Varg Vikernes–Øystein Aarseth

The relationship between Varg Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth is defined in the available account by Vikernes’s claim that he killed Aarseth to forestall an intended attack, and by his insistence that regretting the killing would mean regretting his own survival. Other commentators frame that certainty differently: as conviction and courage entwined with martyrdom, a poor grasp of reality, and a public persona amplified by the press.

The killing as Vikernes explains it

Asked whether he regretted killing Øystein Aarseth, Vikernes held to his established explanation: the killing had been a pre-emptive strike because Aarseth had planned to kill him. He treated the two men’s survival as inseparable, arguing that regret for Aarseth’s death would amount to regret for being alive himself. The account records Vikernes’s justification, not independent confirmation that Aarseth planned to kill him; that distinction is central to how the relationship is described.

Martyrdom and contradiction

Garm portrays Vikernes as a neo-Viking martyr who had made himself the Jesus of his own ideals, then suffered imprisonment for them. He grants Vikernes conviction and courage while rejecting his sense of reality. In this reading, Vikernes’s conflict with Aarseth sits within a larger self-image: a man who presents himself as acting decisively for his principles, but whose chosen role carries the consequences of martyrdom. The description exposes a tension between the heroic meaning Vikernes appears to assign his actions and the critic’s view of their unreality.

Media, notoriety, and the scene

Asbjørn Dyrendal describes the early-1990s Black Metal coverage as shaped by teenagers who adopted shifting identities—among them Satanists, Nazis, and Odinists, or simply the label of being evil—and whose actions included attacks on people and property. He notes that this climate helped create the impression of a broad Satanic assault on Christians in Norway. This is scene-wide context, not a specific account of the relationship between Vikernes and Aarseth.

A separate assessment of the media’s role links its attention more directly to Vikernes’s public standing. The speaker says that conversations with journalists and people involved in Vikernes’s trial changed an earlier view that the press had not fanned the flames: media coverage had helped Vikernes build street credibility and a near-mythological image. The same account argues that intense attention heightened internal competition to become the scene’s dominant personality. Read together, these assessments show how the relationship was presented not only through Vikernes’s account of the killing, but also through the public mythology surrounding him—while leaving the precise part Aarseth played in that competition unspecified.