Viking Age

The Viking Age functions in the book as a contested inheritance rather than a simple historical backdrop. Musicians draw on Norse gods, ancestral memory, and images of Viking life to redirect Black Metal away from borrowed Satanic horror toward a northern past; later, figures such as Varg Vikernes present that past as a living force capable of shaping modern identity and action. The account traces the appeal of this inheritance while distinguishing musical mythmaking and political claims from the independent practice of Ásatrú.

A Past Recast in Music

Bathory’s turn toward Norse themes marked a significant change in the sound and imagery associated with the emerging Black Metal scene. On Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, the band replaced the earlier album’s B-grade horror presentation with a painting of the Wild Hunt, or Oskorei, drawn from Scandinavian and Teutonic folklore. The music inside the cover remained brutal, but its aggression was carried by more orchestrated songs, clearer vocals, and lyrics the book describes as more thoughtful. The opening instrumental evokes Odin riding across the heavens; the final title song looks toward ancient ancestors and the freedom associated with their world.

The change was not merely decorative. The book presents Blood Fire Death as Bathory’s abandonment of the childish, foreign Satanism of its early inspiration in favor of a heathen mythological legacy associated with its own forefathers. It argues that this turn toward ancestral archetypes would become a central resource for the generation of Black Metal that followed. The Viking Age thus entered the genre not as a carefully reconstructed historical setting, but as a store of images and inheritances through which musicians could claim a distinct northern identity.

Bathory developed that approach across what the book calls an Ásatrú trilogy. Hammerheart, released in 1990, adopts a more personal viewpoint and attempts to explore the mindset of a Viking Age practitioner of Ásatrú. Its extended songs, clearly sung vocals, choral backdrops, and acknowledgment of Richard Wagner in the credits support a more epic musical form. The cover depicts a nobleman’s Viking ship burial, presenting the past through romanticized ceremonial imagery. In 1991, Twilight of the Gods continued the classical musical direction, while its lyrics drew on Nietzsche and included veiled references to SS divisions in World War II Germany. That combination complicates any reading of the trilogy as straightforward religious revival: the book describes an evolving musical and ideological construction, not a single, consistent historical account.

Performance and Ancestral Identity

Unleashed, a Swedish Death Metal band, offers a related but distinct example. Rather than focusing on the gore associated with many of its contemporaries, the group dedicated a substantial number of songs to the Viking Age and old Norse religion. At concerts, singer and bassist Johnny Hedlund spoke against Christianity and urged listeners to treat self-preservation as a highest principle. The band members wore Mjöllnir amulets, and Hedlund sometimes returned to the stage carrying a Viking drinking horn. He dedicated songs such as “Into Glory Ride” to his Viking ancestors, drank from the horn, and poured some of its contents toward the audience. These repeated actions made tradition part of the performance itself, connecting music with a publicly enacted ancestral identity.

The book links such practices to an atavistic energy that would also draw Black Metal bands, but it does not treat the performances as evidence of an unbroken survival from the Viking Age. The horn, amulets, songs, and invocations are modern acts of selection and presentation: they make the past available as a forceful image in a contemporary musical setting.

Archetypes, Revival, and Political Claims

Varg Vikernes framed his own work in terms of the return of primordial forces. He presented Burzum as a resurrection of such forces and described the Norse gods not as supernatural beings but as archetypes belonging to the northern race and preserved in ancestral memory. In his account, making this interpretation visible could awaken a heathen identity in others. The book connects that claim to his justification for church burnings, which he represented as a way of reactivating Odin and ancestral religion in public life. These are Vikernes’s ideological claims, not independent evidence that modern action reproduces Viking Age beliefs or practices.

The wider revival described in the book has a different institutional history. Stephen McNallen, drawn to Norse heathen religion in the late 1960s, composed rituals and founded the Viking Brotherhood, which developed into the Ásatrú Free Assembly. The book reports that people in England, Iceland, and the eastern United States formed groups devoted to northern European gods around the same period, without knowing of one another. It presents the synchrony as a question open to interpretation, mentioning a Jungian explanation, rather than establishing a direct historical chain from the Viking Age.

In Norway and Sweden, the book notes growing interest in indigenous religion and identifies Draupnir as a heathen group recognized by the Norwegian government; Draupnir and Bifrost held regular gatherings that included blot, or symbolic sacrifice. It emphasizes that these practitioners had no specific connection to Black Metal. Public assumptions that they did were a liability, and Vikernes’s frequent statements about his own heathen beliefs made it harder for the organizations to dispel that association. The distinction matters: a shared reference to Norse religion does not establish shared membership, aims, or methods.

From Regional Inheritance to Global Symbol

The Viking Age’s musical afterlife also traveled beyond Scandinavia, but the book treats the spread of Black Metal and the spread of any particular religious tradition as separate matters. It describes Norway as the scene’s best-known center because of extensive international media attention, while stressing that Black Metal was becoming popular in many parts of the world. Scandinavian activity could serve as an example for distant scenes: the book, for instance, describes East Germany as a setting where Black Metal ideology contributed to crimes shaped by a Scandinavian precedent. That account concerns the circulation of a musical and rebellious identity; it does not show that Viking Age history itself was transmitted intact.

Across these examples, the Viking Age operates as both cultural material and a claim about belonging. Bathory reshapes it through album art, composition, and lyrics; Unleashed stages it through concert ritual; Vikernes invokes it as ancestral memory and a rationale for action. The book’s account gains precision by setting these appropriations beside the independent modern Ásatrú organizations, whose separation from Black Metal it explicitly records. What persists across the different uses is not a demonstrated continuity of practice, but the capacity of an imagined ancestral past to give contemporary music and identity a language of origin, defiance, and return.