Ásatrú faith

Ásatrú faith is the modern revival and reconstruction of the religious beliefs of the Norse and Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe. The term means loyalty to the Æsir, the pre-Christian Nordic gods. In the account, this revival becomes more than a religious reference within Scandinavian Black Metal: it offers musicians and listeners an ancestral mythology through which to challenge Christianity, shape identity, and recast the past as a force in contemporary life. The book also stresses that Black Metal’s use of heathen imagery should not be confused with the beliefs or organizations of heathen practitioners generally.

Definition and religious revival

Ásatrú is presented as a modern name for the revival and reconstruction of older Norse and Teutonic religious beliefs, not as proof that contemporary practice has continued unchanged from the past. Its central appeal in the book’s account lies in the idea of allegiance to the Æsir and in the recovery of a pre-Christian religious inheritance. Christianity, by contrast, is often regarded by adherents as an alien religion imposed on their ancestors under threat of death. That opposition gives heathen revival a historical and political charge as well as a spiritual one.

The revival described in the book was not confined to musicians. Stephen McNallen became interested in heathen Norse religion in the late 1960s, composed rituals for the Norse and Germanic gods, and founded the Viking Brotherhood, which later evolved into the Ásatrú Free Assembly. Similar groups appeared independently in England, Iceland, and on the east coast of the United States. In Norway and Sweden, interest in ancestral religion also grew: Draupnir gained recognition from the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization, while Bifrost and other groups held regular gatherings that included blot, or symbolic sacrifice to the old deities.

Bathory and the musical turn

The book locates a decisive change in the music of Bathory. The band’s early records drew on Satanism and black magic, but Quorthon later described that material as bound up with youthful rebellion and horror-story imaginings. As the records developed, the music slowed, the songs became more elaborate, and the lyrics gained ambiguity. With Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, Bathory turned from what the book calls the childish and foreign Satanism of its early inspiration toward the heathen mythology of its own forebears.

The album’s imagery made that turn visible. Its cover used a romantic painting of the Oskorei, or The Wild Hunt, with the Norse god Thor and a host of mounted figures crossing the sky. The opening instrumental evokes Odin riding Sleipnir, while the final song invokes the Norse gods. The music retained its raw aggression but placed it in more arranged songs, with clearer vocals and more considered lyrics. In the book’s interpretation, this was a powerful combination: inherited myth supplied a new symbolic world without displacing the force that had defined the band’s earlier sound.

Bathory pursued the heathen perspective more personally on Hammerheart, released in 1990. Its long songs, clearly sung vocals, choral passages, and acknowledgment of Richard Wagner in the credits accompanied an attempt to imagine the outlook of a practitioner of Ásatrú in the Viking Age. The cover, A Viking’s Last Journey, showed a nobleman’s ship burial. The book sets that romantic image against the later actions of some Norwegian fans, who would take up real firebrands in what it describes as a neo-Viking fantasy: an example of mythic imagery crossing into real-world conduct.

The final record in Bathory’s Ásatrú trilogy, Twilight of the Gods, appeared in 1991 and placed still greater emphasis on European classical composition. Its lyrics drew on Nietzsche’s warnings about contemporary spiritual decline. The song Under the Runes also contained veiled references to German SS divisions from the Second World War; Quorthon acknowledged that he intended the references to provoke. He framed the song’s argument as a demand that Sweden’s pre-Christian gods and history be given a place in public discussion. The heathen turn therefore did not carry a single, uncomplicated meaning: it combined ancestral religious claims, cultural provocation, and imagery with far-right associations.

Ancestral identity and Black Metal

The book treats the appeal to ancestral archetypes as a key inheritance from Bathory. The band’s first six albums, in its account, assembled a repertoire that later Scandinavian Black Metal could draw upon: raw cacophony and orchestral grandeur, Satanic excess and Viking heathenism, European cultural references and deliberate flirtation with fascist and National Socialist iconography. The movement toward Ásatrú was thus not simply a change in lyrical subject. It helped establish a way of treating music, historical memory, and inherited identity as parts of one expressive project.

Varg Vikernes gave that project an especially explicit interpretation. He described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and presented the Norse gods not merely as figures in stories but as archetypes belonging to the Northern race. In his account, heathen belief expressed a people’s nature and connection to forebears; publicizing his interpretation was meant to awaken that inheritance in others. He also invoked Odin when explaining the purpose he assigned to the church burnings. These statements show how Vikernes joined religious language to political identity and destructive action; they record his own framing, not evidence that all Ásatrú practitioners shared his aims or that the faith itself entailed them.

The book further notes that interest in Viking strength and barbarism appeared in Black Metal before Nordic mythology became a prominent theme for many bands and personalities. The cover of Blood Fire Death had already placed The Wild Hunt in the scene’s visual vocabulary. Later heathen rhetoric could make those images seem like expressions of a continuous ancestral tradition, though the account presents their adoption as a modern cultural and musical development, not as proof of uninterrupted historical practice.

Boundaries between heathen practice and the scene

The distinction between Ásatrú organizations and Black Metal is explicit. The book states that there was no specific connection between Nordic religious practitioners and the Black Metal scene. Public assumptions that the groups belonged together created serious difficulties for heathen organizations, which had to explain their lack of common ground with both Black Metal and Satanism. Vikernes’s frequent public statements about his own heathen beliefs made that separation harder to communicate, despite the absence of an organizational link.

Ásatrú consequently occupies two different positions in the account. For religious groups such as Draupnir and Bifrost, it is a contemporary religious practice with gatherings and symbolic offerings. Within the Black Metal story, it also becomes a vocabulary for ancestral memory, opposition to Christianity, and claims about identity—sometimes entangled with provocative or extremist politics. Keeping those uses distinct clarifies the book’s central point: heathen imagery became influential in Black Metal, but its circulation in the scene neither defines Ásatrú as a whole nor makes independent practitioners responsible for the scene’s actions.