Heavy Metal & Global Premodernity II online conference, hosted by Miami University, 15-17 March 2024
Full conference program:
sites.miamioh.edu/heavy-metal...
"'Wild Eyes and Thundering Hooves: Representations of Equines in Album Art"
-Carolyn Willekes, Mount Royal University
-Clara Wanning, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Abstract:
The horse is an animal of considerable semiotic significance in human history. For tens of thousands of years humans have carved, etched, painted, sketched, and sculpted images of horses. Given its prevalence in the artistic record, it is perhaps no surprise that the horse has found its way into the culture of metal music. The thundering sounds of a galloping horse, and references to equids can be found in numerous songs like Iron Maiden’s The Trooper or Motörhead’s Iron Horse but here the horse is a thematic motif, rather than a being viewed as an individual being. In this talk, however, we aim to dig deeper into the layered meaning of the horse in metal music by looking at representations of equids in the art of metal album covers such as Rhapsody’s Legendary Tales, Saxon’s Heavy Metal Thunder or Thunder Horse’s Chosen One. We will do this by looking at the use of equine iconography on the album art of different metal subgenres to consider the visual messages being communicated through the use of anthropomorphism to evaluate how these images take the powerful, often emotional, symbolism of the horse and its roles in premodernity to create a clear message framed around the horse-human relationship.
Biographies:
Carolyn Willekes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of General Education at Mount Royal University. She received her Ph.D. in Greek and Roman Studies from the University of Calgary in 2013. Her research focuses on the horse-human relationship in antiquity, and its influence on social and cultural identities. She is the author of The Horse in the Ancient World: from Bucephalus to the Hippodrome, as well as several book chapters and articles on ancient cavalry, equestrian sports, and representations of equines in visual culture (with forthcoming chapters for Cambridge University Press and Brill). She has been involved with numerous public education programs on the history of the horse, and is past-President of the Equine History Collective.
Clara C. Wanning holds an MA degree in aesthetics from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She studied philosophy, Japanese studies, media studies and aesthetics at the University of Siegen and the Goethe University of Frankfurt. Her fields of study include political and social philosophy, contemporary aesthetics, popular culture of film and comics, and occasionally metal studies and equine culture studies. She is working on her PhD project in political philosophy and aesthetics and also works as a German teacher and freelance journalist for the German horse magazine Cavallo.