Blood and Soil

Blood and Soil is an idea that binds ancestry, territory, and collective identity. In the book, it helps explain how parts of the Black Metal scene turned from borrowed Satanic imagery toward a claimed inheritance of Northern European heathen tradition; Varg Vikernes’s own account gives the idea a specifically racial and eugenic dimension.

From Satanic imagery to heathen inheritance

The transition is traced through Bathory’s 1988 album Blood Fire Death. Its cover replaced the band’s earlier horror imagery with a scene drawn from the Oskorei, a Scandinavian and Teutonic Wild Hunt tradition: a spectral host rides across the sky as Thor appears above a warrior below. The music likewise redirected raw aggression into more elaborate arrangements and lyrics shaped by heathen mythology. The album’s opening instrumental evokes Odin riding across the heavens, and its closing song invokes the old Norse gods.

This change was more than a new visual style. The book presents Blood Fire Death as a turning point at which Bathory abandoned the childish, foreign Satanism of its original inspiration and drew instead on the ancestral mythic legacy of its own forebears. That turn made ancestral archetypes a lasting resource for the generation of Black Metal that followed. Images of the Oskorei had already circulated in the scene before Nordic mythology became a prominent subject, giving the later revival the appearance of a rediscovered inheritance.

Vikernes’s racial and cosmological interpretation

Varg Vikernes described Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and framed the church burnings as an attempt to awaken heathen identity in the public. His account treated the old Norse figures not simply as supernatural gods but as archetypes belonging to the Northern race and preserved in its collective memory. In that formulation, heathendom was an expression of inherited nature, and reviving its symbols became a way of asserting continuity with forebears.

In a later explanation of his views, Vikernes placed Blood and Soil within a cosmology that linked blood mysticism to genetics and eugenics. He described individuals as components in a long ancestral chain and argued that human groups possessed distinct gene pools, with DNA shaping both physical traits and collective archetypal symbolism. He further asserted the superiority of the Indo-Germanic or White race and invoked the prehistoric replacement of Neanderthals by Cro-Magnons as an early example of conquest and destruction. These are Vikernes’s ideological claims, not historical conclusions established by the book.

A contested inheritance

The book distinguishes Vikernes’s politics from the broader revival of Ásatrú faith in Norway and Sweden. It notes that Draupnir had been recognized by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization, while groups such as Draupnir and Bifrost held regular gatherings that included symbolic sacrifice. It states that Nordic religious practitioners had no specific connection to the Black Metal scene, and that public assumptions of such a connection burdened them by making it harder to dispel negative impressions of their religion.

Blood and Soil therefore names more than a musical or mythological change. It describes an effort to make selected images of the past serve as evidence of present-day ethnic identity and political purpose. The same heathen symbols could belong to contemporary religious practice, to Bathory’s musical transformation, or to Vikernes’s racial program; the book’s distinctions between these uses show why an apparent continuity with ancestral tradition was also a contested modern construction.