Monomyth in Music: The Morrowind Theme Song

So I know I'm probably preaching to the choir out there when I say that The Elder Scrolls games are super 'mazinglicious, but I feel like I could add another level of appreciation to this great franchise. I'm going to interpret the opening theme of The Elder Scroll III: Morrowind in the framework of a monomyth (aka "the hero's journey," I prefer the term monomyth).

For those of you not in the know, the monomyth is a framework defined (not created) by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It has many parts and has had much said about it in the years since, and I'm going to use a weird mishmash of it that makes sense to me. You're probably going to get upset at this point and say that I'm full of bologna sandwiches, but that's just life and stuff.

In my mind the most important parts of the monomyth are

• The call to adventure; the thing that pushes the hero from a static existence into something bigger.
• The threshold; the point where the hero leaves the familiar and enters into something else. This other place has been called many things: the wild, realms of power, realms of magic, etc.
• Challenges and temptations; the hero must pass through these in order to reach...
• The Abyss; the darkest moment in the hero's struggle. Usually the test that must be overcome to receive the boon.
• Death; caused by struggling in the abyss. Often death in stories is not literal so much as it is a shedding of something about themselves meaning that, in a sense, their old being is dead.
• Rebirth; once again, not always literal, but in the case of Gandalf vs Durin's Bane it is.
• Atonement; being initiated into a higher state by the ultimate power.
• Return; the return from the realms of power with a boon for the benefit of all.

So all we have to do is map these steps onto parts of the song and convince you that it makes sense. Easy, right?

So there's the song, listen to it once, twice, or repeatedly until you fall asleep like I do. Here we go.

The first thing you hear at zero seconds is a drum breaking silence. It's easy to deduce that this is the call to adventure. The silence is the state that is broken by the sounding of a drum.

The step over the threshold into realms of power is indicated by the introductions of the strings into the mix. If we maintain that silence is considered to be the familiar state, then it should be obvious to conclude that by contrast stepping into a world full of wonderful, powerful sounds would indicate crossing the threshold*.

The first challenge begins around 0:35. The melody rises and falls as the hero is confronted with trials. Voices of instruments can be heard intermixing giving a feeling of the other stories that intersect with that of the hero. The most prominent of these is the horn. Just keep that in mind.

We progress through trials until about 1:10 when we enter the abyss. The tension mounts as the music swells, giving an indication of how the hero struggles in the abyss.

Fortunately he doesn't have to struggle long because he dies around 1:28 when the swell crests with the crash of a cymbal and a gloriously minor chord.

With death comes rebirth and atonement. From 1:28 to 1:33 a lot of things happen in the music all jammed into just 5 seconds. At the same time that the strings, which had been carrying the melody, are on a descending scale and diminuendo, the horn part plays an ascending scale while performing a crescendo to become the lead voice.

Now if we take the horn to be a symbol of majesty, power, and/or lordship, then this indicates the subservience of the hero to a greater power. In turn this highest power grants a boon and initiates the hero into a higher level of existence. This atonement causes the rebirth of the character. If you listen again you may also notice that the voice of the horn can always be heard, giving the sense that the highest power is present wherever the hero is, granting a certain kind of moral authority to the hero's task.

The following seconds indicate the return of the hero as he leaves the realms of power. The drums fade into the distance almost like something holding the hero, trying replicate the call once again, but it's not the drums that we hear last, but indeed, the strings. This indicates that the hero has returned home as a hero, bearing both the boon and increase in status granted during the atonement.


And that's that. Music is by its very nature an extremely abstract art form and it's very interesting to see when some of that abstraction lines up with some kind of narrative that resonates on an instinctual level. If you've read this far, I'm glad you granted me the time to talk about things that probably don't matter all that much, and I hope that your appreciation for The Elder Scrolls and music has increased in some way.

* For you more hardcore hero's journey analysts out there, I would say that between this point and 0:35 is the "meeting with the goddess."