We Lit the Fires

We Lit the Fires was the headline over a January 20, 1993, front-page story in Bergens Tidende featuring Varg Vikernes. More than a label for the article, the phrase condensed a turning point: the underground scene was suddenly being presented to a national audience through claims of conspiracy, menace, and criminal violence, while Vikernes used the interview to shape a public identity around fear and opposition to society.

From proposed interview to front-page story

Two young men who had grown up with Vikernes first approached journalist Finn Bjørn Tønder with an interview they had conducted, hoping Bergens Tidende would publish it as Burzum prepared to release a new album. The newspaper declined their submission, but Tønder recognized the possibility of a larger story and arranged to meet Vikernes with their help. Their agreement included an understanding that Vikernes would read and approve the finished article. The resulting story placed his brooding image and statements on the front page, giving the phrase We Lit the Fires its force as a headline rather than leaving it within the underground’s own circulation.

The article’s ending connected the interview to specific allegations: it stated that Vikernes had burned eight churches and killed a homosexual at Lillehammer. The latter was the crime for which Bård Eithun would later be imprisoned. In the account of the interview’s aftermath, Vikernes said the newspaper story was much larger than expected and that police arrested him about an hour after he spoke with the journalist by phone. That sequence made the headline part of a consequential encounter between a media story, police attention, and a scene already under scrutiny.

Constructing an image of menace

The article gave Vikernes an opportunity to present Black Metal as part of a grand struggle against the forces of good. Its rhetoric included the claim, “Our purpose is to spread fear and evil,” a declaration that made antagonism toward society central to the public image being assembled. The account also describes Vikernes invoking a conspiracy and even the slaughter of rabbits. The effect was not simply to report a musical subculture: the story offered readers a dramatic persona and a narrative in which that persona could appear as evidence of a wider threat.

That image emerged from a scene whose boundaries were not governed by a stable rule book. In Norway, Black Metal was defined as much by outlook and belief as by sound, and its shifting limits were shaped by prominent personalities. By 1991, bands including Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Thorns, and Emperor were in contact with Øystein Aarseth, who planned to release many of them through Deathlike Silence Productions. Aarseth later used the phrase Norwegian Black Circle when speaking to the press about church burnings. Around his shop, access and acceptance depended on whether newcomers were trusted and regarded as serious; the environment offered a strong sense of belonging but no formal membership test. The front-page story compressed these varied relationships and changing commitments into a vivid public spectacle centered on Vikernes.

A shift in media framing

The headline appeared as Black Metal and church arsons were beginning to draw escalating attention. A later account of Norwegian press coverage describes how Black Metal displaced earlier Satanism stories in the headlines in 1993. Teenagers, mostly between fifteen and eighteen but ranging from fourteen to twenty-five, could adopt shifting identities—Nazi, Satanist, Odinist, or simply evil—and some accompanied their posturing with attacks on people or property. The distinction between self-presentation, musical affiliation, and criminal conduct was therefore crucial, but coverage could make these different things seem like parts of a single organized assault.

The subsequent international coverage intensified that framing. On March 27, 1993, Kerrang! published a cover feature built around Vikernes’s image, a burning church, and sensational language about arson, death, and Satanic ritual. Its account relied heavily on alleged remarks by Vikernes and Aarseth. The book identifies this as the first media story to label the Black Metal scene neo-fascist, while also noting that some of the claims attributed to participants were later said to have been fabricated, misunderstood, misquoted, or taken out of context. We Lit the Fires thus belongs to a sequence in which media attention both amplified the scene’s self-dramatization and supplied a frame through which audiences abroad encountered it.

Legacy and contested meaning

The article’s importance lies partly in the difference between what it made visible and what it simplified. It offered a rare view of how the scene was developing and of how Vikernes attempted to construct his media image. At the same time, its conspiracy rhetoric and the association of music with crime encouraged a reading of disparate people and actions as one coherent movement. Later reflection in the book treats the period’s statements as, in some cases, naive or deluded, and records Vikernes’s insistence that many of his remarks in the international coverage were distorted. The tension does not erase the headline’s impact: the Kerrang! feature brought Norwegian Black Metal to a global audience, but the crimes and sensational claims risked permanently eclipsing the music.

The phrase also anticipates a recurring dispute over how to interpret such coverage. In a later Norwegian case involving chapel desecration, tabloids speculated about Satanic ritual and some called for Black Metal to be outlawed, while commentators stressed that the main perpetrator had been ostracized from the scene and that psychological and drug-related factors were more plausible explanations than music or Satanism. That later episode is not the event named by the headline, but it shows the persistence of the interpretive pattern that We Lit the Fires helped establish: a shocking act could become a story about Black Metal as a whole, even when the relation between the act and the scene was uncertain.