Wolf

The wolf carries several sharply contrasting meanings in the book: it is an outlaw figure associated with exclusion, a symbol of forces that civilized culture rejects, and a sacred animal linked to Odin and warrior traditions. Its significance lies in the friction between these meanings. The name Varg, adopted by Varg Vikernes, brings the threatening outlaw sense into contact with older Germanic associations in which wolves could be honored rather than despised; Black Metal imagery draws on both sides of that inheritance.

Name, Outlawry, and Transformation

The discussion of the wolf begins with the name Varg. Vikernes was originally given the first name Kristian, which he grew to find intolerable in his late teens. He used it when he first entered the Black Metal scene, then legally changed his name to Varg sometime in 1991–92. He said he chose it mainly for its common meaning of wolf. The book finds the choice ominous in retrospect because the name’s older Germanic uses connect it with the outlaw, while Vikernes’s later actions and public legend seemed to bring those obscure meanings into view. It does not establish that he knew this etymology when he chose the name, and the distinction matters: the correspondence is presented as striking, not as proof of a planned reference.

The linguistic history is introduced through Michael Jacoby’s dissertation, whose title connects Wargus and Vargr with the meanings criminal and wolf. The book contrasts the varg form with ulv or ulf, another Germanic root for wolf that appears in personal names and carries no comparable stigma. This distinction makes the animal’s symbolism more than a simple opposition between good and evil: even within the naming tradition, different wolf-words could suggest different social positions. The figure of the outlaw, banished from ordinary society and exposed to destruction by others, also helps explain why old accounts could surround outlaws with stories of transformation into wolves. In this symbolic pattern, exclusion from human society becomes a passage toward an animal identity.

The Wolf Beyond Christian Moral Judgment

The book describes the negative view of wolves as a development associated with Europe’s Christian period, contrasting it with pre-Christian heathen perceptions. In later associations, the wolf could become a werewolf figure, and some sources even identified the Devil himself with a werewolf. That hostile frame is not treated as the timeless meaning of the animal. Set against it is a tradition in which wolves had a place in warrior cults and in the sacred world of the old Norse gods. The contrast allows the wolf to signify not merely danger, but a challenge to the moral categories through which danger is judged.

Erik Lancelot, guitarist in Ulver, describes the mythical wolf as a solitary antagonist associated with animalism, selfishness, and brute force. He links its forest habitat to a realm outside the control of human civilization and makes the wolf a point of contact between the demonic and the cultural, chaos and order, darkness and light, the subconscious and the conscious. His account does not cast the wolf as a neutral balance between good and evil. Rather, it presents the animal as a figure for the force that a culture centered too exclusively on light has disowned. Suspicion and awe follow from that position: the wolf embodies what human society refuses to recognize in itself.

Warrior Traditions and Odin

The older warrior associations give the wolf a different standing. In Viking times, wolves served as totem animals for certain warrior cults, and the sagas mention the Ulfhethnar, or wolf-coats, who wore wolf skins. The account of the Berserkers describes warriors in special garments entering an altered state: they were said to gain superhuman strength, resist swords and fire, glare as if flames burned in their eyes, grind their teeth, froth at the mouth, gnaw their shields, and rush into combat yelping like dogs or howling like wolves. Here the wolf is not a distant emblem of wilderness but a model for a human transformation into ferocity.

The old chronicles called the Berserkers men of Odin, a god to whom Vikernes also claimed exclusive dedication. Wolves were sacred to Odin, who was accompanied by the wolf figures Geri and Freki. This connection places the wolf within a religious and martial order, rather than solely among Christian-era images of demonic threat. The distinction between varg and ulv or ulf therefore becomes especially charged: wolf imagery could name outlaw status, but it could also belong to respected warrior traditions and personal names. Vikernes’s chosen name draws force from the tension between those inheritances.

Black Metal and the Wolf Image

The wolf’s associations recur in Black Metal culture. Ulver, whose Norwegian name means wolves, provides the most direct example discussed in the book; the band’s more recent recordings at the time were based entirely on wolf lore. Lancelot’s account makes that interest legible as more than a decorative use of an animal: the wolf stands for animal power and for the parts of human life excluded by civilization’s preferred image of itself. The same image can therefore serve a broader anti-civilizational imagination without erasing its older religious and social meanings.

Across these contexts, the wolf is never reduced to one stable emblem. Its forest isolation, outlaw connotations, warrior use, and sacred place beside Odin pull in different directions. The book’s reading of Varg depends on precisely that instability: a modern name can appear to gather meanings that the person who adopted it may not have known, while later actions and legend make the old associations seem newly present. The wolf thus becomes both an inherited cultural symbol and a means through which Black Metal figures an identity set against ordinary society.