Heavy metal is often seen as primal and unrefined. But Iron Maiden’s albums are like the Western literary canon in musical form.
You can read Alfred Tennyson. There’s nothing wrong with reading Tennyson. You can grab a crinkly anthology page, take on The Charge of the Light Brigade from 1854, and learn about the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War, where five British regiments perished in a suicide charge against Russian artillery positions.
As mentioned, reading Tennyson is perfectly fine. Or you can get the entire lesson in four minutes—set to one of rock history’s most agile riffs—when Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson stands on stage in a period-accurate red uniform jacket, microphone in one hand and the Union Jack in the other.
Tennyson gives you the obituary from God’s perspective; Iron Maiden puts you in the saddle. The song The Trooper doesn’t describe the charge—it is the charge: the verse feet are driven into a galloping frenzy by Steve Harris’s bassline while Dickinson howls:
"The smell of acrid smoke and horses' breath
As I plunge on into certain death"
Steve Harris was originally an electrician from the rougher parts of northeast London. But with a bass guitar slung over his shoulder, he becomes something else—a time-traveling librarian with a taste for bloodshed, drama, and theology.
He is Iron Maiden’s founder and primary songwriter and, I dare say, has done more for men’s education worldwide than most reading challenges and public education campaigns.
I say this as one of those millions of men.
Harris is one half of the duo that forms the band’s soul—the other half is Bruce Dickinson. A vocal acrobat with an octave-climbing range, the inner life of a poet, and a résumé fit for a Bond villain: he’s an Olympic-level fencer, author of satirical novels, and licensed to fly jumbo jets.
Together, they turn education into an experience. The pressure wave from the amplifiers blows the dust off all course literature. Call it power pedagogy. They’ve written songs based on works by Umberto Eco, Joseph Conrad, C.S. Lewis, William Golding, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells—to name just a few. Virtually the entire (male-dominated) Western literary canon is represented in the band’s discography.
“People generally seem to think that heavy metal is dumb music only about sex, booze, and fighting, but metal lyrics often have literary references. Tolkien above all, who has appeared in everything from Black Sabbath to Swedish Amon Amarth. And Greek and Norse mythology, especially in more extreme metal.”
So says Ika Johannesson, author of the metal book Blod Eld Död and curator of the current exhibition Total Metal at Kulturhuset in Stockholm.
Iron Maiden’s approach is thus not unique. But few bands have done it with the same persistence, passion, longevity, breadth, and ambition.
The most famous example is the nearly 14-minute-long Rime of the Ancient Mariner, based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem from 1798. It was released on the album Powerslave in 1984.
That a heavy metal band would embrace a 200-year-old poem by a key figure of British Romanticism is, on paper, a terrible target audience analysis—but in your headphones, it feels completely natural.
The poem’s swaying, singing rhythms and rhymes are made to be screamed into eternity and immortality. Not to mention the verses’ gothic imagery of abandoned shipwrecks, slimy beasts, and Death playing dice for sailors’ souls.
Harris remembered the poem from his school textbook and forged it in leather and lycra; the song is often described as his craft masterpiece, with many tempo and style changes, including a long recitation of the original poem in the song’s middle section.
The beauty is that you don’t need to know Coleridge to be captivated by the music. There’s no elitism here—rather, a reward for the already initiated. A secret handshake between the band, the listener, and the poet.
This is what makes Iron Maiden’s educational stance so subversive. While academics and politicians argue over reading lists and cultural canons, the band uses pop culture as a gateway to the guarded, exalted, and overly revered.
It’s a stress test that proves literature is neither fragile nor trapped in time. It withstands high decibel levels and distorted guitars. It can be forged through 14 minutes of metal and come out the other side alive—perhaps even stronger.
The band has a clear desire to act as ambassadors of learning. They often talk about sparking curiosity in their audience to seek out the literary originals. Dickinson frequently recites poets and bards from the stage in his interludes—like from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar before launching into The Evil That Men Do.
“As a trained teacher in civics and history for upper secondary and high school, I know how effective it is to anchor parts of teaching in pop culture references. It’s a way to capture students’ interest.”
So says Kalle Bäck, a Christian Democrat local politician in Gothenburg. He has seen Iron Maiden live about a hundred times; this summer alone, he has tickets for ten shows.
His personal favorite among the band’s literary songs is Brave New World from the 2000 comeback album of the same name. The lyrics are inspired by Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. The song made Bäck read the book in English during high school and later give a class presentation on it and the author.
“It’s a dystopia about how interpersonal relationships are replaced by a drug, people are divided into groups to serve their purposes, and the state has absolute control. The song’s melancholy fits perfectly with this grim theme and makes you reflect on what’s important in life and that freedom should not be taken for granted.”
I remember a TV interview with Bruce Dickinson—possibly on SVT—about twenty-five years ago. The details are blurry, but his line stuck with me. He was asked why their lyrics dwell in the escapist and fantastical. “If you grow up on the street, you already know how hard it is,” he explained. “You don’t need someone to tell you about that life.”
On the first two albums, when Paul Di’Anno was the singer, the lyrics still dealt with urban misery. There are songs about prostitution and flashers, and on the cover of the 1980 debut, the band’s zombie mascot Eddie appears with scruffy punk-bleached hair, twitchy-eyed in front of a dimly lit brick wall.
Since then, the band has moved beyond the crude image of the heavy metal listener as a societal outcast: Iron Maiden has a global audience that transcends class and generational boundaries. That didn’t stop them from being influenced by British working-class literature on the 1986 album Somewhere in Time, particularly Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, about an angry young man facing a bleak horizon in Nottingham.
What truly makes Iron Maiden shine is class friction—the energy that arises when East End brick meets ivory tower. Even though Dickinson later attended boarding school and university thanks to his parents’ class mobility, he grew up with his grandfather in a British coal district. The others were shaped by East London’s soot, swearing, and muscular vowels. They still love their football and their pints. But they saw literature as locked behind the doors of academia. So they kicked them in—they don’t just recite Coleridge, they reclaim him.
Perhaps it’s that hunger and thirst for revenge that still drives them, fifty years later, to tirelessly travel the world and through literary history. In a time when culture is sometimes more about status than substance, they remind us of something essential: that education is not a belonging, but a movement. And that knowledge sometimes resonates best in E minor.
