Mary Gerstein

Mary Gerstein appears in the book not through a personal biography or a conventional narrative arc, but through the research and interpretations attributed to her essay Germanic Warg: The Outlaw as Werewolf. As a comparative mythology researcher, she supplies a historical vocabulary for understanding the figure of the outlaw: the term warg carries associations with criminality, exclusion, and wolfishness, while its specialized legal uses connect it to crimes including arson and concealed killing. Her work gives the book a way to compare Varg Vikernes’s public identity with older Germanic traditions without treating that comparison as merely a modern nickname.

The legal history of warg

Gerstein’s essay traces the term across Northern European languages and legal settings. As the book summarizes her research, warg could designate a criminal, outlaw, outcast, thief, wrongdoer, or evil being; its meanings also reached the damned and the Devil. The term was not simply a general insult. Old legal codes could attach prefixes that specified the offense, including gorvargher for a cattle thief and morthvargr for a killer. That technical vocabulary matters to Gerstein’s account because it shows how the figure of the wolf-outlaw was embedded in classifications of conduct and status.

Her discussion of the Icelandic legal text Grágás focuses on morthvarg, a designation for a particular class of outlaw. The relevant sense, as the book presents it, involves killing furtively and attempting to conceal the crime. Gerstein therefore links outlawry not just to the fact of violence, but to secrecy: the wrongdoer is marked by the hidden character of the act as well as by the breach of law. The comparison gives the word a precise legal and social dimension, rather than leaving it at the level of a mythic image.

The Norwegian legal material sharpens that connection. In her examination of the Gulathingslov, Gerstein identifies brennuvargr as a term for a person outlawed for arson—literally, a fire-wolf. She describes such forms as specialized, fossilized legal vocabulary, preserved in declarations that deprived offenders of rights and publicly designated them outcasts. Arson, oath-breaking, and secret killing belong to the particularly serious offenses associated with this language. In this account, the word records a social judgment: the outlaw is not only a perpetrator but someone formally placed outside the protections of the community.

Odin, outlawry, and death

Gerstein’s interpretation also brings the legal history into contact with mythology. Her essay compares Odin’s ordeal on Yggdrasil, where he hangs for nine nights to gain wisdom, with the hanging of Jesus as an outlaw who is subsequently raised to divine power. The parallel concerns the transformation of an excluded or condemned figure into an empowered one. The book uses this comparison to illuminate how outlaw status can be made to signify more than punishment: it can also become part of a story of sacrifice, knowledge, and authority.

A further connection concerns Odin as a binder of foes and the criminal warg. Gerstein emphasizes that Odin’s mythic character is not governed by ordinary moral consistency: he can foster conflict among kin and encourage the breaking of vows. The strangled warg belongs to him, in her reading, through affinity rather than straightforward moral punishment. This interpretation joins the outlaw to a divine figure associated with frenzy and disorder. The book draws on the comparison to explain why an outsider who embraces violence and social rejection could find the Odin figure symbolically resonant, while preserving the distinction between a historical legal term and a modern person’s self-presentation.

Gerstein’s account also connects Odin to the dead. The book notes the tradition that Odin could summon the dead and receive the souls of fallen warriors in Valhalla, and presents her observation that the corpse of a warg hanging from a gallows serves as an emblem of Odin’s power and presence. The image brings together the essay’s central strands: outlawry, death, and mythic belonging. The condemned figure is excluded by law but remains legible within a religious symbolism that makes the gallows a sign of divine association, not simply an instrument of civic punishment.

The essay’s place in the book’s argument

The book invokes Gerstein’s research as one strand in a broader reading of Vikernes. Its comparison between the ancient brennuvargr and Vikernes’s later notoriety for arson gives an older legal term a pointed modern relevance. It also notes that the essay discusses other crimes associated with warg traditions, including grave robbery, treason, theft, and manslaughter. The connection to Vikernes is presented as an interpretive case, not as evidence that the ancient laws predicted or caused his actions.

Gerstein’s contribution is thus both lexical and interpretive. The legal history supplies distinctions—between kinds of offenders, between ordinary criminality and outlaw status, and between an act and the public naming that follows it. The mythological analysis then places those distinctions beside Odin’s associations with frenzy, conflict, death, and the dead. Together, these lines of inquiry help the book examine how an outlaw identity can be fashioned from inherited language and symbols. Gerstein is significant in this account as a scholar whose work makes that historical and mythic vocabulary available for analysis, rather than as a participant in the events surrounding the Norwegian Black Metal scene.