Trolls

Trolls are figures of Norwegian folklore whose grotesque, threatening world helped shape the imagery of younger Black Metal groups. In the book, they also become a point of contact between folklore, the genre’s response to cultural censorship, and Varg Vikernes’s personal myth-making: he associates trolls with berserkers and uses Norse myth as a frame for a much larger, explicitly racialized account of ancient history.

Folklore and Cultural Censorship

Norwegian folktales bequeath a landscape populated by trolls and witches, set among forests that carry a sense of foreboding. The book presents this legacy as a substantial influence on younger Black Metal groups, whose work drew on a grotesque imaginative world largely absent from ordinary media culture. Its argument is not simply that musicians borrowed folkloric creatures: it links their attraction to the macabre with a national environment in which horror and violence were heavily restricted.

The account describes horror culture as having little place in Norway, with foreign horror films routinely censored or banned. Even an episode of the children’s series Colargol the Singing Bear was stopped by Norwegian National Broadcasting because it featured a gun. The book suggests that this broader suppression helped create a cultural void, and that Black Metal’s appetite for violent and macabre imagery grew partly in reaction to it. Trolls thus belong to a folklore that could supply what mainstream media withheld: an imaginative vocabulary of menace and the grotesque.

Trolls in Black Metal

The influence did not take one fixed visual or musical form. Ulver, for example, abandoned traditional Black Metal imagery and symbolism in favor of trollish atmospheres. The distinction matters: trolls could inform a group’s mood and imaginative setting even when the band moved away from conventional genre iconography. The evidence also notes the existence of a band called Troll, showing the creature’s direct presence in the scene’s naming as well as its wider folkloric influence.

The book places this turn toward folklore within a generational context. Black Metal adherents were often in their late teens or early twenties, newly able to pursue their interests with greater independence from parents and other moral authorities. The forbidden or censored did not remain merely absent; the account suggests that access to such imagery could prompt an eager embrace of it. Trolls, with their associations with threatening forests and grotesque folklore, suited that reversal.

Berserkers and Tolkien

In an interview about leaving Old Funeral and starting Burzum, Vikernes described the project’s earlier name as Uruk-hai, referring to the beings in J. R. R. Tolkien’s stories. He connected Tolkien’s mythology to Norse mythology and explained his attraction to Sauron and his followers rather than the hobbits. In that account, trolls resemble berserkers: large figures who go berserk. He also likened the Uruk-hai to the Ulfhedhnar, or wolfcoats, and treated the wolf element as heathen.

This comparison makes the troll more than a borrowed monster. Vikernes uses it as a bridge between Tolkien’s fictional world and a conception of Norse warrior figures, folding the creature into a personal chain of associations that leads from dark fantasy to occult interest and heathen identity. The account presents these as Vikernes’s interpretations, not as an established equivalence between the traditions.

Norse Myth and Vikernes’s Cosmology

The book also places trolls within a Norse mythic allusion involving Hymir, Thor, and the Midgard Serpent: Hymir sends his trolls to take revenge on Thor after Thor goes fishing and catches the serpent. The narrative then compares this episode with its account of a war on Atlantis. In Vikernes’s cosmology, that conflict ends with Atlantis sinking and the Aryans seeking refuge elsewhere; the book describes his further claim that only Northern Europe preserved them as a pure race as part of his racial mythology, not as historical fact.

Across these uses, trolls shift from inherited folklore figures to signs within competing imaginative systems: a dark folkloric inheritance, an alternative to sanitized media, a model for berserker violence, and a link between modern fantasy and Vikernes’s mythic reconstruction. Their significance lies less in a single defined role than in how readily they connect those worlds.