Yule

Yule is presented as more than a date on the seasonal calendar: in accounts of the Oskorei, it is a midwinter interval when the boundary between the living and the dead was imagined as especially permeable. The book traces how that folklore—its night riders, ancestral spirits, and protective customs—became an evocative reference for Black Metal, while also emphasizing that modern heathen religious organizations had no specific connection to the scene.

Midwinter and the Oskorei

In Varg Vikernes’s prison writings, the Oskorei is associated with the twelve or thirteen nights of Yule and with fasting. He interprets the legendary ride as part of an ancient Germanic religious culture linking the living with the dead, and describes its participants through the image of initiated warriors marked by shields and warpaint. This is Vikernes’s interpretation of the tradition, not a neutral account of a universally practiced rite.

The folklore described in the book places the Oskorei within a broader midwinter belief that the dead return at Yule. In rural Northern Europe, seasonal customs also included groups of young men riding at night, whose noisy arrivals could frighten villagers. Such practices offer a human and social context for stories of a supernatural host, without reducing the legends to those customs alone.

The ride and its protections

The Oskorei was imagined as a company of dead souls moving across the night sky, sometimes led by Odin or another heathen deity. In some versions, the riders might descend and carry away a living person. The book notes that the name could be understood as the terrible ride, and recounts traditions in which the places the host stopped became settings for fighting and killing, as well as eating and drinking.

The danger assigned to the ride generated specific protective gestures and objects. People might make the sign of a cross, lie on the ground with their arms extended in that shape, or place crosses above doors; steel kept above animal stalls was also considered effective. These details show how the folklore organized fear into practical habits around homes and livestock. They also preserve the tension at its center: a feared company of the dead was situated within a season when the dead were thought to return.

From folklore to Black Metal imagery

The book connects the Oskorei’s winter-night imagery to the visual language of Black Metal. Bathory’s 1988 album Blood Fire Death used a painting of the Wild Hunt on its cover, placing the spectral ride at the threshold of a musical shift toward Norse and ancestral themes. The book stresses that many recognizable traits of the Norwegian Black Metal scene—including corpse paint, pseudonyms, harsh performance styles, and arson—had appeared before Nordic mythology became a central stated interest among scene participants. The parallel is therefore not presented as proof that the scene consciously reenacted an old Yule custom; it is a correspondence between folklore and a developing set of modern images and behaviors.

Vikernes gave that correspondence an explicitly ancestral meaning. He described Burzum as a revival of primordial forces and represented its actions as a way of awakening identification with Odin and the old Northern past. In his account, heathen deities were archetypes of a people rather than simply remote supernatural beings. The book presents these statements as Vikernes’s ideological interpretation, not as evidence that the Oskorei or Yule folklore had one settled meaning.

Religious practice and distinction

The book separates Black Metal’s appropriation of heathen imagery from contemporary Ásatrú practice in Norway and Sweden. It notes that Draupnir had been recognized by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization, while groups including Draupnir and Bifrost held regular gatherings involving blot, or symbolic sacrifice, to the old deities. Those organizations had no specific connection to the Black Metal scene, and public assumptions that they did were a serious liability for them.

Yule consequently occupies two related but distinct places in the account: it is the traditional season associated with the return and ride of the dead, and it is a source of imagery later drawn into modern music and ideological claims about ancestry. The book’s distinctions matter. The recurrence of midwinter motifs helps explain the resonance of the Oskorei for Black Metal, but it does not make the folklore, Vikernes’s political and religious framing, and contemporary heathen organizations interchangeable.