WHAT OCCURRED WHEN VARG LIVED THERE?
I’m not completely sure, but I think Varg was very shocked by things he experienced when he was in Oslo with Øystein. These things were disillusioning toward the image he had of Øystein. He was not the person Varg had thought him to be. I know he was very disappointed that Øystein came forward in the media the way he did after the church fires. He felt let down.
VARG, AGE 5
Furthermore, I know that Varg no longer wanted to have a record contract with him because Øystein did not follow up on his part of the agreement. He owed Varg a lot of money, but instead of paying it back, he bought himself expensive furniture and spent the money in very unserious ways. The mutual confidence was broken because many of the agreements they had, for example regarding distribution of the records, were not followed up by Øystein.
Thus Varg’s confidence was weakened. So when Varg got a record deal with someone else, there developed an enmity between them because Øystein would have to compete. After the church fires, I didn’t know what had happened. Øystein had to close his shop because of them. In retrospect, I heard that Øystein had said he could live off selling Burzum records by mail order the rest of his life. He didn’t need the shop anymore. If he had counted on living off this, and Varg broke with him, it is clear that his income was disappearing. Therefore, Øystein felt let down, too.
HOW DID VARG DEVELOP HIS CURRENT BELIEFS?
I have no good explanation of how Varg [came to hold such extreme viewpoints]. He had a strong need to rebel, and sometimes chose the paths that would be the most oppositional.
COULD THIS BE MORE OF A GUT REACTION THAN A CONSCIOUS IDEOLOGY? A PROVOCATION?
It usually started with that. But I feel that he now has gotten well into the ideologies he stands for, that he means what he says.
DID HE EVER EXPRESS HIS IDEAS TO YOU?
He liked to talk with people like me who disagreed with him, to have his own opinions confirmed. Very often he would say, “I won’t bother to talk with you any more, you’re hopeless.” But I thought he was even more hopeless than me.
HOW DID YOU FIND OUT ABOUT HIS INVOLVEMENT WITH THE ARSONS?
I began to have suspicions about the business with the churches when he once told me that he thought the police were quite useless because they couldn’t catch the people behind the church burnings.
I reacted when Åsane Church burned. We were in the mountains, but Varg didn’t want to come with us. When I talked with him on the phone he asked if I had heard about it. I confirmed that, and said that I thought it was awful. I asked if he agreed. He didn’t. He thought it was completely okay. That astonished me. But I didn’t really think he had been involved in it.
A YOUNG VARG
WHY DO YOU THINK THE CHURCHES WERE BURNED?
I have tried to ask him why they did it, and I have gotten the impression that it was mostly the excitement he was after. I don’t think there was a strong ideological motivation behind it.
THE MEDIA CREATED THE IMAGE OF “THE COUNT,” BUT DIDN’T VARG ALSO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS HIMSELF?
This was all based on the first interview he did. All subsequent media treatment was based on that. He incited it himself by exaggerating and making himself sensationalistic. They would wind each other up in interview situations. It was as if the worse it was, the better. He is stuck with that image. He has tried to reach the media with other points, but they are never heard. It is as if the media wants that twist to it.
WHAT DO YOU RECALL ABOUT VARG’S INTERVIEW IN BERGENS TIDENDE?
It was very embarrassing, because it was about my son. He had told me about the newspaper interview beforehand, that it was very exaggerated and that I was not going to like it. He said he was considering to contact the journalists because he felt he had exaggerated so much. I had never expected it to look like it did. I think he was quite desperate for publicity around his recording project. I think he expected to get a small piece at the end of the newspaper—instead he got the entire front page.
DID VARG’S RACISM INTENSIFY AT A CERTAIN POINT?
If he had racist tendencies to begin with, I am sure that they came to the surface when he lived in Oslo.
VARG VIKERNES
WHEN DID YOUR INTERESTS IN WORLD WAR II GERMANY BEGIN?
