Musician Kristian ‘Varg’ (Wolf) Vikernes, who recently went on trial in France for ‘inciting racial hatred and glorifying war crimes,’ isn’t a household name. Even within the extreme heavy metal scene he helped create back in the early 90s his name is slowly diminishing if not into oblivion, then into ignominy. He is, however, an interesting character and the story of his persecution, first in his native Norway and now in France, is worth chronicling for TOO readers.

Born in 1973, Vikernes was the son of an electronics engineer and an oil company employee. When he was about 6 years old, the family moved for about a year to Baghdad, Iraq, because Vikernes’ father was then working for the Iraqi regime developing a computer program. Since there were no places available in the English school in Baghdad, the young Vikernes went to an Iraqi elementary school during this time. Vikernes claims it was then that he became aware of racial matters. Corporal punishment was not uncommon in the school, and on one occasion Vikernes had a quarrel with a teacher and called him “a monkey.” But, as Vikernes perceived it, the teachers “didn’t dare to hit me because I was white.” Vikernes’ mother also recalls how they spent a year in Iraq, and that “the other children in his class would get slapped by their teachers; he would not.” In general, both of his parents appear to have been racially conscious. His father would frequently express anxieties about the increasingly multi-ethnic makeup of their hometown. About his mother, Vikernes says that she was “very race conscious,” in the sense that she was afraid that Vikernes “was going to come home with a black girl.”

The teenaged Vikernes founded the one man music project Burzum in 1991, quickly establishing himself as a precocious and formidable musical talent. In doing so he became part of an emerging Norwegian black metal scene. Although now dominated by often ridiculous pageantry, kitsch and costuming, the early black metal scene was a reaction against the bloated commercialism of American metal music. Superficially, the music was thematically pre-occupied with anti-Christian lyrics, but beneath this tactical move for shock-value were deeper ideas and inspirations: disillusionment with the direction of modern society, hypocrisy in religion, the loss of European identities, the dark and foreboding Nordic landscape, and even the harsh northern weather itself. Read more