Tomyris: A Killer Queen in Heavy Metal Music

Description

Heavy metal is a musical offspring of rock music, characterised by its clamorous sound, provocative counter-culture, and aggressive machismo. Relatively unknown to many scholars of reception until recently (Fletcher & Umurhan 2020), the genre has spawned receptions of Classical antiquity from the genre’s inception in the late 1960s to today. Topics and themes cover numerous aspects of Greek and Roman culture and society, but especially warfare in myth and history. Of particular interest to metal bands from Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden to Sabaton have been traditionally masculine power symbols, such as Achilles and Alexander the Great. In more recent years, however, artists have embraced an ever more diverse cast of characters and stories from the ancient world.In this paper, I will investigate one such important instance of reception, namely, A Sound of Thunder’s track about the warrior queen Tomyris, the bane of Cyrus the Great (It was Metal, 2018). This is but one of the many contemporary receptions of this ancient character (see e.g. Edith Hall’s blog post about The Legend of Tomiris, a Kazakhstani film from 2019). After a brief introduction to the band, their discography, and the song, I will use transformation theory (Baker et al. 2019) to compare their version of the story with the original account of Herodotus (Hdt. 1.205-214). The aim is to explore how the band redefinesTomyris’ role through a subversion of primarily the Herodotean narrative, and I argue that they raise a particularly feminist agenda in highlighting her independence, freedom, and power. I will contextualise this representation of Tomyris with the band’s general involvement in bringing feminism into the masculine world of heavy metal, which raises further questions about Classical reception’s role in promoting this agenda at large.

Period	3 Sept 2021
Event title	Popular Receptions of Classical Antiquity: The Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity 2021 Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Aarhus, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International