Garmarna playes old medival songs with modern influences as well as swedish traditional music (as in swedish "folkmusik"). They use a mixture of modern and old instruments, as in other modern swedish bands like Hedningarna and Hoven Droven.

The Beginning

The band started 1990 with Gotte Ringqvist, Stefan Brisland-Ferner and Rickard Westman saw a novell settings of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Struck by the music in the play (by Olov Johansson), they started a band and got the name just befor the first gig. Two years later they was invited to swedens largest festival, in Hultsfred.
To that gig they needed a drummer, and Jens Höglin joind the band. In that audience was Emma Härdelin listening to the band. Also Mats Hammerman, president of Mass Production. He got so impressed by the band, that he offered the band to record a CD. When they was in the studio, they felt they needed a femal vocal singer, so they aske Emma to help out. And later see was part of the band, without knowing it herself. The EP "Garmarna" made good press, and they started to touring in sweden.

About Recordings

There are releases from three different companies, Massproduktion in Sweden, NorthSide in USA and Westpark in Germany. That can make some confussion about different albums that seems to have same name and CD covers.

For example has Vittrad from Mass Production 13 tracks and Vittrad from NorthSide 14 tracks. Garmarna from Mass Production is an EP from 1993 and Garmarna from NorthSide a CD released from 2003. Other differences are name of tracks. CD:s from Mass Productoin don't have translations of there names, those from NorthSide have them translated.

So please be carfull when you change things here. And when you have checked carfully, think that someone might have done wrong in the past with this. Information here could actually be wrong on this.