To be born female in this world since its very beginning is to have experienced a certain kind of powerlessness, sourced, very simply, in a relative lack of muscle mass and the particular burdens of childbirth. These brute facts of biology have dictated women being less effective hunters of prey, and thus subject to domination by their more physically imposing male counterparts and sometimes companions.
(Talk about an old story…)
But underneath that competitive imbalance lies an often latent, sometimes wayward, increasingly confident and directed ferocity. An inner strength gathering itself over eons now, cracking the foundations of male hegemony so severely that today, headlines such as a recent “New Yorker” magazine’s “What’s the Matter With Men?” seem to have caught up in frequency with the anguished cries of women inveighing against history’s misogynist ways.
Few contemporary expressions of this ferocity match the latest iteration of our “Brilliant Songs” series: Wyndreth Begindottir’s “My Mother’s Savage Daughter.” That official 1990 copyright title has since been shortened in most versions to the “Savage Daughter” you will see in the performances below.
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Wyndreth Bergindottir is a performance name for Karen Kahan, who was reportedly inspired by her Norse heritage to explore Viking Age history, which encompasses, like history everywhere, a healthy dose of mythology.
The heavy Greek and Roman underpinnings of the West tend to have us imagining the likes of Apollo, Zeus, Athena and Venus commanding the heavens and stirring up all the big human emotions leading to war and ardor, mischief, mayhem, art and wisdom. But of course, the pantheon of gods and goddesses is as limitless across cultures as the human imagination.
The Norse pantheon of medieval Scandinavian times gave that part of the world no less a cast of characters, goddesses included. Here you’ll find Frigg and Freya, the former presiding over marriage and fertility, the latter war, love, beauty, and gold.
Frigg gave us “Friday,” and Freya gave herself access to lovers across the heavens, which she commandeered from a chariot drawn by cats.
Bergindottir has dedicated her artistic life to bringing this heritage to life in both music and poetry. While “Savage Daughter” celebrates the power of women to shape their own destiny, the men of Norse country get no less their due in songs like “Berserker”:
I say to the gods,
I have wedded this blade
and will take no other wife
I have bones for her bride-price
and a barrow for our bed
and the blood of our enemies
to dress us both in red.
No shrinking violets of either gender in that world, prompting Bergindottir to write in her liner notes to the song: “Honestly. I never intended to write a song that included the term, ‘Blood-eagle’ in it. Here it is anyway.”
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Here’s how she describes the birth of “Savage Daughter” in a blog post: :
“In 1990, I woke up with the chorus in my head, and as soon as I found a pen, the rest of it poured out. The tune came the same day. It was clear to me that this was a song that wanted to be sung by anyone who found their own voice within it.”
As you will see below, many have found that voice. Among them are the various cover versions on You Tube, which I stopped counting at 20, and the 6,000 impassioned commenters on Ekaterina Shelehova’s highly stylized Vevo cover last year, which has garnered 16 million views and is still going strong.
Back in 2009, Kahan’s own a capella version was recorded outdoors in spring with a flip video camcorder, her voice and the surroundings raw, unadorned, and true to her bones.
We’ll lead off with that version below because, however moving the Shelehova and a lovely version from the Norwegian women’s choral group Artemis below that, the song’s deepest power resides in the raw, forthright, and ultimately definitive statement carried by the one human voice who conceived it, declaring her truth to the world.
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I am my mother’s savage daughter,
the one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones.
I am my mother’s savage daughter,
I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice.
My mother’s child is a savage,
She looks for her omens in the colors of stones,
In the faces of cats, in the fall of feathers,
In the dancing of fire and the curve of old bones.
(Chorus)
My mother’s child dances in darkness,
And sings heathen songs by the light of the moon,
And watches the stars and renames the planets,
And dreams she can reach them with a song and a broom.
(Chorus)
My mother’s child curses too loud and too often,
My mother’s child laughs too hard and too long,
And howls at the moon and sleeps in ditches,
And clumsily raises her voice in this song.
(Chorus)
Now we all are brought forth out of darkness and water,
Brought into this world through blood and through pain,
And deep in our bones, the old songs are wakening,
So sing them with voices of thunder and rain.
(Chorus x3)
We are our mother’s savage daughters,
The ones who run barefoot cursing sharp stones.
We are our mother’s savage daughters,
We will not cut our hair, We will not lower our voice
“My Mother’s Savage Daughter” words/music c. 1990 K.L.U. Kahan
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More refined, a different beauty…
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Choral version…
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Comments, questions, attaboys or critiques, suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
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For a list of all songs in this series, most recent first, see
http://andrewhidas.com/?s=Brilliant+songs
Fist-raising woman by Miguel Bruna, Costa Rica https://unsplash.com/@mbrunacr
Karen Kahan portrait from https://wyndrethsavagedaughtershieldmaid.bandcamp.com/
I sent that to my daughter. Elemental and anthemic.
Pithy synopsis! Good to hear from you, Dennis.
Having three different and varied versions of “Savage Daughter” allows one to appreciate a song’s delivery. Certainly Wyndreth Bergindottir/Karen Kahan’s acapella rendition has a more earthy quality to it than either Ekaterina Shelehova or Artemis. Wyndreth Bergindottir/Karen Kahan’s singing, although far less sonorous than the other two, better suits the “savage” lyrics. Shelehova’s voice is so beautiful it can overwhelm the lyrics as can the wonderful harmony in Artemis’ presentation. Nevertheless, if I’m driving about town or performing some sort of menial task like doing the dishes, I’d go with Shelehova or Artemis. I guess I’m showing my age in that preference.
Yeah, each of them exists in their own orbit, I’d say. As with most all music, depends on your mood—though sometimes a song can get you in a mood you didn’t know you were ready for!