“Det som engang var”

“Det som engang var” is a fourteen-minute composition by Burzum, written in the spring of 1992 and heard by the reviewer on the CD Hvis lyset tar oss. The account singles it out as the project’s most beautiful and powerful work, while emphasizing the tension at its center: grimness and blazing beauty carried by a sound described as symphonic violence.

Composition and Reception

The song’s unusual duration gives its force room to accumulate rather than pass as a brief burst. The reviewer says its impact remains undiminished, returning to the composition as an experience of dark, fateful intensity. That appraisal is personal, but the details supporting it are concrete: the fourteen-minute span, the expansive musical character, and the contrast between beauty and violence.

Voice and Language

Varg Vikernes’s vocal is characterized as a hair-raising scream directed toward the heavens, turning the song into what the reviewer calls an expressionistic shriek-opera. Its words are described as probably incomprehensible even to Norwegians. The account thus places vocal expression ahead of easy lyrical comprehension: the voice gives the piece its stark force even when its language remains difficult to follow.

The Album’s Imagined Landscape

The same CD also contains “Tomhet,” another unusually long piece that the reviewer finds compelling. It is heard as a soundtrack to an imagined Norway, shaped by silence and storm, solitude and natural violence. The comparison helps locate “Det som engang var” within an aesthetic of expansive duration and dark atmosphere, while the account separately notes that Burzum’s songs address dreams, visions, the past, light and darkness, winter, and war. Nordic mythological ideas, it adds, are not directly present in the lyrics, though they are more explicit in Varg Vikernes’s interviews and recent writing.