Lene Bore

Lene Bore, the mother of Varg Vikernes, appears both as his most persistent personal defender and as a witness to the distance between his family life and his public extremism. She supported his music, stayed involved during his imprisonment, and tried to improve public opinion of him. Her own account also records early unease about his relationship with Øystein Aarseth, her gradual suspicions about the church arsons, and her explanation that his politics began in a desire to rebel. Later, money she supplied was found in the investigation of a group police said planned to break Vikernes out of prison, placing her loyalty at the center of a public and legal controversy.

Childhood and family observations

Bore remembered Vikernes as a loving child who could be joyful and happy, but whose reactions were intense and difficult to conceal. He disliked organized play and sports and did not readily adapt to the social expectations of kindergarten. On his own, she recalled, he played well and had a rich imagination; in kindergarten and school, he was unhappy. Her portrait therefore holds together two qualities that might otherwise seem incompatible: a child capable of warmth and solitary imaginative play, and a boy who struggled when asked to adjust to a group.

Her account of his friends likewise differs from the image of a criminal circle. When they visited her home, she found them easygoing and did not regard them as criminals. She was relieved that she saw no drinking, drug use, or crime among them. That impression is not evidence about everything the group did beyond her home; it does show the limited, domestic vantage from which she first encountered Vikernes’s associates.

Aarseth and the weakening of their bond

Bore met Aarseth a few times and noticed that Vikernes initially looked up to him. Vikernes was proud that he, rather than the other members of the scene, had obtained a record contract. Aarseth was five years older, and the degree of influence Bore saw him acquire over her son made her wary enough to confront Vikernes. He reassured her that there was nothing to worry about. At her house, Aarseth behaved acceptably toward her, despite looking frightening to people on the street; she judged him by his conduct in her presence, just as she expected others to judge her son.

In Bore’s recollection, Vikernes’s admiration did not last unchanged. He lived with Aarseth for a few months, after which she believed he saw him from a different perspective and became disappointed. She connected the later deterioration of their relationship to competition: when Vikernes obtained a record deal elsewhere, Aarseth had to compete with him. After the church fires, Aarseth’s shop had to close. Bore said she did not then know what had happened, but later heard that Aarseth believed he could make a living indefinitely by selling Burzum records by mail order. If he had counted on that income and Vikernes broke with him, she reasoned, the break would have cost Aarseth an expected source of support as well as leaving him feeling let down.

Rebellion, beliefs, and suspicions about the arsons

Bore said she had no good explanation for how Vikernes arrived at his extreme views. She associated their beginnings with a strong need to rebel and a tendency to choose the most oppositional path. In her view, however, provocation no longer explained the whole of his politics: what may have begun as a gut reaction had developed into convictions he genuinely held. Her distinction matters because it marks a change from rebellion as posture to ideology as commitment, without claiming that she could account for every step in that development.

Vikernes liked discussing his views with people who disagreed with him, including Bore. She understood these conversations as occasions for him to have his own opinions confirmed. When he dismissed her as impossible to persuade, she privately considered him the more hopeless of the two. The exchanges suggest that disagreement did not necessarily open a shared inquiry between them; it could instead become a test of each person’s certainty.

Her suspicions about the church burnings arose gradually. She first became suspicious when Vikernes complained that the police were useless because they could not catch the people responsible. A later conversation followed the burning of Åsane Church. Bore and her family were in the mountains, and Vikernes had chosen not to join them. When she telephoned him, he asked whether she had heard about the fire. She said that she had and that she found it awful; he did not agree and considered it acceptable. Bore was astonished, but at that point did not think he had taken part. Her account thus separates what she knew at the time from the suspicion that his remarks later prompted.

Support for Vikernes and Burzum

Bore’s involvement was practical as well as emotional. She helped provide money for the early Burzum releases on Aarseth’s Deathlike Silence Productions label, a role that gave her opportunities to meet people in the Black Metal scene. After Vikernes was imprisoned, she visited him frequently, helped him manage correspondence, and assisted with business matters connected to Burzum. She also sought to improve the public perception of her son, even as his actions brought years of unrest into her life.

Burzum releases continued to sell well internationally while Vikernes was in prison. Bore received the royalties, and the account notes that this arrangement allegedly contributed to serious trouble later. The detail connects her earlier support for the music to the later question of who controlled the resources associated with it. It also makes her position more complicated than that of a distant family advocate: she remained involved in the correspondence and commercial affairs that continued around Vikernes while he was incarcerated.

The escape-plan investigation

Police later said that the group known as Einsatzgruppe planned direct action against prominent Norwegian politicians, bishops, and other public figures, as well as a forceful attempt to free Vikernes. Investigators found a war chest containing 100,000 Norwegian kroner, supplied by Bore, and arrested and charged her with financing an illegal group. She confessed to providing the money but said she had not known the people involved were right-wing extremists. A Norwegian headline presented the payment as money for an escape plan and described her as fearing for her son’s life.

The origin of the funds remained disputed. Police speculated that the money might have come from Vikernes’s substantial record royalties; Bore said it came from the proceeds of a house sale. The book does not resolve the disagreement, so the two accounts remain distinct: one a police theory about the source, the other Bore’s explanation. She also expressed concern that her son was being mistreated in prison. The prison director dismissed her allegations as unfounded, though Vikernes had in fact suffered a broken jaw in an altercation with another inmate in late 1996.

Despite her confession and the charge, Bore could not be prosecuted under Norwegian law: conspiracy to break the law was not illegal when undertaken to help a close family member. That legal exception did not erase the gravity of the alleged plan or the controversy surrounding the money. It did, however, make the case a revealing extension of the relationship that runs through Bore’s account of Vikernes’s life. Her loyalty had begun in the ordinary forms of maternal care—helping with records, correspondence, and business—and reached into an investigation involving a proposed armed rescue. Bore remained both a defender of her son and a consequential participant in the circumstances that gathered around him.