Voice of Swedish Nationalism
Saga & Her Music

3,352 words

“Armies already wavering and giving way have been rallied by women who, with earnest entreaties and bosoms laid bare, have vividly represented the horrors of captivity . . . [The Germans] even believe that the sex has a certain sanctity and prescience, and they do not despise their counsels, or make light of their answers.”–Tacitus, Germania 8

Land of Ice

From My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volume 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbp6nUrEi7Q&feature=related [1] [2:15]

Talking ’bout a land that is made of ice
A land of the North that is full of pride
Hearts full of fire, forests full of snow
We’re always made welcome by the friends we know
As we board the Swedish ferry and journey through the night
Gothenburg is waiting

Hearts of fire, land of ice
Hearts of fire, land of ice

We cross the mighty ocean and arrive next day
Comrades are waiting on the dock of the bay
We toast old friendships as we shake their hands
We swear to keep fighting to release our lands
The next day on to Stockholm to meet comrades of the fight
Their pride is Sweden’s struggle

Hearts of fire, land of ice
Hearts of fire, land of ice

[Instrumental interlude]

Bevara Sverige Svensk” [“Keep Sweden Swedish”] is the slogan there
Nordic pride is the thing they share
To save their Northern country from the Marxist plague
To stop their country dying they fight every day
They’re fighting in Uppsala, in Södertälje they fight
In Borås and in Malmö

Hearts of fire, land of ice
Hearts of fire, land of ice
Hearts of fire, land of ice

A note on disambiguation, because if you do a search you may run into this problem: the Swedish singer of this song, known by her stage name Saga, is not to be confused with the Canadian rock band Saga or its first album (Saga), the bassist Saga of the Japanese rock band Alice Nine, or the album Sagas by German Viking metal band Equilibrium.

Saga was born in 1975 and currently resides in south Sweden. She works from her home studio before taking finished material to a professional studio and redoing it for the final result.

The Swedish woman is one of the most popular and well-known white nationalist singers in Europe. And she’s radical—no Buckleyite, philo-Semitic racialist she. As of 2007 she was the mother of two children.

On top of her professional talent, comeliness, and radicalism, Saga possesses the enviable ability to sing in English without the trace of an accent—reminiscent of older, mainline Nordic pop groups like ABBA and Roxette from Sweden, or Ah-ha from Norway. She also speaks English exceedingly well—again with no trace of an accent as far as I can tell. This exceptional bilingualism enormously enhances her worldwide appeal.

Early Work as Vocalist for the Swedish Metal Band Symphony of Sorrow

Swedish Gothic/Industrial Metal band Symphony of Sorrow [2], a project of lead vocalist Saga and three male members of the former Swedish death metal/white power band Triskelon [3], has been described as emphasizing themes of National Socialism, Religion, and Emotions. The band has cut two albums to date, Paradise Lost (1999) and Symphony of Hatred (2005).

The appeal of these works is probably limited to aficianados of the genre.

Covers of Ian Stuart and Skrewdriver

Saga’s fame and success rest primarily upon her extensive “covers” (actually, in her case, interpretations) of songs by the pioneer English skinhead band Skrewdriver. A cover, or cover version, is a new recording of a well-known song first sung or popularized by another performer.

She has created three albums in this vein, My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volumes 1–3 (2000–2001), which embody a near-perfect match of artist and material.

According to Saga’s website, she “was not alone in producing these. Several prominent RAC (Rock Against Communism) musicians assisted in the production and all songs, except a handful, were written by the legendary Ian Stuart. As a result, these albums were not considered solo projects.”

It has been said by more than one listener that Saga’s covers are much better than Skrewdriver’s originals. This is my opinion as well. (There are a few exceptions. I prefer Skrewdriver’s “The Road to Valhalla” [4] to Saga’s [5].) As time went by, Saga brought more and more of her own sensibility to the music.

Perhaps a better way of expressing the relationship, though, is to say that Saga makes Skrewdriver accessible. It’s much easier to see Skrewdriver lead singer-songwriter Ian Stuart Donaldson’s (1957–1993) considerable accomplishment, musically, lyrically, and ideologically, if you approach him through Saga.

In addition, Donaldson possessed organizational ability and marked leadership qualities. You have to be able to look past the rough edges of his skinhead persona (which was 100 percent genuine) in order to perceive this.

Donaldson (also known as Ian Stuart), a northwestern Englishman of Scottish descent, formed Skrewdriver as a punk rock band in 1975, but the group subsequently evolved into the first major white power/skinhead band in the world, famed throughout Europe.

Donaldson and his band were harassed by authorities and by anti-white domestic terrorist groups unofficially sanctioned by the government. Donaldson was convicted and served time in prison. He was killed in an automobile accident in England at age 36 at the height of his fame. Like Saga, Skrewdriver had to release its music through small, independent, non-Establishment labels and distribution channels.

