Middle Ages

The Middle Ages are the historical hinge between the Christianization of northern Europe and the modern Black Metal scene’s selective invocation of a pre-Christian past. In the book’s account, the period is marked by the construction of Norway’s stave churches, the Viking raids on monasteries in Britain, and the eventual ascendancy of Christianity; these histories later give the churches both architectural and symbolic weight.

Christianization and Viking resistance

The book places the building of stave churches after Christianity arrived in Scandinavia around 1000 CE. It also describes Viking raiders from the Norwegian coasts attacking monasteries in Britain several centuries after Saint Columcille’s prophecy of danger to churches and religious communities. The account presents these raids as part of a larger confrontation: the newly established Christian forces eventually subdued their heathen opponents, and Europe became Christian to its furthest borders.

That sequence becomes a retrospective frame for later Black Metal. The book draws a broad analogy between medieval resistance to Christian expansion and modern musicians’ appeals to older pagan traditions, while also acknowledging that the connection is blurred by myth and allegory. The analogy is therefore a narrative of claimed recurrence, not evidence that medieval raiders and modern musicians formed a continuous movement.

Stave churches as a medieval legacy

Norway’s stave churches are described as distinctive wooden buildings whose construction used strong corner posts, or staves. Built after Christianity’s arrival in Scandinavia, they continued to be erected until the end of the Black Death, which swept through medieval Europe in the 1300s. Their architectural history thus spans much of the medieval period as presented in the book.

The churches’ appearance holds together Christian and older Nordic imagery. Gabled roofs rise toward sharp steeples; some exteriors were darkened or tinted blue-black with pitch, and the more elaborate buildings bore carved portals in Nordic interlace. Interior motifs could retain traces of heathen iconography, while a one-eyed carved head at Hegge was described as an echo of Odin. Dragon heads projecting from upper gables added another striking feature to the buildings’ outline.

The book estimates that as many as 1,200 stave churches may have existed in the early Middle Ages. Only thirty-two original examples were thought to remain in the second half of the twentieth century, a figure later revised to thirty-one. Their scarcity makes the medieval buildings more than a backdrop: they are surviving material traces of the Christian transformation that modern anti-Christian arsonists would later challenge.

Law, fire, and historical contrast

The book also places arson within a long history of social danger and punishment. It notes that arson appears in the oldest surviving Norse law codes. In eleventh-century England it was punishable by death; under Henry II, a person convicted of arson could be exiled after severe corporal punishment. These examples establish that the destruction of buildings by fire was treated as a grave offense well before the modern church-burning cases discussed in the book.

The medieval setting does not, however, explain those later crimes by itself. The book distinguishes ordinary historical fires, including those caused by lightning or faulty wiring, from deliberate acts, and notes that Norway had recorded church arsons before 1992 as well. Against this background, modern attacks on churches acquire a double significance: they damage vulnerable historic structures and invoke a conflict with Christianity whose origins the book locates in the medieval conversion of northern Europe.

Later uses of the medieval past

In its account of Black Metal, the book describes musicians turning toward Nordic heathen mythology after an earlier phase of Satanic imagery. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, marked a prominent change of focus: its cover drew on the Wild Hunt, and its songs invoked Norse gods. The book presents this turn toward ancestral archetypes as influential for the Black Metal that followed, not as a straightforward recovery of medieval religious practice.

The medieval past also functions as a scale of comparison in the book’s wider account of the genre. It contrasts the historical spread of Christianity and the suppression of heathen resistance with modern claims of cultural defiance, while tracing Black Metal’s later appearance across several countries. The Middle Ages consequently serve both as a period of historical change and as a symbolic resource repeatedly reworked in modern arguments about religion, ancestry, and rebellion.