It’s difficult to say. When I was three years old we moved to a road named Odinsvei, “Odin’s Walk,” and we were playing with the neighbor. He had German toy soldiers, but he always wanted to have the American soldiers, because they were the big heroes in his view. So I ended up with the German soldiers, as he was five years older than I. And I actually came to like them. It developed from soldiers to running around with SS helmets and German hand grenades and a Schmeizer with a swastika on it. In time we tried to figure it out—what the hell does this mean? That’s how it really began, and it developed. I was a skinhead when I was 15 or 16. Nobody knows that. People say that suddenly I became a Nazi, but I was actually a skinhead back then. It was in waves—in ’91 I was into occultism, in ’92 Satanism, in ’93 mythology and so on, in waves.
VARG AS A TEENAGER
HOW DOES YOUR MOTHER FEEL ABOUT YOUR RACIAL VIEWS?
You know how fathers tend to be afraid that their daughter might come home with a black guy? Well, my mother was actually afraid that I was going to come home with a black girl! She’s very race conscious. She was raised in a very Christian family and when she was 12 or 13 she told her parents, “The Virgin Mary is a bitch who doesn’t even know the name of her baby’s father!” and a lot of things like that. She could just as well be my friend as she is my mother.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR FATHER?
I have very little contact with him. They’re divorced. He left about ten years ago. There wasn’t any big impact. I was glad to be rid of him; he was just making a lot of trouble for me, always bugging me. He was in the Navy. We were raised very orderly; it was a good experience. I had a swastika flag at home and he was hysterical about it. He’s a hypocrite. He was pissed about all the colored people he saw in town, but then he’s worried about me being a Nazi. He’s very materialistic, as is my mother really, but that’s the only negative thing I can say about her. The positive thing is that she’s very efficient, and in business I have to have someone take care of my money and I can trust her fully. I know she will do things in the best way.
NORWEGIAN HEADLINE:
“BLOODY TRIANGLE IN THE SATAN SCENE”
YOU GREW UP IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
Iraq, in Baghdad. I went to school there one year. My father was working for Saddam Hussein! They were developing a computer program to control the economy of Iraq. He brought the family with him when he was working there.
WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM THAT TIME?
A lot of things. I visited Babylon, for example—which doesn’t exist anymore because Saddam tore the whole place down—the ruins of Babylon, and a lot of mythological sites. There were a lot of dangerous things that happened, like being chased by dogs with rabies.
WHAT WAS SCHOOL LIKE?
It was an Iraqi elementary school. The English school couldn’t take us because they were full. I went to a regular Iraqi school. I could use some basic English. I think it was my mother’s idea, because she didn’t want us to stay home, bored. We couldn’t go out too much because of the rabid dogs and all this, so she put us in school, just to keep us active.
VIKERNES PROMO PHOTO, 1993
YOU HAVE SIBLINGS?
I have a brother, one and a half years older. He’s studying at a technical school. He’s a security guard. Actually he was selling alarms to churches—fire alarms! The Police were asking, “Isn’t he the brother of Vikernes?” Yes! He was making money from it!
WHEN DID YOU BECOME AWARE OF RACIAL MATTERS?
When I was six years old I had a quarrel with a teacher, and I thought, “You monkey!” I called the teacher a monkey in Iraqi elementary school. Of course normally they’d hit the children right then and there, but they didn’t da
re to hit me because I was white.
The first contact I had with colored people was in Iraq, and after I moved back to Norway it took years before they started to move into the area, upper-class Norwegian society. In Bergen it’s a more aristocratic society I was part of, because of my mother mainly. I had very little contact with colored people, really. In Bergen we are still blessed with having a majority of whites—unlike Oslo, which is the biggest sewer in Norway.
DID YOU START TO SEE THINGS CHANGE?
When I was a skinhead there still weren’t any colored people, but there were these punks—that was more the reason I went over to the other side. But of course the main reason is weapons: German SS helmets, Schmeizers and Mausers and all these weapons. That’s what they shot British and Americans with. Great! We hated British and Americans.
SINCE THE WAR, EVERYTHING GERMAN HAS BEEN TABOO IN NORWAY AND NORWEGIAN KIDS ARE EXPOSED TO A LOT OF AMERICAN CULTURE AS A RESULT.
