brychar66's video: Northern Legend: poem by Charles Bryant

Northern Legend (listening to Sibelius's Lemminkäinen Legends) by Charles Bryant Northern mistlands once again enclose me, forest-gods surround me, cold air congeals my throat and lungs. Hugin and Munin, circling overhead, black emblazons signifying dread, flap and croak and draw me further on into a thicket of bleaching bones whose skin ripples in a freezing breeze, their eyes aflame with memories of final battle. Valkyries hover in the stormy sky above, reluctant to leave their heroes, shedding tears of chivalry and shame in cold-scalding rain. Beneath the birches stands the man I seek, master-musician, bard, berserker, drunk with whelming melody and song, melancholy lord of that vast throng. He turns at my approach and takes my hand; together we gaze across the stricken land in fervent longing for the rising sun. ********************************* Thoughts of Finnish landscape bring to mind (as does Sibelius's music) somewhat more Wagnerian images. But Thought and Memory (Wotan's ravens Hugin and Munin) intermix music, mythologies and images; and darkness inevitably gives way to light in a reverse Götterdämmerung of the human psyche! And although I was listening to Lemminkäinen when I wrote this, I thought Sibelius's incidental music for a performance of The Tempest (practically the last thing he ever wrote before the final long silence descended over the master of Ainola) was more suitable. Such are the intermixing vagaries of pure creativity :)