Trondheim is a recurring location in Lords of Chaos, marking both a brief period in Snorre Westvold Ruch’s life before the events surrounding the murder and a later prison visit to Varg Vikernes. These appearances connect the city to two distinct stages of the book’s account: Ruch’s departure for Bergen in 1993 and Vikernes’s confinement years later.

Ruch’s residence and departure

Ruch says he lived in Trondheim from Christmas 1992 until the summer of 1993. During that summer, he experienced psychiatric problems and came close to being committed to an institution. Instead, he ran away to Bergen, ending his time in Trondheim just before the events he refers to obliquely as what happened next.

Asked who first proposed the idea discussed in the interview, Ruch attributed it to the Count and said he had been neither for nor against it. He also said that he did not care about Øystein and had nothing to do with him. In this recollection, Trondheim is the last named setting in the account of Ruch’s circumstances before his flight to Bergen; the passage does not specify what happened in the city itself.

The prison visit

Trondheim appears again in the book’s account of a March 2000 interview with Varg Vikernes. Didrik Søderlind travelled there with Swedish photographer Max Fredriksson to visit the prison where Vikernes had spent the preceding years largely alone. The passage identifies the destination as Trondheim prison and describes Vikernes as effectively unable to put his theories into practice while confined.

The two appearances give the city different narrative functions. For Ruch, it belongs to a short, unsettled period ending in flight; for Vikernes, it is associated with prolonged imprisonment and the interview setting from which he continued to develop political and social ideas. The book does not connect the two men’s experiences there beyond placing both accounts in Trondheim.