Heavy metal went to mythology because the stories were the one part of the job that arrived free, ancient and already under pressure. Everything else came with an invoice. The studio hours, the sleeve painter, the van, the solicitor who read the contract: all of it was billed, and none of it helped unless the words could stand up under the volume.
Rain that fell on chalk downland two centuries ago sinks through the rock, stops on a bed of clay and sits there with the weight of the whole hill on top of it, so that when a drill snaps through the last of that clay the water climbs the casing by itself and stands in the air above the field, with no pump, no handle and nobody turning anything. Mythology in heavy metal lyrics is that water. The band drills. The pressure was laid down long before the band existed, and nothing it does can use the pressure up.
The Assyrian king who had every story his scribes could lay hands on copied onto clay and shelved in one palace was Ashurbanipal. When Nineveh was sacked and burned in 612 BC, the fire that brought the roof down over those shelves baked the tablets hard in the rubble instead of destroying them. The oldest long poem anybody has, a flood and a king who would not accept that he had to die, came out of the wreck of the library that held it. The English engraver turned museum assistant who read that flood tablet aloud to a London society in December 1872 was George Smith. Three thousand years of pressure, and a fire to open the tap.
What mythology in heavy metal lyrics is actually for
Four things come up the pipe, and only one of them is the plot. The first is a cast the hall already knows, so that a song can open on the killing instead of spending two verses explaining who holds the spear. The second is scale: a riff at full gain flattens an ordinary subject, and myth is the rare material that does not buckle under it. The third is that nobody owns it. The fourth is a shape, since almost every myth worth the trouble is an ordeal with an end, which is also the shape of a song.
The third of those is the one the accountants noticed. Homer has never sent a letter, Aeschylus has never asked for a point on the back end, and no estate has ever written to a small German label about the use of a Norse god. Where myth sits among the rest of the subjects is in the chapter that covers it. What a band gets out of it is narrower and stranger.
Homer has never sent a letter, Aeschylus has never asked for a point on the back end.
The bargain has a price, and the price is that the audience knows the ending. A myth cannot be spoiled, only staged, and the test of a mythological lyric is what happens in the space between a story the whole room can already finish and a chorus nobody has heard yet.
Olympus belongs to the punished
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing.
Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, 1715
Greece handed the style a whole pantheon and the style took almost none of it. The gods in their glory were left where they stood, the comedies were never opened, the love stories were left to other kinds of music, and what heavy metal carried off was the shelf marked punishment: the boy who flew too near the sun, the man chained to a rock with his liver growing back every night, the prophetess nobody believed, the king dragged behind a chariot round the walls of his own city. Iron Maiden made a top twenty single in 1983 out of Icarus and threw away the moral that the fable exists to deliver.
The Americans who took the whole of the Trojan material at once and let it run past twenty-eight minutes were Manowar, on The Triumph of Steel in 1992, and the Long Island band that set the Oresteia of Aeschylus as a metal opera across two records at the end of the same decade was Virgin Steele. Neither record was short. Neither was meant to be. A style that had spent fifteen years cutting songs down to three and a half minutes for radio went to the Greeks precisely because the Greeks gave it an excuse to stop.
Pick up almost any Greek lyric in the style and the same figure is in it, standing where the god used to stand: a human being who goes past the line drawn for him and is broken on it, a subject a loud band can play without a trace of irony. The moralising is what gets left behind. The falling is what gets a riff.
Camelot belongs to Mordred
The Arthurian material went the same way. The round table, the fellowship and the good king were of almost no use to anybody with a distortion pedal, and the knight heavy metal keeps going back for is Mordred, the traitor, the son nobody wanted and the man who brings the whole arrangement down. The German band that gave him a chorus rather than a sentence was Blind Guardian, and "Mordred's Song", on Somewhere Far Beyond, which Virgin put out on 29 June 1992, is sung from inside the traitor's own head.
The German five who closed a trilogy about the Middle Ages with a record named after the sword put the legend end to end, Grave Digger on Excalibur in 1999, and the Tampa band that borrowed the castle's own name in 1987, found a record store already trading under it, filed the C down into a K and then hardly ever sang about the place at all, is Kamelot. Arthur gets the title. Mordred gets the songs.
That preference is not an accident of taste. A legend built around a good king ruling well gives a band nothing to play, while the treachery at the end of it gives the band everything: a motive, a battle, a wound that does not heal and an ending that cannot be argued with. On any honest reading the style has been choosing the collapse over the court for fifty years, in every mythology it has touched.
Asa Bay, Sodom and the oldest story on the shelf
The Norse material is the one case where the reaching changed the reacher. The Swede who scrapped his own formula, dropped the speed, hauled in horns and a choir and turned the whole operation north was Quorthon, and Hammerheart, released by Noise in 1990, spent its longest song on a village watching a cross go up on its own shore, which is how Bathory came to shoot the only promotional video of its existence. Whole genres came out of that turn. Almost none of them stayed heavy metal.
The Bible was quarried harder than any of them and with the least reverence, which is why the accusations of blasphemy that followed the style around for thirty years were aimed at the wrong shelf. Revelation supplied the imagery, Genesis supplied the disasters, and the cities of the plain supplied what a band actually wants, which is a place with a name and a fire coming for it.
The Stockholm band that answered the problem by hiring a choir and an orchestra outright, rather than suggesting them with a keyboard, was Therion, and Theli, released by Nuclear Blast in 1996, opens on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with voices stacked behind the guitars in a way that nothing in the genre had tried at that scale. Christofer Johnsson had been playing death metal six years earlier. The choir was not a costume. It was the argument.
Mesopotamia is the last quarry and the least worked, which is strange, because the material Ashurbanipal's scribes copied out is a thousand years older than Homer and darker than anything in Camelot. Melechesh and Absu dragged it into black and death metal decades later; heavy metal proper has walked past the oldest story it could possibly steal, for no reason anyone has ever given.
What all of it has in common is that the band did not have to make any of it up, and that the listener arrives already carrying half the lyric. That is the opposite of metal songs about metal, where the subject has no history at all and the band has to build the myth on the spot, out of leather and a chorus, in three and a half minutes. Both work. Only one of them is free.
