I’m on a bit of a Finland run posting about my author playlist over on Substack…
Today, we’re taking a look at Ensiferum’s 2007 song Wanderer — which as far as I can tell, is either about Finland’s great folk hero Väinämöinen, Conan the Barbarian, or me…
Like Korpiklaani, Ensiferum draws a lot from the Kalevala, to the point of directly quoting the text in their songs — and those themes are a lot more explicit and obvious in those other songs, especially the ones where they are just quoting the Kalevala.
With that in mind, I’m not sure if the Wanderer from the song is supposed to be a specific Finnish folk hero like Väinämöinen (basically musical Gandalf) or Lemminkäinen (sort of a Heracles-type figure, featuring in Sibelius’ tone poem The Swan of Tuonela), or just a generic sort of Fantasy Hero.
Ensiferum also has a lot of songs that are broadly Fantasy-y or mythological.
Honestly, the lyrics of Wanderer could be pretty easily applied to Conan…
And, as a bonus that kinda-sorta ties into today’s post, here’s a video from YouTube Channel Empire of the Mind discussing Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer in relation to the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien:
Check out my full playlist is 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