And I responded with hate toward American culture! Like when reading the war comic books, it was always the Americans and British shooting the Germans, like one British soldier shooting a whole platoon of Germans. This is bullshit, it wasn’t true of course. We didn’t like it. We liked the Germans, because they always had better weapons and they looked better, they had discipline. They were like Vikings. The volunteers from America were tall, blond guys, who looked much more like the ones they were attacking than some Dagos who were waving them good luck when they left home. It’s pretty absurd. The volunteers, the good men die first.
DID YOU FEEL LIKE YOU FIT INTO BERGEN SOCIETY?
Not really. Although in Bergen we have 90% of all the occultists in Norway. If you go up in the mountains around Bergen every other time you will meet some occultists. There are a lot of occult groups in Bergen—the O.T.O., the Aleister Crowley groups, etc. They have their own large groups at the university. The only real shaman in Norway lives in Bergen.
HOW DID YOU FEEL IN THESE SURROUNDINGS?
I was mostly socializing with weapon-freaks. My hobby was shooting guns, militia training, and playing in the woods with a shotgun.
BUT YOU HUNG OUT WITH SKINHEADS IN BERGEN?
There were no skinheads in Bergen. My brother shaved his head and I cut my hair short. But we were into the weapons, German weapons, and these attitudes like war means to fight, peace means to degenerate. Our big hope was to be invaded by Americans so we could shoot them. The hope of war was all we lived for. That was until I was 17, and then I met these guys in Old Funeral.
WHEN DID YOUR INTEREST IN MUSIC BEGIN?
I started playing when I was 14, playing guitar...
WHAT WAS THE BAND YOU PLAYED IN, OLD FUNERAL, LIKE?
These guys were just interested in eating. They didn’t care about my sawed-off shotgun or my dynamite, or any of these things. They were just interested in hamburgers and food, they had absolutely no interest in the weapons that I liked. Eventually I also lost interest in my weapons as well. Then came more music, and an interest in occultism developed.
VARG IN PRISON, 1995
WHAT INFLUENCED YOU TOWARD THAT?
I got interested in occultism through other friends. We played role-playing games, and some of these guys (all older than me) started to buy books on occultism, because they were interested in magic and spell casting. They showed me the books and then I bought similar things. But the music guys weren’t interested in that stuff at all, they only cared about food.
WHAT WAS THE MUSIC LIKE?
Originally it was Thrash Metal, and then it became Death-Thrash or Techno-Thrash, and I lost interest. I liked the first Old Funeral demo. It had ridiculous lyrics, but I liked the demo and that was why I joined with them. They developed into this Swedish Death Metal trend; I didn’t like that so I dropped out. But I played with them for two years.
WHAT OCCURRED AFTER YOU LEFT?
My own band, Burzum. It really began earlier as Uruk-Hai, and after I left Old Funeral I started calling it Burzum. An Uruk-Hai is the typical berserker in the Tolkien stories. There’s a lot of Norse mythology in Tolkien. We were drawn to Sauron and his lot, and not the hobbits, those stupid little dwarves. I hate dwarves and elves. The elves are fair, but typically Jewish—arrogant, saying, “We are the chosen ones.” So I don’t like them. But you have Barad-dûr, the tower of Sauron, and you have Hlidhskjálf, the tower of Odin; you have Sauron’s all-seeing-eye, and then Odin’s one eye; the ring of power, and Odin’s ring Draupnir; the trolls are like typical berserkers, big huge guys who went berserk, and the Uruk-Hai are like the Ulfhedhnar, the wolfcoats. This wolf element is typically heathen. So I sympathize with Sauron. That’s partly why I became interested in occultism, because it was a so-called “dark” thing. I was drawn to Sauron, who was supposedly “dark and evil,” so I realized there had to be a connection. That’s the reason I liked the book in the first place, because of the veil of hidden mythology.
WHAT IDEAS WERE THERE IN STARTING YOUR OWN PROJECT?
