1) The Middle Ages as identity marker in heavy metal: the Spanish case

Medievalism is not alien to heavy metal music. It is actually a prominent feature of two of its most successful subgenres, power metal and pagan metal, and it recurs in the aesthetics and the lyrics of black metal and, characteristically, classical heavy metal bands. Warriors, knights, sorcerers, minstrels, and the whole cast of contemporary popular medievalising fiction, TV-series and cinema alternate with Norse, Anglo-Saxon and, sometimes, plain continental Germanic mythology, ballads, epic poetry, Crusaders, Vikings, and many other supposedly more historical topics. I will not be commenting here on the reasons behind this fascination of heavy metal for the Middle Ages. A taste for epicism tightly bound to celebratory masculinity, a longing for a simpler, nobler or freer, and more fulfilling lifestyle, or simply a morbid interest in the darkest aspects of the Dark Ages myth are frequently cited as the most likely sources, although it is even more likely that heavy metal medievalism has ended up evolving into a mere rhetorical device, at least in some subgenres. However, none of these reasons explains the apparent urge to reappropriate the Middle Ages that can be felt in heavy metal nowadays. At least since the last decade of the twentieth century, bands have started to move away from the generic, pop-culture medievalism of the old days, and to vindicate historical authenticity, which, how Simon Trafford implied at a conference in London some weeks ago, does not necessarily have anything to do with actual historical accuracy. Moreover, particularly among peripheral, that is, non-AngloAmerican metal bands, this historicising tendency also manifests as a naturalising one, evidenced by the rejection of foreign medieval topics in favour of national, regional