The Øystein Aarseth Homicide was a murder for which Varg Vikernes was convicted and which he continued to describe as a necessary, pre-emptive act. Its significance in the account extends beyond the killing itself: competing explanations of what happened expose a sharp divide between Vikernes’s self-justification and the legal finding, while the crime became part of the violent reputation and public mythology of Norwegian Black Metal.

Scene and public image

The killing emerged within a Black Metal milieu in which appearance, provocation, and transgression were increasingly bound together. Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous, cultivated a militantly sinister image for Mayhem and sought to spread evil to a wider audience. The group’s performances were rare, but they could make its image tangible: the 1990 Sarpsborg concert became legendary, and a bootleg release reproduced an image of Dead’s suicide on its cover. This material concerns the scene’s image-making, not the circumstances of Aarseth’s later murder; it helps explain the atmosphere in which criminal acts and their representations could acquire cultural force.

The book also stresses that the scene was not simply a coordinated organization. Asked whether he had been a ringleader in the church-burning activity, Vikernes denied that there was an organization, while describing himself as the person who started it and identifying the Fantoft Stave Church fire as the event that set off the wider episode. That account is about the arsons, not a direct explanation of Aarseth’s death. Read together, however, these passages show how the scene’s public identity was assembled from individual acts, claims of leadership, and a reputation for defying ordinary limits.

The killing and the accounts of its planning

At Vikernes’s trial, testimony later described Aarseth’s killing as premeditated. According to that testimony, Vikernes had two accomplices: Snorre Westvold Ruch, also known as Blackthorn and a member of Bård Eithun’s band Thorns, and another friend in Bergen. Ruch accompanied Vikernes on a seven-hour drive to Oslo that night; the other friend remained at Vikernes’s apartment in Bergen. These details place the killing within a plan involving more than the two men at its center, but the evidence presented here does not describe the attack itself.

Vikernes offered a different account of why he acted. He said he had been told Aarseth intended to use a stun gun, tie him up, and torture him to death. He also recalled receiving a friendly, positive letter from Aarseth while believing that Aarseth was discussing how to get rid of him with someone else. Vikernes presented that contradiction as evidence of a threat concealed behind apparent kindness. These are his claims about what he believed and had heard; the account does not establish that the alleged plan existed.

In describing the confrontation, Vikernes said Aarseth ran out, called for help, and rang neighbors’ doorbells. Vikernes interpreted this as cowardice rather than as a reason to stop. He said he believed Aarseth would eventually kill him, and argued that he could kill him then or wait for Aarseth to try. His explanation turns fear of a possible future attack into a rationale for killing in the present. It is a self-defence narrative, not an independent confirmation of the threat he described.

Justification and conviction

Vikernes framed his conduct through an uncompromising rule of reciprocal honor. He said he would treat someone honorably if he expected honor in return, but that he had no reason to show mercy to a person he believed would bind and shoot him. The stated principle makes his account depend on his own judgment of Aarseth’s intentions: once he had decided that Aarseth posed a lethal threat, he treated violence as justified retaliation rather than as an act requiring restraint.

The legal outcome was different from Vikernes’s preferred description. He was convicted of murdering Euronymous, while maintaining that the killing was manslaughter committed in self-defence. The book notes that he was also found guilty of stealing 150 kilograms of explosives, which had been stored in his apartment when he was arrested. That theft conviction is separate from the homicide, but it contributes to the portrait of a criminal history that the author connects with the older Germanic idea of the outlaw. The distinction matters: Vikernes’s account insists on necessity, whereas the conviction fixes the act as murder.

Reputation, aftermath, and meaning

The homicide was part of a wider period of violence associated with the Black Metal scene. An account of events from 1991 to 1993 records assaults and stabbings, a rape, and two murders. These broader crimes do not explain Aarseth’s killing, but they situate it in a period when attacks on people and property were increasingly discussed alongside the scene’s claims of evil and its attacks on Christian institutions.

Media attention helped shape how that period was understood. One assessment in the book says that mass coverage became valuable to Vikernes in building street credibility and a near-mythological public image. It also argues that coverage intensified the internal struggle to become the scene’s dominant personality, even though the scene had its own dynamics independent of outside attention. In this interpretation, the murder was both a crime and a powerful element in a reputation formed through actions, public claims, and their circulation.

A later reflection by Garm calls Vikernes a neo-Viking martyr and a prophet of the ego who had paradoxically become a Jesus-like figure for his own ideals. Garm expresses respect for Vikernes’s conviction and courage while questioning his sense of reality. The judgment captures a tension running through the accounts of the killing: Vikernes presents himself as acting decisively against an imminent threat, yet that self-image is inseparable from the notoriety and isolation that followed. Even years later, he said that regretting Aarseth’s death would mean regretting his own survival. The event thus remains unresolved at the level of his explanation, but not in its legal consequence: Vikernes was convicted of murder, and continued to defend the act as necessary.