It is no secret that metal music has an affinity for anything epic, in particular if it is medievalising. What is less known is that its inclination towards epicism may have played an essential role in the configuration of the metal community as we know it nowadays and, more importantly, in its current problems of sexism, homophobia, and, above all, white supremacism. In this book, Amaranta Saguar García proposes the pop culture of the years of formation of heavy metal and the redefinition of the attitudes towards heroism in post-war Western society as the most likely sources of the fascination of metal music with medieval epic themes, while evidencing its similarities to the draw the Middle Ages have on European nationalisms, fascism, and the alt-right. Through a corpus of songs that deal with Medieval Hispanic topics, the author exemplifies the different uses of medieval epic themes in metal music, and explores the rhetorical, ethical, and ideological consequences for the scene of this recurrence of medievalising epicism.

This Open Access publication is funded by the research project PoeMAS: POEsía para MÁS gente. La poesía en la música popular española contemporánea (PGC2018-099641-A-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia Innovación y Universidades de España).