Towards an Ecocritical Norwegian Folklore and Music: Water, Love and Death

Without a doubt, music can carry a cultural message. Music and sounds can characterize the context: sounds and melodies sometimes become an aspect capable of shaping geographical spaces also in a sense of identity. This work focuses on critical attention about the ability of music, like other forms of popular culture, to convey an environmentalist discourse, through a specific representation of the relationship between human and nonhuman. The assumption that motivates this contribution is that popular folklore can offer a key to reading the traditions of a country and provide useful information on the ways humans represent themselves through the representation of an existing or imagined territory. In this sense, taking a cue from three poems by Ibsen that Grieg transposed into music, an ecocritical analysis of Norwegian folklore beliefs and practices is proposed to highlight how folklore still transmits an important message of environmental conservation and the importance of restoration of a harmonious balance between the person and the physical environment surrounding him or her.