The oppression and violence the group experienced perhaps explains the disproportionate emphasis (that is, in comparison to the indifference displayed by most WNs) on freedom of speech and thought in many of Skrewdriver’s (and Saga’s) songs and lyrics.

Nor does it escape my attention that the words in the following song were written by a man, loathed by Jews and government officials who had employed violence and repression against him, who was ultimately killed prematurely in an automobile accident.

Suddenly

From My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volume 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpMr2AN651I&feature=related [6] [4:46]

We live in changing times
When certain thoughts are now a crime
Power flows through an evil pen
And freedom’s light is growing dim

Chorus:
One day if suddenly, I’m forced to take my leave
Will you still carry on, with the things that we believe?
One day if suddenly, they take my life away
Will you still be fighting to win a bright new day?

The people who’ve stood against us
They seem to be above the law
With the power to listen in to private moments in your lives
With the power to come kick down your door

[Repeat Chorus]

[Instrumental interlude]

[Repeat Chorus]

Our strength has come from ideals many years old
A strength that has survived within our blood
A strength our foe has recognized, and sworn to drag it down
He wants to drag our people through the mud

Chorus:

One day if suddenly, I’m forced to take my leave
Will you still carry on, with the things that we believe?
One day if suddenly, they take my life away
Will you still be fighting to win a bright new day?

Here’s what one YouTube commenter said in response to this song: “fukin nazi fucks, fuck off and die. and this slag needs her throat cutting. fuck all of u. i hope someone shoots your kids if u support this cunt.”

On a UK Black Metal site one commenter sneered, “I see a gang raping in her future,” and another added, “She needs a stiff black dick.”

Sure, these are the comments of scum—quite possibly college-educated scum—but their hatred is also the hatred of the state and of society: of government, police, security agencies, prosecutors, judges, the SPLC and the ADL, academics, journalists, and Hollywood.

Don’t think for one moment that such sweet people intend to let your race survive. They hate—they jail, they assault, they defame, they destroy families, they torture, they kill, they impoverish, they discriminate, they lie, they silence, they censor. They’re behind replacement migration. They possess the will and the power to commit genocide.

YouTube’s mix for Skrewdriver (the original band) lists 100 video uploads of an officially reviled and out-of-the-mainstream group. One Skrewdriver song, “White Rider,” has well over half a million hits. Some have tens or even hundreds of thousands of views.  And this is nearly two decades after Skrewdriver’s demise, when many youthful listeners weren’t even born.

The thing about this phenomenon is that, although marginal from the perspective of the larger culture, in terms of the white movement it is a mass affair; it is aural and visual rather than print; it engages the subconscious and the emotions as well as the intellect; it reaches the young (the future) instead of the old; and it excludes non-whites and Jews.

Midgård Records

The producer of Saga’s albums is Gothenburg, Sweden-based Midgård Records, which was founded by Per-Anders “Pajen” Johansson as a retail record store in 1994. His objective was to provide young Swedes with an alternative to the anti-white music of the Establishment.

According to the company’s website, the newly-established shop was smashed a few nights after it opened, with no arrests or, apparently, serious investigation by police.

Midgård moved to a more secure location in a privately-owned house, and stayed open for the next 6 years, 5 days a week, despite night attacks, Red demonstrations, and media assaults. The store was also the target of government investigations and harassment.

Johansson closed the shop in 2000 because the owner of the premises refused ro renew the lease. However, two years earlier Midgård had launched a mail order service to reach people around the world, plus its own label to produce pro-white records in innovative styles to professional standards.

In addition to Saga, Midgård sells music by Bound for Glory, Brutal Attack, Fortress, Landser, No Remorse, Pluton Svea, Skrewdriver, Stahlgewitter, Storm, and Sturmwehr, together with stylized clothing, posters, flags, and similar items. Books offered for sale include Swedish translations of David Irving’s Göring, Codreanu’s For My Legionaries, and William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries.

It would be interesting to estimate the potential market for white power music of all kinds—metal, rock, pop, folk—in terms of numbers of customers and total revenues, as well as potential profit margins. It would be smart for entrepreneurs producing such music to focus on intellectual property and contract law, which are of primary importance in such areas.

Of course, it is no easy task to own or operate any kind of business. And when you factor in denial of access to normal commercial marketing and distribution channels, racist-totalitarian laws to suppress white speech, and Jewish and Communist domestic terrorists and mobsters working (in effect) hand-in-glove with law enforcement and government, the rigors of ordinary free market competition, merciless enough on their own, pose, perhaps, the least of one’s problems.

Nevertheless, the very fact of suppression intensifies both inchoate and potential market demand, even if would-be consumers have no way of knowing that they would want such music if it were available.

