Folkerie

What do the Middle Ages and 2020 have in common? One, there’s the pandemic. The second one, however, is rather unexpected — the production of medieval music, or some form of it. The past few months have seen the rise of a phenomenon called Bardcore , a music genre consisting of medievalesque adaptations of modern popular songs. It is coined from the word bard , a medieval storyteller and singer, and the combining form -core extracted from another music genre hardcore . Although medieval remakes of contemporary music already existed before 2020, most notably Algal the Bard’s cover of System of a Down’s Toxicity in December 2017, it was two viral YouTubers who finally pushed it to prominence this year: Cornelius Link and Hildegard von Blingin’ . The consensus is that this particular trend started on April 20, 2020, when German web developer Cornelius Link released a remake of Tony Igy’s Astronomia . He then followed it up weeks later with an instrumental version of Foster the People’s b