What is the first name of the person whose belief reveal the confused nature of ideas about Vikings in the Norwegian black metal scene?
Ideologically, Varg Vikernes's one-man project Burzum helped inspire the Viking metal scene through his strongly held racist, nationalistic, and anti-Judeo-Christian beliefs, and his longing for a return to paganism. In Trafford and Pluskowski's opinion, Vikernes' beliefs, which had culminated in the burning of several churches, including the twelfth-century Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen, reveal the confused nature of ideas about Vikings in the Norwegian black metal scene. They note, "His tastes seem originally not for the unmediated medieval itself as for J. R. R. Tolkien: he adopted the name 'Count Grishnackh', based upon an orc in The Lord of the Rings, and named Burzum after a Tolkienian word for 'darkness'." They postulate that only in retrospect did Vikernes "cloak his actions in an Oðinic garb and claim the motivation of an attempt to restore Norse paganism for his church burning". While in prison, Vikernes released the book Vargsmål, which Trafford and Pluskowski call an echoing of the Hávamál, though with "an eye on Mein Kampf". According to Trafford and Pluskowski, "proving both that it is not just the early medieval past to which he looks for inspiration, and that he will use any historical weapon at his disposal to offend Norwegian liberal opinion, it is notable that he has recently added the name Quisling to his own, and is even attempting to claim some sort of kinship to the wartime collaborator".Vikernes himself has connected the church burnings to an idea of resurgent Viking paganism. The first such burning, that of Fantoft Church on June 6, 1992, was thought by many to be related to Satanism, since the burning occurred on the sixth day of the week, on day six of the sixth month and was thus a reference to the Number of the Beast. Vikernes contends that the date June 6 was really picked because the first recorded Viking raid (upon Lindisfarne) occurred, according to Vikernes, on June 6, 793. Quorthon acknowledged that nationalist elements had always been present in the Viking metal scene, and, in the early 1990s, these elements hardened into explicit racism and anti-Semitism, particularly among Heathen adherents. However, by the late 1990s, Viking metal pulled back from the neo-Nazi direction toward which it was headed, once many musicians from the Oslo scene died or were jailed.
Varg