Pro Patria III

In 2002, Midgård asked Saga to take up the microphone on the third volume of its Pro Patria series. The Pro Patria albums are an ongoing project between Midgård Records and patriotic Swedish musicians. The albums in the series maintain a soft style, “an alternative to the traditional hard rock, punk and metal that saturated the Nationalist music scene,” on the theory that “we should face the enemy with all means possible,” according to the firm’s website.

Saga’s Pro Patria III, her only album to date sung entirely in Swedish rather than English, took about a year to produce and supplied patriotic lyrics to popular Swedish tunes. Saga’s vocals and musical arrangements were radically softened from her hard metal Symphony of Sorrow sound.

Pro Patria III was a success throughout Sweden, Scandinavia, and Europe.

On Her Own

Saga’s outstanding success covering Skrewdriver material created a problem. Could she create new material, or was her considerable talent limited to rendering cover versions of songs by other artists?

She met this challenge head-on with her next album, On My Own (2007), a major departure. She served as singer, songwriter, lyricist, and producer of the piano-driven melodies.

Live Video of Saga

Video clips of Saga performing live are not plentiful on the Internet, and the sound and picture quality of those that do exist are poor. It is happenstance material independently recorded and posted by random audience members. Still, the few available clips do show what she looks like, and provide some insight into her live performances.

The most professional-looking performance clip I was able to locate is the elegiac “Ode to a Dying People” from On My Own. The music video includes relatively clear images from two live performances.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwT75Afi55w&NR=1 [7] [6:35]

An audience member shot this live video [8] [3:54] of Saga performing “One Nation Arise” from On My Own in Hungary in 2011, but as usual the audio is extremely poor.

There are a handful of other live clips available. The most notable of them is a raw, undated video called Saga Live in Finland that is indispensable for understanding both the performer and the explicitly (not implicitly) white, radical social milieu she rose out of. And yes, that is the f-word she speaks at the beginning.

Note that in Live in Finland the Swedish singer communicates with her drunk, male, Finnish skinhead audience in English.

Swedish is an Indo-European (Germanic) tongue, Finnish a member of the Finno-Ugric subgroup of the non-Indo-European Uralic language family. (This does not mean that Finns are non-white or “less white.”) To what extent Swedish and Finnish are mutually intelligible I don’t know. But Swedish is a co-official language in Finland, where ethnic Swedes make up about 6 percent of the population.

Saga Live in Finland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7q8564e5Yc&feature=related [9] [3:22]

You probably can’t decipher the lyrics, but the Skrewdriver song looks forward to white victory won:

Hail the New Dawn

From My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volume 2

(Full lyrics from the clear studio recording [10], not the Finnish performance 3:59)

Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!

Comrades, the voices of the dead battalions
Of those who fell, that Europe might be great
Join their song, for they still march in spirit with us
And urge us on that we gain the national state

Chorus:
The streets are still, the final battle has ended
Flushed with the fight, we proudly hail the dawn
See over the streets, the White man’s emblem is waving
Triumphant standards of a race reborn

Blood of our blood, spirit of our spirit
Sprung from that soil, for whose sake they bled
Against the vested powers, Red front, and massed reaction
We lead the fight for the freedom and for bread

[Repeat Chorus]

Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!

People who we trusted, again have let us down
Jailing men of this nation for fighting for their land
We will fight forever, until the end releases us
Never gonna submit to the six point master plan [changed from “Jewish master plan” in Skrewdriver’s 1983 original]

[Repeat Chorus]

Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail!

In addition to the two Symphony of Sorrow albums, the three Skrewdriver cover albums, the Swedish-language Pro Patria, and On My Own, Saga has released two live performance discs containing selections of her songs: Saga: Live & Kicking [11] (2000), recorded at Midgård’s Ian Stuart Memorial Concert in 2000, and Comrades Night Live [12] (2010).

The latter album was recorded “last year at a secret location in the snow-covered heartland of Sweden, [where] 175 delegates from Sweden and beyond gathered to discuss the plight of our people in their homelands and how to move forward in these dark days.” It includes “the bonus out-take, ‘The Snow Fell’ in which Saga forgets the lyrics—if ever you wanted proof it [was] being recorded live!”

Finally, here’s one more song to close this brief introduction to Saga.

