Black Metal and Oskorei

Black Metal and Oskorei are connected in the book through a sustained comparison between a modern underground music culture and Norwegian Wild Hunt traditions. The link is not presented as a documented chain of direct inheritance. Instead, the book argues that Black Metal reworks a recognizable repertoire of disguises, noise, assumed identities, and heathen imagery, while stressing that its urban musicians belong to a different social world from the rural communities associated with Oskorei. The comparison makes Black Metal appear less like a wholly new invention than a modern, electronically amplified return to older Nordic patterns—though the book leaves that return as an interpretation, not a settled historical fact.

Oskorei as a folkloric model

Oskorei, also called Oskoreien and Oskoreidi in Norway, names a form of the Wild Hunt. The book traces the word’s associations across several possible meanings: a terrifying or thunderous ride, and a ride connected with Asgard. Rather than reducing the term to one fixed definition, this range gives the tradition an atmosphere of movement, supernatural presence, and force. The comparison begins with Oskorei as more than a name for a story: it also refers to groups and customs associated with masked young people.

The account describes Norwegian cult communities of young men who wore masks and furs, a practice said to have continued until the beginning of the twentieth century. Their appearances were associated with the nights around the winter solstice. Disguised participants used assumed names and moved on foot or horseback, presenting themselves as beings beyond ordinary human society. In the folklore material, their actions could punish violations of rural custom, disrupt household routines, or claim property such as horses. These details matter to the comparison because they place anonymity, collective action, and deliberate disturbance inside a traditional social pattern, rather than treating them as isolated signs of youthful mischief.

Shared devices of disguise and sound

The strongest parallels the book draws are formal. Oskorei participants used disguises, masks, noise, drink, movement, and music in approaches to religious ecstasy. Their clothes were intended to look frightening; their altered voices and otherworldly presentation reinforced the claim that the masked figures represented supernatural beings rather than ordinary people. Black Metal, in the book’s reading, carries forward several of those devices as musical and visual conventions: musicians use demonic black-and-white face paint, adopt pseudonyms, and cultivate voices that shift between whispers and harsh cries.

Noise is especially important to the comparison. In descriptions of Wild Hunt processions, bells, drums, rattles, cries, and other loud sounds help create an overwhelming collective din. The book calls Black Metal a modern form of heathen noise, transformed by electronic amplification. The parallel is not simply that both are loud. In each case, sound helps construct an encounter with an imagined otherworld: a processional, ritual-like disturbance in the older material, and a dark, forceful sonic environment in the music. The book also links music and movement to the older tradition’s use of dancing and song, although it does not claim that a Black Metal performance reproduces an Oskorei ceremony in any exact sense.

Assumed names provide another point of contact. The masked riders concealed their identities and represented themselves as supernatural entities; Black Metal musicians, too, often perform under pseudonyms, many drawn from Nordic history and mythology. The book notes that Black Metal culture includes figures from The Eddas, making older mythological material available as part of the scene’s self-presentation. The resemblance is therefore both practical and symbolic: concealment separates performers from everyday identity, while mythic names give the music a vocabulary for imagining a world beyond ordinary social life.

From folk motif to musical style

The comparison extends from performance devices to the sound and shape of the music. The book characterizes Black Metal as powerful, violent, dark, and grim, and describes its musical landscapes as obscure and dense. Repeated motifs, a blazing atmosphere, and songs sometimes lasting more than ten minutes contribute to an effect that can become almost psychedelic. Some melodies, it observes, may emerge only after repeated listening. This account connects the music’s sustained darkness and recurrence to the imagined world of the Wild Hunt, not by identifying the two as identical, but by showing how an older image of supernatural tumult can illuminate the mood and form of a modern genre.

The link also has a visual and bodily dimension. Black-and-white face paint, ancient Nordic clothing, emblems of death, and deliberately ghostly voices make Black Metal’s performers legible as figures who have crossed away from ordinary appearance. The book compares those choices to the masks and disguised bodies of Oskorei, while acknowledging that modern musicians may use such symbols without seriously studying their spiritual background. Runes, images of the Irminsul, and Thor’s Hammer can function as decoration for some participants. For others, Nordic cosmology is a serious framework joined to ideas of self-respect and resistance. The contrast prevents the comparison from implying that every use of Norse imagery expresses the same beliefs.

Continuity, difference, and interpretation

The book’s central claim is that Black Metal is Oskorei romanticism: a modern culture that recalls, consciously or unconsciously, a Nordic cosmology and its repertoire of dark transformation. But it draws a clear boundary around that proposition. Oskorei belonged to a rural cultural landscape and village communities; Black Metal developed primarily as an underground culture in Scandinavian cities. Shared images and practices do not erase that difference, and resemblance alone cannot establish an unbroken line of transmission. The book even anticipates that Germanicists and folklorists may reject the suggested continuity.

That tension is central to the relation. Oskorei supplies Black Metal with a historical and mythic frame through which disguises, violence, noise, and hostility to Christianity can be read, but the modern scene reshapes those elements within music, urban networks, and its own shifting ideology. The book places the Norwegian church arsons of 1992 beside this folklore, describing a perceived connection: some Black Metal musicians understood the destruction of churches as vengeance against Christianity’s earlier suppression of Nordic sacred places. That interpretation belongs to the musicians’ symbolic framing; it does not establish that the folklore itself caused the arsons. The comparison instead shows how an older story of ritualized disturbance could help give contemporary acts a language of historical revenge.

The result is neither a simple claim that Black Metal revived an intact pagan custom nor an account of folklore used only as ornament. Oskorei offers a pattern that the book sees reappearing in altered form—in anonymity, masks, noise, mythic self-presentation, and the aspiration to stand outside Christian and everyday norms. The differences between village tradition and city-based music remain decisive. Their relationship is best understood as an interpretive echo: a modern genre drawing force from an older Nordic imaginary without becoming its direct continuation.