Light On Dark Water

Who or what, you ask, is Varg? Varg Vikernes, the most notorious of the Scandinavian black metal musicians who took the ordinary heavy metal fascination with darkness and violence far more seriously than other bands. In an awful lot of metal, there's an element of schtick in the whole thing; sometimes there's a bit of tongue-in-cheek, or just an adolescent desire to shock, not to mention a great deal of macho posturing. The black metal crowd was much more serious, at least a lot of them. They attained great notoriety in the early 1990s when some of them became actively criminal and burned several historic Norwegian churches. Then in 1993 Varg murdered a fellow musician and was sentenced to 21 years in prison. He was released in 2009 after 15 years and moved to France where he lives with his wife and three, soon to be four, children. (See Wikipedia for a great deal of information.)

A week or so ago he and his wife were arrested on suspicion of planning a terrorist massacre. Apparently they were released pretty quickly, but Vikernes is still–if Google's translation of this Norwegian news story is correct–facing charges of violating France's anti-racism laws in writings on his web site. 

He has apparently become a pretty serious racist and nationalist in a very Nazi-like vein: anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, nature-worshipping, pagan-fantasizing. Here's a segment of an interview in which he talks a lot of ahistorical rot about the origins of Christianity, rot which he firmly believes and discusses at great length on his web site.

How seriously should one take this sort of thing?–as a social force, I mean. There's no reason to think he himself is not perfectly serious, and the people who comment on his web site seem to. Is it anything more than a handful of cranks blathering on the web? I really don't have any idea. But it doesn't seem far-fetched that these sentiments would strike a chord with a certain number of alienated young people in a Europe dominated by a culturally self-destructive but personally power-seeking elite.

Curious about his music? Try something from this list. "Burzum," by the way, is the word for "darkness" in the Black Speech that Tolkien invented for the orcs. Vikernes for a time used the stage name "Count Grishnakh," which you may remember as the name of an orc soldier. It is difficult to enter into the mind of someone who could read The Lord of the Rings and want to be an orc.