The Prince of Death

The Prince of Death is an epithet applied to Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous, after his murder in 1993. In the book, the phrase turns his stage identity and the scene’s cultivated fascination with death back upon the person who helped define it: Aarseth had sought to shape Norwegian Black Metal around a severe, transgressive image, and ultimately became part of the violence that made that image seem more than theatrical.

Meaning and Context

The expression appears as a retrospective description rather than as a separately established title. The narrative links it to Euronymous, whose name and public identity had long been entangled with death imagery, and presents his killing as a terrible fulfillment of that persona. The force of the epithet lies in this reversal: a figure associated with an artistic ideal of deathlike silence is remembered through the violent ending of his own life.

The phrase also belongs to a scene in which belief and outlook mattered alongside music. Its boundaries were not governed by a fixed rulebook; attitudes shifted with the influential personalities who shaped the genre. Mayhem, the band Aarseth founded, occupied a central place in that history. Its reputation preceded much of its recorded work, growing through rumor, a deliberately stark presentation, and a small number of notorious performances.

The Image Before the Epithet

Mayhem’s early history shows how the band’s image developed rather than arriving fully formed. At first, its members wore black clothes and leather jackets, a look that an early observer recalled as ordinary for the time. The band had played only one live show before that encounter, performing covers rather than its own songs. After releasing a second demo and the 1987 mini-album Deathcrush, Mayhem began to attract a serious following. Aarseth released material slowly, whether because of financial constraints or his insistence on control over production, and the band played few shows.

Aarseth later adopted corpsepaint, the black-and-white makeup that gave the musicians a macabre appearance in concerts and photographs. It became one of the recognizable visual marks of Norwegian Black Metal. The scene’s style was not merely an accompaniment to its music: appearance, reputation, and an uncompromising attitude helped distinguish those considered serious from outsiders. The epithet The Prince of Death draws on this accumulated language of image, but gives it a final, literal-seeming weight that the early presentation alone did not possess.

Aarseth and the Scene He Shaped

By mid-1991, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Thorns, and Emperor were among the groups in contact with Aarseth; he planned to release much of their work through Deathlike Silence Productions. The circle around the bands came to be called the Norwegian Black Circle, a name Aarseth used when speaking to the press about church burnings that would begin before the year ended. His record shop functioned as a focal point and a place where acceptance was granted through trust and perceived seriousness. Ihsahn later recalled an intense atmosphere in which younger participants deferred to Aarseth and older figures, and people sought recognition within the group.

Aarseth’s role was therefore both musical and social. He helped organize connections among bands, controlled access to a label and a gathering place, and influenced the attitudes by which the emerging scene defined itself. That prominence makes the epithet more than a reference to a single person’s death: it attaches the phrase to the scene’s authority structure and to the identity Aarseth helped create.

Fulfillment and Aftermath

The book places Aarseth’s death beside the killings committed by Bård Eithun and Varg Vikernes, arguing that members of the Black Metal scene had carried violent rhetoric into real acts. In that context, the retrospective phrase The Prince of Death marks a collapse of the boundary between performed menace and consequential violence. It does not make the death an artistic achievement; rather, the wording exposes the bleak irony of a public persona being fulfilled by an actual killing.

The consequences extended beyond Aarseth’s personal legacy. Major Norwegian Black Metal bands entered hiatus as key members faced prison sentences for arson, grave desecration, and murder. Legal proceedings disrupted the scene and divided people into opposing camps, while a cult grew around Aarseth’s memory, elevating him as a foundational figure. The narrative cautions that some of this posthumous acclaim was hyperbole, advanced by later musicians seeking credibility through association with his legend.

Ihsahn’s later recollection offers a contrast to that mythmaking. He described his younger self as more extreme in dress and public expression, using strong views to provoke a reaction and assert identity; as he grew older, proving those views became less important. That change underscores the distance between a scene’s dramatic early self-presentation and the varied ways its participants later understood it. The Prince of Death remains a compact expression of the period’s most consequential contradiction: an identity built around death became inseparable from the real violence that helped dismantle the scene.