Chapter 8: The Norwegians as “Authentic” Vikings: Enslaved, Windir and Wardruna

The tensions over Viking metal outlined in Chapter 7 will continue to be explored in this chapter, which turns the focus on Norway. Black metal has become the form of heavy metal most associated with Norway, and its leading acts receive recognition, cultural awards and funding. Even the bands that reject such recognition by taste-makers are unmasked and made safe by becoming objects of mockery, or lose their fire when surviving band-members sue each other for the rights to use the names and logos (Spracklen, 2012, 2018d).¹ When the scene first appeared, however, it was in the wake of church burnings, murders and outrageous behaviour by many of the musicians associated with Mayhem guitarist Euronymous and his record shop and label in Oslo (Kahn-Harris, 2007; Spracklen, 2006). The genesis of this second wave of black metal was partly inspired not only by the early Bathory albums, but also by the belief that death metal and extreme metal had lost its anti-authoritarian, anti-Christian essence (Spracklen, 2006). Euronymous and his acolytes attacked American death metal bands in fanzine interviews for not being truly Satanic, and not looking evil. They started to impose a new sound and a new look, adopting corpse-paint alongside the all-black of goth rock (Spracklen & Spracklen, 2018). Black metal became a music driven by elitism and misanthropy, and the mis-reading of Nietzsche. The crimes led to headlines around the world, and to the ideology and style of black metal becoming deeply popular in the extreme metal underground, even as mainstream media rejected it as deeply stupid, or deadly dangerous (Kahn-Harris, 2007).