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**Wardruna - Runaljod - Ragnarok**
★★★★☆

The final chapter of Einar Selvik's ambitious Norse trilogy arrives with the weight of apocalypse and the whisper of ancient winds. *Runaljod - Ragnarok*, the concluding volume in Wardruna's exploration of the Elder Futhark runes, doesn't merely close a musical project – it completes a ritual that began over a decade ago in the forests of Bergen, where Selvik first conceived his radical reimagining of pre-Christian Scandinavian music.

Following 2009's *Gap Var Ginnunga* and 2013's *Yggdrasil*, this third instalment finds Selvik and his collaborators delving into the eight final runes of the ancient alphabet, each song serving as both musical composition and spiritual invocation. Where its predecessors established the framework and explored the cosmic tree, *Ragnarok* confronts endings, transformations, and the cyclical nature of destruction and rebirth that defines Norse cosmology.

Selvik's journey to this point reads like something from the sagas themselves. A former member of black metal outfit Gorgoroth, he abandoned the genre's theatrical extremity for something far more profound – an archaeological dig through sound itself. Years of research into historical instruments, collaboration with ethnomusicologists, and immersion in Old Norse poetry have culminated in music that feels less composed than excavated from some primordial memory.

The album opens with "Tyr", named for the one-handed god of war and justice, where Selvik's weathered vocals emerge from a landscape of frame drums, bone flutes, and the haunting resonance of the tagelharpa – a bowed lyre that sounds like the earth itself singing. This isn't the bombastic orchestration of symphonic metal or the pastoral prettiness of neo-folk; it's something altogether more primal, as if the very stones of ancient burial mounds were given voice.

"Algiz" stands as perhaps the album's most powerful moment, built around the rune of protection and higher consciousness. Here, Lindy-Fay Hella's ethereal vocals weave through layers of ritual percussion and what sounds like the breathing of the forest itself. The track builds with shamanic intensity, reaching moments of transcendence that justify every minute of Selvik's obsessive research into historical performance practices.

The title track "Ragnarok" confronts the twilight of the gods with surprising restraint. Rather than apocalyptic bombast, Selvik presents the end of worlds as a natural process, inevitable as winter following autumn. Traditional instruments – deer-hide drums, wooden flutes, jaw harps – create textures that seem to emerge from the landscape itself, while his vocals, delivered in Old Norse, carry the gravity of prophecy without descending into melodrama.

"Sowilo", exploring the rune of the sun, provides the album's most accessible moment, its circular melodies and hypnotic rhythms suggesting both solar cycles and the eternal return that underlies Norse philosophy. Yet even here, accessibility never comes at the expense of authenticity – every sound feels carefully researched, every note weighted with historical significance.

What sets Wardruna apart from the crowded field of pagan metal and dark folk is Selvik's scholarly approach. This isn't fantasy role-playing set to music but a serious attempt to reconstruct the sonic world of pre-Christian Scandinavia. The fact that his work has found its way into mainstream consciousness through the *Vikings* television series speaks to its power to transport listeners across centuries.

The production, handled by Selvik himself, places every creak of wood and whisper of wind in crystalline focus. Recorded in carefully chosen locations – caves, forests, mountains – the album carries the acoustic signature of the Norwegian landscape, making geography itself an instrument.

*Ragnarok* succeeds not just as the conclusion to an ambitious trilogy but as a standalone work of remarkable depth and beauty. While it may lack the immediate impact of black metal's assault or the familiar structures of conventional folk, it offers something rarer: genuine transcendence through historical imagination.

In completing the *Runaljod* trilogy, Selvik has created something unprecedented in contemporary music – a successful marriage of academic rigour and artistic vision that neither compromises historical accuracy nor sacrifices emotional power. As the runes fall silent and the cycle completes, Wardruna stands as proof that the old gods still have stories to tell, if we're willing to listen with ancient ears.