Asbjørn Dyrendal

Asbjørn Dyrendal is a research fellow in cultural studies at the University of Oslo whose account of Norway’s Satanism scare and Black Metal crime coverage treats the media as an active part of the story, not just a record of it. His research follows the changing headlines from the late 1980s into the 1990s, distinguishing sensational claims from documented events while examining how public attention could shape the identities and reputations of the people it described.

Research and the changing Satanism scare

Dyrendal’s research focused on new and emerging religions, especially Wicca, and included an investigation of Norwegian and foreign media claims about a Satanic conspiracy. He summarized his findings in an article tracing press treatments of Satanism in Norway from 1988 to 1997. The chronology matters: stories of Satanism did not begin with the church fires and arrests that later made Norwegian Black Metal notorious. They developed through earlier waves of reporting, each supplying a different frame for interpreting youth, occult interests, and crime.

According to Dyrendal, accounts of cult conspiracies and Satanic ritual abuse reached Norway a few years after similar stories had surged in the tabloid press of the United States and England. The Norwegian State Church had discussed Satanism at bishops’ conferences from the late 1970s, but it was generally treated as a minor element in the broader growth of New Age and occult spirituality, not as a grave danger. That distinction changed when Satanism began to acquire sustained attention in the press.

In the summer of 1988, newspaper reports described supposed Satanist groups meeting in small towns. One story involved two brothers who stole from a church, threatened people, and were said to worship Satan at midnight dances; another concerned a site described as Satanic that was found during a drug investigation. Journalists and Christian commentators also raised alarms about the availability of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible in Norwegian bookshops. For Dyrendal, these early reports established a repertoire of images that would return when Black Metal later became a national subject.

From conspiracy claims to Black Metal

The reporting intensified in 1990, when stories of Satanic ritual abuse spread through the press. Police lieutenant Willy Kobbhaug publicly claimed to have evidence of growing criminal Satanic activity under investigation. Dyrendal noted that some observers were skeptical, particularly because comparable conspiracy stories had already been widely discredited in the United States. Nevertheless, the Norwegian media often placed disparate alleged crimes within the frame of an organized movement. The occult society Ordo Templi Orientis was accused of involvement in sacrifices and other crimes, although the allegations were never proven and were not taken seriously by most police departments.

As the ritual-abuse stories faded, Black Metal took their place in the headlines in 1993. Dyrendal described the central public image as a conspicuous group of teenagers, mostly between fifteen and eighteen, performing identities associated with evil. Their chosen labels varied: some claimed Nazi, Satanist, or Odinist identities, while others rejected a fixed label. The statements attributed to them presented indiscriminate hostility and the idea that harm caused by their music was desirable. The press attention was not based on words alone: some youths attacked people, more often attacked property, desecrated graveyards, and burned churches. Dyrendal’s account also records assaults, an allegation of sexual violence, and two murders during the 1991–1993 period.

The coverage helped create the impression of a coordinated, large-scale Satanic assault on Christians in Norway. Dyrendal did not dismiss the grounds for public concern: the reports prompted fearful responses from police and church congregations, and some churches were watched overnight. In Oslo, Trinity Church priest Victor Andersson reportedly kept watch in the sacristy with an axe. Yet the same climate also encouraged people to read unusual sites or incidents as evidence of Satanist activity. The public response, in his account, was shaped both by actual crimes and by a press narrative that gathered separate events into a single apparent threat.

Media, imitation, and subcultural authority

Dyrendal considered whether the Black Metal scene copied images of Satanism circulated by newspapers and Christian sources. Young people seeking to become Satanists had few sources from which to learn what such an identity was supposed to entail; they encountered myths and stories in the media and attempted, with limited means, to enact them. He pointed to early interviews with Varg Vikernes as an example of a participant playing into reporters’ expectations: Vikernes suggested that people disappeared and implied possible killings, then withheld a direct admission in a way that invited the question to remain alive. In Dyrendal’s reading, this was a performance built in conversation with an existing media script, not reliable confirmation of the crimes being insinuated.

His assessment of media influence changed as he spoke with journalists and people involved in Vikernes’s trial. He came to regard press coverage as important to the construction of Vikernes’s street credibility and near-mythic public image. Black Metal had its own internal competition for authority, but reports that the scene became wilder after journalists focused on it suggested that outside attention could intensify the struggle to become its dominant personality. Dyrendal thus describes an interaction rather than a simple one-way cause: the subculture had internal momentum, while unusually extensive publicity could add status and raise the stakes of its rivalries.

The book’s account of the scene’s internal life gives this argument a social setting. By mid-1991, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Thorns, Enslaved, Arcturus, and later Emperor were in contact with Øystein Aarseth, whose record label planned to release much of their work. The shop around Aarseth functioned as a selective gathering place: Emperor singer Ihsahn recalled that newcomers had to be trusted and considered serious before they were accepted. Corpsepaint and conspicuous allegiance helped mark that world, but access and respect were also governed by relationships with established figures. Dyrendal’s account of media-created reputation therefore sits alongside a scene whose own mechanisms of acceptance and status were already powerful.

Distinguishing belief, style, and action

Dyrendal’s analysis resists treating Norwegian Black Metal as a unified religious organization. The book describes the scene’s defining elements as beliefs and attitudes as well as music, with no fixed rulebook and boundaries that shifted over time. That fluidity helps explain why young people could move among Satanist, Nazi, and Odinist identities, or insist simply on being evil, without representing one coherent doctrine. Early Black Metal Satanism could be understood as a real struggle between good and evil, but that account of belief does not establish that every provocative act was a religious ritual or that every participant shared the same commitments.

The distinction is especially important in the press’s treatment of wrongdoing. Dyrendal’s chronology separates documented attacks and fires from unsupported claims of a vast conspiracy, and it shows how sensational stories could make varied conduct appear to have a single cause. His approach also leaves room for more than one explanation of the scene’s emergence. Theories included the influence of music, role-playing games, and occultism, as well as criticism of a church perceived as unable to engage young people. Some church figures proposed more aggressive outreach or a return to exorcism, but the range of proposed responses did not itself settle what had produced the phenomenon.

Aftermath and the limits of explanation

A later case, reported in June 2003, illustrates the persistence of the media problem without belonging to Dyrendal’s 1988–1997 chronology. A twenty-six-year-old former bassist from a relatively obscure Black Metal band and younger companions broke into a chapel where bodies awaited cremation, desecrated the deceased, and vandalized the building. The case dominated Norwegian coverage for days; tabloids speculated about Satanic ritual and some commentators urged that Black Metal music be outlawed. The book stresses that the principal offender had been dismissed from his band for musical reasons and was largely ostracized from the scene. His extensive use of ecstasy and GHB, together with psychological and pharmacological factors, offered explanations more plausible than a direct link to music or Satanism. The episode echoes Dyrendal’s concern: publicity can turn a shocking crime into a broad claim about a subculture, while the offender’s actual relationship to that subculture may be marginal.

Dyrendal rejected two broad explanations often offered for Black Metal: that secular society had erased moral limits, and that rebellion had to become more extreme because familiar forms of provocation no longer shocked parents. He considered both too simple. He was more interested in how Vikernes had become a symbol larger than himself, associated in the public imagination with Satanism, racism, Nazism, murder, and the burning of sacred objects. Dyrendal regarded the person beneath that image as comparatively uninteresting and, in many people’s view, pathetic—a figure able to function within a self-created mythology. The contrast captures his central insight: a public image can acquire its own force, inviting imitation and magnifying a person’s significance even as it obscures the varied motives, affiliations, and circumstances behind particular acts.