Odin

Odin is the one-eyed Norse ruler of the dead, war, wisdom, magic, and poetry who becomes a recurring mythic and ideological figure in the book’s account of Black Metal. His importance lies not only in the old stories attributed to him, but in the way musicians and political writers use him: first as an alternative to imported Christian imagery, then as a model of sacrifice and authority, and finally as a symbol enlisted in modern racial and nationalist claims. The book follows that transformation without treating every invocation as equivalent: Odin can be a figure in a song, an ancestral ideal, a political emblem, or the leader of a folkloric host of dead riders.

Mythic Identity and Heathen Revival

The book presents Odin as a principal figure of Norse heathen mythology and, in one account, as the father of the Norse heathen gods. He rides through the heavens on the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, and the traditions associated with him gather together warfare and death with wisdom, magic, and poetry. This combination makes him more than a martial deity: he can represent knowledge won through danger and loss as well as command over the dead and the battlefield.

That breadth became especially consequential when Black Metal began turning away from the Satanic horror imagery of its early years. Bathory’s 1988 album Blood Fire Death opens with the instrumental Odens Ride Over Nordland, which evokes Odin crossing the sky on Sleipnir. Its cover instead depicts the Wild Hunt, with Valkyries riding above a battlefield and Thor at the center of the image. The record thus places Odin within a larger heathen world rather than making him the sole subject of its imagery. In the book’s account, the change helped establish ancestral myth as a durable source for the genre: the musicians could draw on a religious and folkloric inheritance imagined as their own, rather than simply borrowing the transgressive symbols of Satanism.

Bathory’s later Hammerheart developed this turn toward the past through an epic musical form and a sustained engagement with the imagined outlook of a Viking Age practitioner of the Ásatrú faith. The album’s long songs, clearly sung vocals, and choral passages accompany cover art depicting a Viking ship burial. The book notes the irony that some Norwegian listeners would later take firebrands into real life, translating romantic Viking imagery into destructive acts. Odin’s significance in this sequence is therefore partly aesthetic: myth gave Black Metal a powerful language of ancestry, struggle, and opposition to Christianity, but that language could also cross from representation into political or physical action.

Vikernes and the Claim of an Odinic Past

Varg Vikernes made Odin central to his account of himself and of Burzum. While on trial, he described himself as a worshipper of Odin, a god of war and death, and said that Burzum existed exclusively for him. The book sets this declaration against Vikernes’s earlier Satanist statements and his involvement in Black Metal. After his arrest in the latter half of 1993, Vikernes increasingly presented his outlook as heathen rather than Satanist, downplaying what he called the scene’s childish devotion to evil for its own sake. The change was also a change in narrative: he represented Odin as the deeper allegiance that had supposedly been present all along.

Vikernes supported that retrospective reading by identifying Odinic themes in songs written between 1990 and 1992. He pointed to War as a celebration of dying in battle, read Lost Wisdom as heathen, and connected Det som engang var to the dead who drowned on Viking sea raids. He also described En ring til aa herske through Germanic people and Draupnir, Odin’s ring, and interpreted Han some reiste as a song about Odin hanging himself as a sacrifice to himself. In his account, Stemmen fra taarnet evokes a summons from Odin’s throne, while Inn i slottet fra droemmen concerns the journey to Valhalla. He acknowledged only one title as Satanic, Dominus Sathanas. The book observes that the public image of Vikernes as a Satanist drew heavily on his earlier pronouncements and his association with Black Metal, so his later inventory of songs also worked as a deliberate argument over how his past should be understood.

The name Burzum supplied another turn in that argument. Vikernes explained it as a Tolkien-derived fictional word meaning much night or darkness, which he opposed to the light and goodness claimed by democracy. Yet he also insisted that Burzum’s darkness was the light of Odin. Darkness, in this formulation, does not simply oppose light; it becomes the sign of a different religious and political allegiance. The book describes this as part of Vikernes’s self-mythologizing: he selectively emphasized details that made his earlier work appear to anticipate his later heathen identity, while the evidence of his previous Satanist presentation remained part of the account.

