“Dragonborn” is the theme song for the soundtrack of the 2011 role-playing video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from Bethesda Softworks, composed by the American composer Jeremy Soule. The composition is Nordic-influenced classical in style and features a chorus singing lyrics in a fictional language, Dovahzul, that was created by Emil Pagliarulo for the game. “Dragonborn” was lauded by critics and audiences alike. It is featured in orchestral performances and spawned numerous covers, many of which combine the song with an in-game, English-language composition “The Dragonborn Comes”. One such cover, by Lindsey Stirling and Peter Hollens, holds the Guinness World Record for most viewed cover version of a video game soundtrack.
The director of Skyrim, Todd Howard, envisaged the game’s theme song to be performed by a choir of chanting “babarians”. Emil Pagliarulo, the game writer, invented a fictional dragon language, Dovahzul, for the choir to sing in unison. Pagliarulo, as requested by Howard, designed the language in such a way that the lyrics rhyme will not only rhyme in Dovahzul but also when translated into English. The lyrics praise the Dragonborn (the customizable player character), who is prophesied to save Tamriel from the dragons using the dragons’ own shouts. The song also recounts the return of the great dragon Alduin and the climactic final battle which banishes him forever.
Thirty singers composed the choir. Multiple recordings of the choir were layered over each other to achieve the sonic impression of over one hundred voices. Soule incorporated motifs from some of his compositions for previous Elder Scrolls on “Dragonborn”. The song heavily borrows from “Nerevar Rising”, the theme for Morrowind, to the extent where portions of “Dragonborn” are essentially an orchestral and choral arrangement of “Nerevar Rising” rather than merely a variation on it, as well as borrowing elements from music in Oblivion. The opening combines rhythm from taiko drums with a string section and male choral chants. Horns then join and the choir assists in driving the melody. The harmonies from brass and strings give the melody a darker tone prior to a trumpet fanfare. At 2:09, the main melody is reprised, setting up for the dragonborn melody.
In Kyle E. Miller’s review of the game soundtrack, he found “Dragonborn” to be the most memorable and felt it “accurately establishes and conveys the tone of Skyrim before the player ever sees the world.” Michiel Kamp and Mark Sweeney in “Musical Landscapes in Skyrim“, compare Soule’s soundtrack to 19th century interest in landscapes. According to them, Carl Dahlaus’s concepts of Naturklang which he used explain the music of Edvard Grieg also apply to Soule’s work on Skyrim, including “Dragonborn”.
Naturklang is a sense of stasis that paradoxically contains an inner drive from ostinatos and a proto-mininalist rhythmic repetition of “cells” and Klangfläche is a “sound-sheet” which is externally static yet full of constant motion from rhythm and unresolved harmonic notes (seconds and fourths) preventing the music from becoming “dull and lifeless”. In “Dragonborn”, rhythmic string ostinatos in the “A” sections of the track exhibit Naturklang and the wash of string harmony in the “B” sections exhibit Klangfläche. The woodwinds playing in the “B” sections are comparable to other static pieces such as the bird calls in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 or the “Forest Murmurs” sequence in Wagner’s Siegfried.
