Vikernes's self-mythologization

Vikernes’s self-mythologization was the ongoing recasting of a notorious public figure as a symbolic outlaw and, later, a heathen leader. The book distinguishes between the sensational figure constructed by the press and Vikernes’s own selective presentation of himself: he objected to the first while repeatedly supplying names, beliefs, and narratives that made his life appear larger than itself. His self-image did not replace the record of his actions; it reorganized their meaning, turning notoriety into a story of inherited identity and supposed duty.

Names and the Media Persona

As the church-burning and murder trials unfolded in Norway, daily tabloid coverage turned Vikernes into a national bogeyman. His former musical pseudonym, Count Grishnackh, gave journalists a ready-made aristocratic villain: The Count became a supposed sadist and vampire, and headlines attributed to him stories such as drinking someone’s blood. The book describes that story as probably fabricated. Yet the press image did not arise from the name alone: it attached an elaborate fantasy of lawless privilege to a figure already at the center of a highly publicized controversy.

By then, Vikernes had disowned Count Grishnackh. He also rejected his birth name, Kristian, because of its association with Christianity, and adopted Varg, a name he connected to the wolf and to a diagram combining Amor, Roma, and Grav. The account presents the name as a deliberately chosen emblem, not simply a label. Vikernes later offered a different explanation for Count: he said it derived from the Latin comes, meaning companion or partner, rather than the aristocratic title imagined by readers. The second part, Grishnackh, came from Tolkien, where the name belongs to a character serving Sauron. The gap between these explanations and the press’s Dracula-like Count shows how a chosen identity could be contested, repurposed, and made to carry meanings its bearer rejected.

Vikernes disavowed the media’s Count as a shadow produced by publicity, saying he disliked that figure and would have opposed him if they had met. The book does not treat this denial as a clean separation between the man and his public persona. It notes that Vikernes contributed to the surrounding hysteria in his own ways, including through contemptuous courtroom behavior. His self-mythologizing therefore works through tension: he rejects the caricature while recognizing, and at times reinforcing, the symbolic force of the names and roles attached to him.

From Satanism to Heathen Identity

The shift in Vikernes’s public account of himself followed his arrest after the murder of Øystein Aarseth in 1993. Earlier, his statements and the press had associated him with Satanism; afterward, he increasingly described his outlook as heathen and presented himself as a companion of Odin. He said Burzum existed exclusively for Odin and interpreted its darkness as a form of light. This did not simply change the vocabulary around his music. It recast an earlier posture of blasphemy as allegiance to ancestral religion and opposition to Christianity.

That recasting drew on a wider change in Black Metal. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, replaced the earlier records’ horror imagery with a painting of the Wild Hunt, or Oskorei, and music that joined raw aggression to more elaborate arrangements and Norse themes. The book presents the album’s turn toward heathen mythology as an influential model: ancestral archetypes became a major source for the generation that followed. Vikernes’s later interpretation of Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces thus attached his own work to an existing musical and mythological current rather than originating that current by himself.

He gave this connection a personal and mobilizing form. In explaining the church burnings, he framed them as a way to make people recognize Odin and awaken a heathen inheritance within them. He described the Norse deities not as gods in the Christian sense, but as archetypes of the Northern race and names through which descendants could remember what had been. In this account, destructive acts and musical expression became parts of a single claim: that a suppressed ancestral nature could be revived. The book emphasizes the mythic structure of that claim while distinguishing it from evidence that all Norse religious practice belonged to the Black Metal scene.

Vargsmål and the Chieftain’s Burden

Prison writing gave Vikernes a more sustained means of shaping his own legend. Authorities confiscated his computer after he had compiled much of a book; he recalls asking that the computer be sent out of prison, since the manuscript was stored on its hard drive. He wrote the first part in 1994 and the second in early 1995, and says that the need to finish before losing access to the computer contributed to the work’s crowded, disorderly character. The interruption did not end the project, but it became part of the story of its production.

He titled the work Vargsmål, meaning the speech or song of Varg. The title alludes to Hávamál, the Elder Edda poem in which Odin addresses his people with counsel and recounts his own deeds and sacrifices. By placing his name beside that poetic tradition, Vikernes implicitly presented himself as a modern figure entitled to speak in a comparable register. The book describes the title as an attempt to establish a mythic lineage, not merely as a reference to Norse literature.

Vargsmål combines Norse mythology and cosmology with politics and notes about the murder. Vikernes acknowledges that its contents are controversial and that its organization is imperfect, while arguing that it includes material others would prefer not to publish. Its self-portrait centers on the role of the chieftain. In the passage discussed by the book, that leader is not imagined as someone enjoying privilege: he must surrender private wishes and pleasures for the tribe, and bears an unhappy life as a burden of duty. Vikernes anticipates that readers may see this presentation as heroic and treats their judgment as another dishonor the chieftain must endure. The passage turns self-importance into sacrifice: the claim to exceptional status is framed as the price of serving others.

Heresy, Influence, and the Limits of the Persona

The book compares Vikernes’s position as a Norwegian pariah and heretic to Charles Manson’s in the United States. Both are described as proponents of radical, racially inflected ideologies, as men who denied wrongdoing, and as media bogeymen who understood the power of symbols and self-chosen names. The comparison concerns their public roles and their participation in mythmaking; it does not erase the particular histories that made Vikernes a focus of the Norwegian controversy.

His influence was not only a product of press attention. The book says that he helped give focus to ideas circulating in the scene and led people into action, and notes that his own statements implied he had initiated the movement. Before the Bergens Tidende article and his arrest, he was admired by many in the scene, and Burzum was regarded as a pioneer of the modern Norwegian Black Metal sound. Even after the killing of Øystein Aarseth made him an object of intense hatred for many, the book says that some continued to speak of him with deference. His influence also continued from prison through his writing and public statements.

The reach of this identity claim had consequences beyond the scene. In Norway and Sweden, groups such as Draupnir and Bifrost held gatherings devoted to Ásatrú, and Draupnir had government recognition as a religious organization. The book stresses that these practitioners had no specific connection to Black Metal and that assumptions of a link damaged their public standing. Vikernes’s frequent declarations about his heathen beliefs made that distinction harder to maintain, even as he appeared not to understand that his own publicity contributed to the problem. The self-fashioned heathen spokesman thus became both a source of influence and a burden for people whose religious activity he claimed to share. His persona endures in the account as a collision between media invention, deliberate self-presentation, and the wider effects of turning personal myth into public identity.