Does there exist recordings of Scandinavian sea shanties? If not shanties, then songs such as Rolling Down to Old Maui. (Any time period)

by Syrupsniper

Just looking for Scandinavian sea shanties or sea songs, as I can't find many examples of these online compared to British shanties. Mostly interested in Norwegian songs. Thank you in advance.

robothelvete

Evert Taube and his son Sven-Bertil Taube made some recordings of traditional seafarer songs (sjömansvisor), of which some can be found available online. The latter made an album called Seglarsånger (sailor songs) which is available on Spotify and possibly youtube.

There's also apparently The Song and Tune Catalogue from The Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research which you can use to search for records, and order them home on some sort of physical media, like in olden times.

There will also be some sort of festival dedicated to this in Stockholm on the 29th of August, held by the Maritime Museum.

Thanks for making me do this research and discover all this btw, now I'm interested in it too.

vincent_elf

Are you looking for studio recordings or ethnomusicological recordings?

Here's a professional recording of Sjursveinvisa, one of the oldest known "Lofotenviser", fishermen's songs from Lofoten in northern Norway. I can give you more information about it if you're interested. http://websim.arkivert.uit.no/getfile.php%3fPageId=324%26FileId=864

Three different recordings of a song about The Titanic, really popular with sea folk at the time. There are several dozen variants on this: http://websim.arkivert.uit.no/getfile.php%3fPageId=324%26FileId=854

https://uit.no/Content/318172/Det%20st%C3%B8rste%20skip%20Marelis%20Larsen%20TsM%20B%201986%2001%2083.mp3

http://websim.arkivert.uit.no/getfile.php%3fPageId=324%26FileId=855

I'll throw this in just for fun :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjjhCEiSDSk

Aglovale

The Norwegian sailor A.H. Rasmussen was recorded, primarily in English, by the English collector Peter Kennedy in 1955. You can hear these recordings here: 1, 2, 3. He was a fine singer, and these recording contain several rare and interesting chanteys.

Stan Hugill printed several Scandinavian-language chanteys in the unabridged edition of Shanties From the Seven Seas (these days, I think only the abridged edition is widely available?), mostly/entirely collected from earlier Scandinavian collections. Many of these are clear adaptations of English-language songs, containing Scandinavian-language verses and retaining all or part of the English-language chorus. You will be able to find recent recordings of all these by browsing through the playlists on this Youtube channel; the singer, who presents each song with comment, attempts to render them in a historical manner without the frills and distortions of the folk revival.