Odin as a Model of Sacrifice and Leadership

Vikernes turned the god into a practical model for political leadership. In Vargsmål, he described himself as the chieftain of a tribe establishing a Norwegian Heathen Front and argued that such a leader had to act like Odin. His examples emphasized the costs and risks attached to the god’s pursuit of power and knowledge: Odin accepts dishonor, exposes himself to danger, sacrifices an eye for wisdom, hangs himself from Yggdrasil, and seeks counsel from the past in order to understand the future. Vikernes presented these episodes not as remote mythic incidents but as obligations that should shape his own conduct as a chieftain.

His account of authority also rejected the conventional language of democracy. He contrasted a Viking model, in which followers could abandon a chieftain they no longer supported, with what he called the rule of the scum in contemporary politics. He invoked King Olav as an example of a ruler whom people had tried to reject because he sought to Christianize them. In this political framing, Odin’s authority did not mean passive obedience: it became a claim to leadership grounded in a supposedly ancestral way of life, as well as a license for demanding hardship and risk from the leader himself.

Archetype, Race, and Political Appropriation

A different use of Odin appears in material associated with Absurd. There, the Germanic gods are described not simply as supernatural beings but as archetypes rooted in collective inheritance. The text proposes DNA as the seat of a collective subconscious, while also entertaining an enduring force-field that projects archetypes into human souls. Within that scheme, Donar represents the armed German peasant, while Wotan—the name used there for Odin—represents a sorcerer-king associated with occult knowledge, communication with animals, necromancy, the return of the dead, and leadership of the Wild Hunt. The archetype offers a way to present mythology as an ethic and model of life rather than as decorative folklore.

The same material connects Germanic mythology to a racial-nationalist worldview. It treats myth as an inheritance belonging to a particular people, links National Socialism to the Wotan archetype through an interpretation associated with Carl Gustav Jung, and contrasts an idealized Aryan will with a supposedly destructive Semitic will. These are claims made by the writers, not neutral descriptions of Odin or of Germanic history. The book shows how the figure’s flexibility made such appropriation possible: Odin could serve as a god in a religious revival, an archetype in a theory of collective psychology, and a symbolic warrant for extremist politics.

Absurd also framed Black Metal as music of a coming New Aeon and the return of Wotan, contrasting the underground with a commercial music business it condemned. Its ideal of youth borrowed language of hardness, fearlessness, and domination, and the band presented its sinister style as part of a future political and spiritual order. In this context, Odin’s return is not a narrated supernatural event. It is a prediction and a mobilizing image through which the writers cast music as preparation for a new society.

The Wild Hunt, Ragnarök, and the Book’s Counterpoint

Odin also leads the Wild Hunt, a procession described in folklore as dark, martial riders moving through the night. The riders are dead souls or dead warriors returning at particular times, especially during the twelve nights around the winter solstice and during carnival. The book discusses scholarship that treats the Wild Hunt as more than a mistaken explanation of storms or flocks of birds: it joins myth and folklore, and preserves memories of secretive cult associations in which young men underwent initiation. Christian tradition, in turn, recast the leader of the host as the Archangel Michael. Odin’s role in this tradition binds seasonal time, the dead, and the memory of ritual societies together.

The book finds a modern echo of that imagery in Black Metal’s engagement with Nordic cosmology, while warning that not every use of runes, Mjöllnir, or mythic names reflects serious religious study. Some musicians use such symbols as decoration; others combine them with a serious heathen outlook and political ideas. The distinction matters because the imagery of the Wild Hunt can remain an aesthetic reference or become part of an argument for resistance and confrontation. In its account of the Norwegian church arsons of 1992, the book records how some musicians understood the destruction of churches as vengeance for the violent Christianization of earlier sacred places. Vikernes publicly expressed sympathy for those who set churches on fire while denying that he had burned one himself. Odin functions here as the invoked guardian of an imagined heathen landscape, not as evidence that every arson had a single motive or connection.

In the account of Ragnarök, Odin’s authority reaches its tragic limit. The Æsir fight the forces of darkness despite the prophecy of their own defeat; Loki joins the battle after being released, Fenris defeats Odin and swallows the sun, and Surtr’s blazing sword sets the world ablaze. Destruction is followed by renewal: fields grow again, Balder returns, and a hall for the righteous rulers stands at Gimli. This pattern of foreknown defeat followed by rebirth helps explain the myth’s attraction to writers who imagined the collapse of the existing order. The book notes that Black Metal’s early prime movers hoped to hasten such a reckoning, but did not succeed. Odin thus remains both a figure of doomed combat and part of a cycle in which catastrophe does not end history; the world can return, changed, after the fire.