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Black Metal & Christianity

Relfections

I chose not to tackle a topic that had a lot of secondary sources—instead, I relied heavily on primary sources (like Until the Light Takes Us and Vikernes’ own blog posts) for my content. I also worked against a language barrier and relied heavily on Google Chrome’s “translate page” option. I also got to explore several different types of media for this project: documentaries, art, books, blog posts, and news articles.

When I first decided to research this topic I thought I would concentrate on the timeline of the church burnings and Vikernes’ conviction and imprisonment. However, that wasn’t providing a historical argument. Instead, I switched to studying the history behind the hostility between black metal and Christianity. I presented historical data and findings to show the link between early Christianity and the hostility today.

This has been an extremely interesting, if not disturbing, project. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic. If I were to take this project further, I honestly might be interested in attending a black metal show and seeing close up what it’s like. That would probably be easier to do in America, as the Christianity-hatred is more subdued and shows are less violent than Norwegian black metal shows. There are a few other parts of this project that could easily be explored further. I’m most interested in how the rumor started that black metal was a satanist cult. Vikernes touches briefly on it in Until the Light Takes Us but I’d be interested in exploring first how it started and second whether that rumor started a satanist movement in black metal (that wasn’t previously there).