The Swedish world-music group Hedningarna was successful during the 1990s, combining Scandinavian traditional music with an energetic, drone-based “mystical” sound. Combined with a penchant for theatrics, the band developed an image of primal “nordic-ness” which drew a large following. Indeed, the name Hedningarna translates as “the heathens.” This Nordic image was always tongue in cheek and was combined with a progressive and inclusive attitude. Throughout the band’s career, they would consistently use traditional acoustic “folk” instruments, with the acoustic sound typically amplified and modified. One of the band’s instruments was invented and crafted by Anders Norudde, one of the founding members of Hedningarna. While being a plucked instrument, the mora-oud combined the wooden body of a traditional mora-harp—a medieval style keyed fiddle (Ternhag 2006)—and a fretless lute neck. In this paper, we explore the mora-oud and how its inception and development was shaped by the Swedish folk/world music scene of the 1990s, as well as how it connects to larger discourses of authenticity, cultural appropriation (Matthes 2016) and cosmopolitanism (Stokes 2008). An instrument such as this, when explored by traditional Scandinavian musicians as well as when encountered by migrants from for example the Middle East, seems to offer a horizon of possibilities: a merging of musical and expressive histories, even if the merging in this case is “imaginary.” The material for the paper consists primarily of interviews with musician and luthier Anders Norudde and autoethnographic descriptions by Hållbus Totte Mattsson (one of the founding members of Hedningarna), but also newspaper articles, phonograms and recordings.