What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Donnerstag, 3. November 2011

Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini

Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini (2010)

Recently, I was asked to explain the meaning of this album title. With pleasure, I gonna fulfil this wish - easy work for me, because singer Grutle himself has already talked about the title in interviews. (I'm sure there are interviews about this topic out there in english as well, but here I post the link to the interview Grutle gave to the German metal online-mag metal.de).

He said that Ivar wanted to name the album "Axioma" (By the way, the correct plural form would be axiomata and not axiomae, as Grutle assumed in the interview). An axiom is - in logic, philosophy or sience - a proposition which is considered as to be self-evidentially true. So, there is no need for discussing or doubting this proposition.

Grutle instead wanted to name the album "Ethica Odini" - ethical (matters) of Odin. He says that the title is the Latin translation of the Book "Havamal", a collection of Odin's ethical sayings.

So, at the end they just combined the two proposals and created this album title which now means Odin's ethical self-evident proposition.

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