Varg Vikernes’s imprisonment

Varg Vikernes’s imprisonment followed his conviction for murder, arson, and illegal weapons offenses, and became more than a period of confinement: it was the setting in which he defended the acts that had brought him there and tried to turn his worldview into a systematic body of writing. The book traces a tension between the concrete restrictions imposed on him and the intellectual and political projects he pursued from inside prison. His sentence curtailed his freedom of action, while his explanations and writings sought to present that confinement as evidence of a wider conflict with the society he opposed.

Sentence and public standing

At the 1994 proceedings, Vikernes received twenty-one years in prison for murder, church arson, and possession of illegal weapons. In his own later account of the sentence, he itemized three church fires, an attempted burning of a bell tower, the theft and storage of 100 kilograms of dynamite and 50 kilograms of glynite, and break-ins at cabins from which two books were stolen. He said that he had confessed to the explosives offense. That account is his summation of the case, not a neutral judicial inventory; the book separately states that the resulting statements and police interviews were sufficient to convict him of murder and arson as well as weapons possession.

The sentence placed Vikernes, then twenty-one, in maximum-security prison for a term the book describes as Norway’s equivalent of a life sentence. The scale of the punishment distinguished his outcome from those of several other people convicted in the same wave of cases. Bård Eithun received fourteen years for murder, while Snorre Westvold Ruch, identified as Vikernes’s accomplice in the killing of Øystein Aarseth, received eight. Other participants in church burnings, including Samoth and Jørn Inge Tunsberg, received sentences of two to three years in minimum-security institutions after confessing to police. Fines imposed on people involved in the arsons were also intended to cover the damage and reconstruction costs caused by the fires.

The proceedings had a public consequence beyond imprisonment. During the spring 1994 court cases, Vikernes quickly became a pariah in the national consciousness. Newspapers and television focused on him, and the account emphasizes that his own conduct and statements supplied further material for the coverage. The sentence thus fixed his legal status while the publicity made him a central figure in the public understanding of the cases.

His account of violence and responsibility

Vikernes resisted the description of himself as a ringleader of an organized campaign. He said that there had been no such organization and denied being found guilty of burning Fantoft Stave Church. At the same time, he identified that fire as the event that triggered the wider sequence of church burnings. He argued that the date, 6 June, had been interpreted through Satanic symbolism, while he connected it instead to the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and to Hordaland, the county he said was his own. His account therefore combined a denial of organizational leadership with a claim that the fire had initiated a chain of events whose meaning others had misunderstood.

He also presented the killing of Øystein Aarseth as a response to a threat. In his account, he believed Aarseth intended to stun him, restrain him, and kill him; he said that this belief, together with a purportedly contradictory friendly letter and talk of getting rid of him, led him to act first. In another explanation, he framed honorable treatment as reciprocal: because he expected Aarseth to treat him dishonorably, he saw no obligation to show mercy. These are Vikernes’s stated justifications, not findings that establish the alleged threat as fact. The book reports that trial testimony characterized the killing as premeditated and that Vikernes had accomplices in the journey and its arrangements.

His explanations extended beyond the murder. He represented grave desecration as revenge for the earlier desecration of heathen burial places, and portrayed church burning and vandalism as necessary resistance to Christian influence. In prison writing, he again described the killing as self-defense and defended the destruction of churches as a means of rescuing fellow Norwegians from what he regarded as Judeo-Christian influence. Across these accounts, he recast punishment and criminal responsibility within a framework of retaliation, self-defense, and political necessity. The book records these claims as part of his self-presentation, while also setting them against the convictions and sentences arising from the court proceedings.

Writing under confinement

During his first year in prison, Vikernes began committing his views to paper. He wrote about Norse gods and tribal practices as he understood them, trying to apply them to modern life as values and behaviors that could be revived. His writing also defended the actions behind his sentence. He aimed to present a systematic worldview, but the conditions of confinement shaped how that work could be produced and preserved.

At first, prison authorities allowed him a computer. He used it for correspondence and preliminary texts for a nationalist heathen codex; some essays reached correspondents and appeared in underground publications in Europe. Much of this early output concerned Nordic mythology and cosmology. After he had compiled a substantial portion of his book, authorities confiscated the computer. Vikernes said that he was able to have it sent out of prison, preserving the material on its hard drive, but that the confiscation prevented him from continuing to write in the same way. He said he composed the first part in 1994 and the second in early 1995, and that the need to finish quickly led him to put many subjects into the work at once.

He titled the book Vargsmål, a name the account translates as the speech or song of Varg. Its allusion to the Old Norse poetic tradition, especially Hávamál, placed his own writing in relation to poems associated with counsel, conduct, and the deeds of Odin. The title was not merely descriptive: it framed the imprisoned writer as a speaker addressing a community through inherited mythic language. In this way, the book became both a repository for his political and religious ideas and an attempt to claim a place for himself within the tradition he invoked.

Restricted outlets and continuing work

Confinement did not end Vikernes’s creative activity, but it narrowed the means available to him. In a 2000 interview, the book describes him as spending the preceding years practically alone in Trondheim prison on Norway’s west coast. It presents the prison as a place where he was effectively hindered from applying his theories in practical life, yet had time to continue formulating political and social strategies. Isolation and intellectual production therefore appear together: restrictions on action did not prevent the development of plans and arguments on paper.

Music remained another outlet, though his relationship to it changed. Vikernes distanced himself from Black Metal and from Rock and Roll, even disputing that the early Burzum releases belonged to Black Metal. Nevertheless, he kept Burzum active and, during periods when he was permitted to use recording equipment, developed its sound toward somber ambient Electronica. The account notes that later records, considered alongside their mystical liner imagery, could be described as dark New Age music. That direction ended when access to recording equipment was cut off. By the time of the account, he was not permitted to listen to CDs; the only music he could hear came through MTV.

Denied that musical outlet, he concentrated more heavily on writing. His prison work included political tracts, a mythology book titled Germansk Mytologi og Verdensanskuelse, and fiction, including a short novel. The book characterizes the fiction as dramatizing National Socialist rhetoric. In the arc of his imprisonment, the pattern is one of substitution rather than simple silence: the computer was taken away, recording access was later restricted, and writing became the principal medium through which he continued to organize and circulate his ideas. Prison constrained his practical reach while furnishing the time, and repeatedly changing limits, that shaped his efforts to turn those ideas into a durable program.