside, but not really relevant to the song.
Starfire is, like most of Bal-Sagoth’s song pretty lyrically dense and impenetrable (more on that later), not helped by the fact that the vocals switch between deep talk-singing narration and the more typical growly Heavy Metal vocals.
At its most simple, it’s the story or a Fantasy hero questing to Thule and becoming the prophesied god-king:
Spears agleam in the dying sun
Lyrics via Genius.
The blood is spilled, the battle’s won
From the icy throne of God-King shall rule
When nine stars kiss the moon o’er Ultima Thule
Full disclosure, the album is marked with an Explicit Content warning on Spotify. However, at least in Starfire, there isn’t really anything worse than Generic Fantasy Violence that, thanks to being described rather than actually depicted, is probably even less intense than something like Lodoss War.
Of course, trying to actually decipher the lyrics to a Bal-Sagoth song is vexing due to the fact that the lengthy liner notes don’t just contain the actual lyrics of their songs, but substantial supplementary material that spells out the full narrative behind the songs that aren’t actually present in the lyrics themselves.
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