The Music of Ornn
If you look at Ornn,
he's just this huge demigod from Freljord.
Something that isn't really relatable.
But we wanted to actually make him relatable.
We wanted you to feel feelings for him.
He's a stand-off character.
He's not going to let you know who he is.
So we thought about it.
Well, he's a blacksmith and he's going to be forging.
Let's have him hum his theme.
This would be a great opportunity to get players to
experience something and relate to this character
on a more personal level.
The obvious expectation for Ornn's music
was to maybe focus on his power fantasy.
This blacksmithing fire god
who can dominate pretty much everything
and forge whatever he wants.
But music has a unique way of being able to speak
to the things you can't really see all the time
and I wanted to explore that.
Something that hinted at something ancient, wise,
and maybe even a bit soft.
Once I had Ornn's hum together
and something that I knew had weight behind it
that we could create a piece
I thought, what are the lyrics going to be based off of?
I was inspired by a short story that Matt Dunn wrote
about a little girl trying to find Ornn.
The only thing that's keeping her going
are the food that she has on her back
and the song that her grandmother used to sing to her.
Through wandering, she sees locations that are in the lyrics
and she follows them like a beacon
and she finds her way into Ornn's forge.
So it started from the hum
and I created the lyrics based off of the short story
which ended up inspiring our Ancient Freljordian folk song.
When I first was writing the lyrics
and had a general idea
of maybe melodically what I wanted to do
we needed a great female vocalist to get in
and for me to really get an idea of does this work or not?
On Ornn, I did the scratch vocals.
We were doing some research around like
what did Celtic folk singing sound like?
What does Scandinavian folk singing sound like?
So that when I did the scratch vocals
I would be able to do
a good representation of what it might sound like.
The instrumental accompaniment
that I had created underneath it
just wasn't fitting quite as well as I wanted it to.
So I ended up scrapping all of that
and rewriting almost the entire piece
around her vocal performance
and that helped a lot.
So the instrumentation for Ornn's music
I knew that there were certain colors
we immediately were going to go to
because we've already defined
a little bit of what the Freljord sounds like.
There was one moment in particular working with Paul
the hardanger fiddle player.
It's a more ancient, old, raw sound of a violin.
It's just slightly different and that's specific to Norway.
He had certain ways of playing little turns
and melismatic things on his fiddle
that felt so appropriate
for like Irish, Scottish, and Nordic folk music.
If we could do your idea
at 84 to, I think, 91 taking that up an octave.
And it fit so well underneath his fingers
and made the piece sound like it
actually came from that world.
The language for the lyrics came up
because we didn't want to create something
that would just have meaning for North America.
We wanted a language that hid the meaning
of the song's lyrics themselves
so they wouldn't be just like a
oh by the way here are the GPS coordinate routes
to find Ornn.
What we did was translated roughly
into several languages at the same time.
So I think it was Danish, Norwegian
a little bit of German as well
and picked out the words and the sounds
that kind of fitted the number of syllables in the song
but that also felt like it could be a real language
when it was all put together.
We needed someone who could authentically sing
this Ancient Freljordian language that we developed
and Christine, being from Norway, was the perfect choice.
Yea, I like that. If we could take the-
It is softer, yea. The "flee" is a little-
Exactly, there're two strong ones right next to each other
and it feels odd with the eighth note
just leading into it.
We want a little bit more,
I wouldn't say tenderness,
but the heart of the mountain.
So this sturdy outside figure
but the music kind of hints at something
that is a little bit softer.
That's so good.
That was pretty good.
I had been living with Ornn
for three or four months at that point.
You're kind of just rolling with it.
But then when you hear the music
that's when the emotion gets attached to Ornn.
We talked that Ornn was this very very very
deep human character
for being, you know, an angry fire god
and the music just connected those two dots for me.