Tomorrow is Always Too Late

From My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volume 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di4M_Pwwz7k [13] [3:30]

You tell me what you’d like to do, but I don’t want to know
My only interest is today, and where we want to go
We need the people to awake, and fight for us right now
‘Cause we will never be enslaved by the Zionist master plan

Chorus:
Tomorrow is always too late
We should never sit around and wait
Tomorrow is always too late
Get out there and do something today

Our enemies are capitalists, communists as well
Both these forms of evil are ringing our death bell
We salute the troops of yesterday, who fought the Marxist plague
We will carry on your fight as the White men of today

[Repeat Chorus]

We must remain true to our cause, for comrades thrown in jail
For their sake and sacrifice, we must never fail
For Crane and Pearce and Kuehnen too, and Eriksson as well
For the lonely man in Spandau, our efforts they must tell

Tomorrow is always too late
Tomorrow is always too late
Tomorrow is always too late

Tomorrow is always too late
We should never sit around and wait
Tomorrow is always too late
Go out there and do something today

Buy Saga’s albums from:

Her website: This is Saga [14] (3 albums only: Comrades Night Live, On My Own, and Pro Patria III)

Her label, Midgård Records [15] (all)

Discography as Member of Symphony of Sorrow

Paradise Lost (1999) (SoS’s debut album)

[16]

Tracks:

Blood Destiny
For the Love of Life
Freedom [17] [2:59]
The Camp of the Saints
War Cry [18] [2:53]
Beyond Good and Evil
The Final Outpost
The Iron Dream [19] [3:04]
Paradise Lost
King of the Kings

Symphony of Hatred (2005)

[20]

Tracks:

Intro
Symphony of Hatred [21] [4:48]
Racial Opus [22] [4:39]
Runes
I Believe In You
You
Brand New Day
Fire In Your Heart
Someday
Integration [23] [2:56]
Never March Alone
Outro

Discography as Saga

Saga: Live & Kicking (2000)

[24]

Tracks:

Showdown
Patriot
Our Pride is Our Loyalty
Europe Awake
Our Time Will Come
Wasted Life
Gone With the Breeze
Freedom (What Freedom?)
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
Voice of Britain
Hail the New Dawn
After the Fire
Son of Britain

My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volume 1 (2000)

[25]

"My Tribute to Skrewdriver," Volume 1 (right) & Volume 2 (left) (2000)

Tracks:

Son of Britain [Non-Skrewdriver song, a tribute to Ian Stuart]
Tomorrow Belongs to Me [26] [3:21]
Triumph of the Will
Rising
Hail Victory
Where Has Justice Gone?
Klansman Song [27] [2:19]
Land of Ice
Our Time Will Come
Showdown
Mr. 9 to 5 [28] [2:01]
46 Years [Rudolf Hess]
Europe Awake [29] [3:10]
Patriot [30] [3:05]
Gone With the Breeze [Robert Mathews]

My Tribute to Skrewdriver Volume 2 (2000)

Tracks:

Voice of Britain
Strikeforce [South Africa]
European Dream [31] [2:35]
Red Flags are Burning
Thunder in the Cities
Free My Land [32] [4:14; replaces Skrewdriver’s lyrics “run by Jews” with “run by who”]
The Strong Survive
Suddenly
Prisoner of Peace [Rudolf Hess]
Tomorrow is Always Too Late [13] [3:30]
Wasted Life
Hail the New Dawn
Searching
Land on Fire
The Road to Valhalla [5] [2:55]

[33]

Tracks:

Son of Britain [Non-Skrewdriver song, a tribute to Ian Stuart]
Phoenix Rising
Green Fields of France
Suddenly
Freedom (What Freedom) [34] [3:26]
Sleep Well My Brother
Europe on My Mind [35] [3:20]
The Snow Fell [36] [4:32; Germans on the Eastern Front]
Another Prayer for the Dying [about victims of anti-white violence]
Night Trains [Not about Jews being loaded onto cattle cars: a tribute to German soldiers departing for the Eastern Front!]
Tomorrow Belongs to Me

Midgård — Pro Patria III (2003)

[37]

Tracks (Swedish only):

Valkyrian [38] [The Valkyrie 3:31]
Yttrandefrihet [Free Speech]
Rid Stolte Krigare [Ride Proud Warrior]
Krigarens Själ [39] [Warrior’s Honor 3:23]
Röster
Evig Trohet [40] [Loyalty Forever 4:22]
Frihetens Fana [The Banner of Freedom]
Drömmarnas Stig [41] [Dreams Come 6:40]
Allt Är slut [It’s All Over]

On My Own (2007)

[42]

Tracks:

One Nation Arise [43] [4:23]
Hypocrite
On My Own
These Moments [Tribute to her 2nd child, a daughter]
Black Bannered Legion
Stay Alive
Sick ‘n’ Tired
Ode to a Dying People
The Nation’s Fate
Goodbye David Lane [44] [4:29; sung to Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”]

Comrades Night Live (2010)

[45]

Tracks:

Arise [46] [3:57]
Tomorrow Belongs To Me
Hypocrite
Hail the New Dawn
These Moments
On My Own
Kinsland [47] [3:43]
Stay Alive
Racial Opus [48] [3:43; non-metal version, with piano, re-worked from Symphony of Sorrow]
Ode to a Dying People
One Nation Arise
Behind Blue Eyes
Sick ‘n’ Tired [49] [4:22]
The Snow Fell Bonus Track