I’m not sure if I really knew what I was going to put into it. I don’t think it was that conscious. I wrote the lyrics to “Lost Wisdom,” which are very clichéd, about how we don’t know everything and the reason why is because the Christians ruined everything, to put it briefly. That’s the point, it’s like, “There’s something more in here.”
I also wrote the “Burzum” song, which appears on the Filosofem album. Very short, simple lyrics: When night falls / She cloaks the world in impenetrable darkness / A chill rises from the soil and contaminates the air / Suddenly, life has new meaning. Quite simple, more mystical really.
Later everyone thinks, “Oh, it’s all Satanism.” But to answer your question, I don’t think I knew what I wanted to do. It was more a matter of seeking, and I was doing a lot of experimenting at that time as well, with magic and runes and making magical weapons—which actually worked as well!
WHAT DOES THE WORD BURZUM MEAN?
It’s a fictional word, originally. Tolkien was a professor in Norse mythology and Norse language. When he wrote the fictional language in The Lord of the Rings books, it was very much based on Norse. So Burzum—“Burz” means night or dark, and if you take the word in plural it has “um” added, and becomes “Burzum,” meaning much night or darkness. Just like democracy claims to be “light” and “good,” I reasoned that then we obviously have to be “dark” and “evil.”
DEPENDING ON WHO’S CALLING YOU EVIL, IT COULD BE A COMPLIMENT.
Yes. But even though Burzum means darkness, it’s really the light of Odin. Darkness is light.
FROM REALITY INTO MYTH
One of Varg Vikernes’s most remarkable qualities is his ability to mythicize himself, recasting his own deeds in a new light. This is not to say the he creates outright falsifications, but rather he presents and recounts his actions selectively, amplifying certain aspects or details and ignoring others, presumably with careful deliberation.
As time progressed following his arrest after the murder of Øystein Aarseth in the latter half of 1993, Vikernes began to refer to his own ideology as heathen rather than Satanist. He increasingly downplayed the more childish Black Metal trademarks of “evil for evil’s sake” and a simplistic blasphemous attitude toward Christianity, and replaced these with a more thoughtful, encompassing point of view. Instead of being dedicated to Satan as he previously spoke of in older interviews (and most notoriously in the Bergens Tidende piece), Varg was now a comrade of the Norse high deity Odin, “the one-eyed enemy of the Christian ‘God,’” as he put it. Burzum now existed “exclusively for Odin.”5 It is true, as Vikernes explains, that a certain “Nordic” spirit had always existed within his music, thoroughly infused as it was with Tolkienisms. Whether Vikernes was ever really espousing of any kind of militant heathen outlook in his younger days is another question.
Speaking with a certain indignation to Terrorizer magazine a few years ago, Varg explained how the underlying themes of Nordic religion had always existed in his work:
&n
bsp; Take a look at me and Burzum. I have been accused of being a Satanist who suddenly turned Odinic. If the same fucks had the least knowledge about Odinism they would see it in Burzum a long time ago. On the debut we have the song “War,” which hails the Odinic idea of dying in battle. “Ea, Lord of the Depths” is the Mesopotamian Aquarius, Odin is the Norse Aquarius. On Det som engang var (What Once Was) we start with a track called “Den onde kysten” (“The Coast of Evil”) which hails all those who drowned while in Viking [on sea raids]. “En ring til aa herske” (“One Ring to Rule”) talks about Germanic people and Draupnir, the ring of Odin. “Lost Wisdom” is obviously heathen, and “Han some reiste” (“He Who Journeyed/Fared”) is dedicated to Odin when he hung himself as a sacrifice to himself. On Aske (Ashes) the title described Odin’s Reich today and “God’s” tomorrow. The first track, “Stemmen fra taarnet” (“The Call from the Tower”) is about a call from Odin on his throne called Hlidhskjálf, and the newly released album has “Inn i slottet fra droemmen” (“Into the Castle of the Dream”), which is about the [faring] to Valhalla. These are the most obvious Odinic lyrics, written over a period from ’90 to ’92. The one and only “Satanic” title is “Dominus Sathanas” on the Aske album, translated as “The Ruler Adversary” or something similar. So where the hell do they get the impression of my being a Satanist from?6
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