J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien is presented through the way Varg Vikernes read and repurposed his work. Tolkien’s books supplied Vikernes with the name Grishnackh, the figure of Sauron, and the fictional word Burzum; Vikernes used these elements to explain his early band identity and his attraction to darkness, mythology, and occultism. The portrait is therefore less a biography of Tolkien than a record of how his writing became material for Vikernes’s self-fashioning.

Tolkien in Vikernes’s Account

Vikernes said the second half of his former pseudonym, Count Grishnackh, came from Tolkien’s books: Grishnackh is an evil character aligned with Sauron. He also offered a different explanation for Count, claiming that it came from a Latin word meaning companion or partner, rather than from the Dracula-like associations the media attached to the title. In this account, Tolkien furnished the name’s fictional reference, while Vikernes supplied a personal reinterpretation of its first part.

Middle-earth Reframed

Vikernes described his own band as having begun under the name Uruk-Hai before he renamed it Burzum after leaving Old Funeral. He characterized an Uruk-Hai as a typical berserker in Tolkien’s stories and connected that figure to what he called the Norse Ulfhedhnar, or wolfcoats. His reading assembled further parallels: Barad-dûr and Hlidhskjálf as towers, Sauron’s all-seeing eye and Odin’s one eye, and the ring of power and Odin’s ring Draupnir. He also likened Tolkien’s trolls to berserkers. These were Vikernes’s interpretive correspondences, not claims that the figures were identical within Tolkien’s fiction.

His preference for Sauron and his followers over the hobbits was part of this selective reading. Vikernes said he disliked Tolkien’s elves and dwarves, and described the elves in explicitly prejudicial terms. He linked his attraction to Sauron with his interest in occultism: the supposedly dark and evil quality of the material suggested to him a hidden mythological connection. Tolkien’s fiction thus served not simply as fantasy to imitate, but as a veil through which Vikernes said he sought other meanings.

Burzum and the Language of Darkness

Vikernes called Burzum a fictional word and attributed its linguistic basis to Tolkien, whom he described as a professor of Norse mythology and Norse language. In Vikernes’s explanation, Tolkien’s invented language drew heavily on Norse, while Burz meant night or darkness and the plural ending um produced Burzum, meaning much night or darkness. These etymological statements are presented as Vikernes’s account of the name’s origin.

He connected that meaning to a deliberate reversal of moral labels: if democracy claimed the imagery of light and goodness, he reasoned, his own project could claim darkness and evil. Yet he also said that Burzum’s darkness was the light of Odin. Tolkien’s word therefore became a hinge between Vikernes’s band name, his stated interest in occultism, and his later heathen framing. The evidence reveals Tolkien’s significance here through that act of adaptation, without establishing Tolkien’s own intentions or views.