“Tomhet”

“Tomhet” is a song by Burzum on the CD Hvis lyset tar oss. The book’s commentator singles it out as a particularly compelling work, not by detailing a literal scene or a fixed musical program, but by describing the landscape it evokes: a Norway imagined as ruled by silence and storm, solitude and natural violence.

Album and Form

The song appears on Hvis lyset tar oss, alongside “Det Som Engang Var,” the first Burzum song the commentator heard. The passage stresses that “Tomhet,” too, has an extraordinary length, making duration part of its distinction without specifying a running time.

An Imagined Norway

For the commentator, “Tomhet” functions as an exceptional soundtrack to Norway as imagined rather than simply observed. Silence and storm, solitude and natural violence form a sequence of contrasts that gives the imagined landscape its character: quiet is not the absence of force, but its counterpart.

Place in Burzum’s Imagery

The book places the song within a broader account of Varg Vikernes’s work, whose songs address dreams, visions, the past, light and darkness, winter, and war. The passage does not assign those subjects individually to “Tomhet”; instead, its description connects the song to an evocative landscape and an unusually extended musical form.