Kvikne is a small village in central Norway, in the Øterdalen valley. The book gives it two distinct roles: it was Bård Eithun’s childhood home before he entered the Black Metal underground, and it was where Varg Vikernes was arrested in connection with the murder of Øystein Aarseth. The accounts do not suggest that these events were connected to one another; together, they show how the village enters the narrative through separate lives and episodes.

Childhood and departure

Eithun says he grew up in Kvikne and lived there until he was 15 or 16. He then moved to Lillehammer, where he spent two years, before moving to Oslo for his final year away from the village. This sequence makes Kvikne the starting point of his geographic trajectory, but not the place where the book locates his first direct contact with the underground scene.

From the village to the scene

Eithun dates his correspondence with Mayhem and Øystein Aarseth to 1987. He describes writing letters, receiving magazines, and gradually getting to know people as the means by which he became part of the scene. By then his life had moved through Lillehammer and Oslo: he worked in Aarseth’s shop and, for the last half of that year, lived in an apartment in the same building. Kvikne therefore belongs to the account of his early life, while the relationships and activity that brought him into the scene are associated with the cities he moved to afterward.

A later police encounter

Kvikne appears again in Vikernes’s account of his arrest. He says police approached him while he was drinking with other people outside a local motel; they wanted to speak with him and had an arrest order, as well as permission to search his apartment. He recalls waking at a police station in Oslo and understanding that he had been arrested over Aarseth’s murder. The arrest thus links Kvikne to the opening of a particular police sequence: Vikernes was taken from the village to Oslo, where he was questioned that afternoon.