Ievan polkka is a Finnish folk song that achieved memetic popularity on the Anglophone internet circa 2006 thanks to a clip of the version of the song by Finnish quartet Loituma synced up with a clip from hugely popular anime Bleach featuring prominent character Orihime twirling a leek:
The song itself subsequently proved incredibly popular with the users of Japanese singing robot software Vocaloid, in particular the brand’s flagship singing robot and mascot Hatsune Miku and has proven catchy and enduring enough to pop back up as a meme in the ensuring years.
Korpiklaani is a Finnish folk metal band, who, according to the band’s own frontman, play “old people’s music with heavy metal guitars.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of their songs are based on Finnish folklore, particularly the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.
In keeping with their stated function of playing “old people’s music with heavy metal guitars”, they’ve also done a Folk Metal version of Ievan Polkka, both in the original Finnish and an English translation on their 2012 album Manala (FYI, it’s one of several names for the Finnish underworld — incidentally, so is Tuonela, as in “Swan of.”)
Ievan is the possessive case of the Finnish form of the name Eva, so the song is literally Eva’s Polka. In their version of the English title, Korpiklaani keeps the Finnish spelling, but I’m going to be using the English “Eva.”
And it fundamentally delivers what it promises — there’s a neighbourhood party and then Eva and her boyfriend sneak out on Eva’s overbearing mother to polka dance:
While Ieva and the lad next door
They had trouble keeping [calm]
No matter what the old hag saysLyrics via Genius.
It’s basically a love song.
Also, dude threatens to beat up Eva’s mom…
It’s touching, really.
I’m sharing the English version, because I anticipate most of my readers don’t understand Finnish, but you can also listen to Korpiklaani’s Finnish version of the song here.
The full playlist is here:
And, 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
