Rumour is a pipe blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, and of so easy and so plain a stop that the blunt monster with uncounted heads can play upon it.William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
Two things are true at once and almost every account of this subject drops one of them. A group of people in Oslo and Bergen between 1991 and 1993 knew each other, held a shared set of positions, and included several individuals who went on to commit arson and murder and were convicted for it. There was also no organisation. No membership, no leadership with the authority to order anything, no roll, no meetings, and no body that any Norwegian court has ever found to exist.
The Inner Circle is a name, and names are cheap. What follows separates the part that is documented from the part that is invented, and says which is which in plain terms, because the confusion between the two has been doing work for thirty years and most of that work has been commercial.
Where the phrase came from
It came from inside. Oystein Aarseth described the people around his shop as an organised cell of militant satanists, and he described it that way to journalists, in letters and in interviews, at a point when the group he was describing amounted to a handful of teenagers who had nowhere else to be. Bergen had a parallel name, the Black Circle, applied to the people around a different set of bands. Neither term had a definition and both were used loosely by the people who coined them.
The press then did what the press does with a good name. A Bergen daily printed an anonymous confession to church arson on 20 January 1993. Ten weeks later a British weekly gave its cover to the scene and attached the word terrorists, and from that point the phrase existed in English with an implied structure behind it that had never been described, let alone evidenced. The four years the coverage was reporting on are set out in KaosMetal's chapter on the second wave.
What stands up
The documented part is smaller than the legend and more interesting. There was a shop, at a known address, open for about eighteen months. There was a label run from its back room with nine releases. There was a cellar people slept in, a mail order list, a large quantity of correspondence, and a set of stated positions about how records should sound and who was permitted to make them. That is a scene with a headquarters, which is rare and worth studying, and it is not a secret society.
The crimes are documented too, and they were prosecuted as what they were, which is individual acts by individual people. Five musicians received prison sentences between 1994 and 1995 for arson, for murder and for related offences, terms running from sixteen months to twenty one years, and the outcomes are a matter of public record including the acquittals. None of those trials established a controlling organisation, because no evidence of one was produced.
| Claim | Status | What it rests on |
|---|---|---|
| A group around one Oslo shop shared an ideology and a doctrine about the music | Documented | The shop, the label, the records, the surviving correspondence |
| People from that group committed arson and killing | Documented | Five convictions, 1994 to 1995, sentences of sixteen months to twenty one years |
| The phrase was used by the scene itself, not only by the press | Documented | Aarseth's own statements to journalists in 1992 and 1993 |
| It was an organised cell of militant satanists | Unsupported | One man's description of himself, repeated by newspapers |
| It had members, membership cards and meetings | Myth | Denied by the people named as members; no document has surfaced |
| A leader ordered the church fires | Myth | Not alleged successfully in any trial; most fires produced no conviction at all |
| It operated nationally with a list of targets | Myth | Nothing. It appears first in press coverage and then in books drawn from that coverage |
What does not stand up
The membership is the load bearing invention. Every other claim rests on it, and it has never been supported by a document, a witness, a charge or a verdict. There is no list because there was no list to make. The Bergen and Oslo names were separate and were used by different people about different groups, and merging them into one national body was done by journalists, not by anyone in Norway who was actually in a band.
An organisation with no members, no minutes and no address is not an organisation. It is a rumour with a very good title.
The coordination claim fails on the arithmetic. More than fifty attacks on Christian buildings were counted in Norway between 1992 and 1996 and the great majority produced no conviction at all, many of them committed by people with no band, no label and no connection to Oslo who had read the newspapers and wanted the same photograph taken of them. A coordinated campaign leaves evidence of coordination. This one left a trail of teenagers acting alone.
Who the myth was useful to
It was useful to almost everybody, which is why it survived. It gave one shopkeeper an authority in the scene that his actual position could not have supported. It gave newspapers in two countries a story with a structure, a leader and a threat, which is a far better story than a set of unconnected crimes by young men. It gave bands abroad a reason to be taken seriously and it recruited a generation of teenagers across Europe who bought the records because of the reputation.
Then it was useful commercially, and it still is. It gave a 1998 American book its shape and a 2018 feature film its plot, and both are read by people who have no other source. It sells shirts. What the myth has never once done is explain a piece of music, which is the only thing that would justify the space it takes up.
What the people named have said since
It's just a name that was invented for the people who hung out at the shop. There wasn't anything like members and membership cards and official meetings.
Bard Eithun, interviewed in Lords of Chaos, 1998
That denial comes from the very book that did most to spread the story, which is the neatest irony in the whole affair. Varg Vikernes has said the same thing in blunter terms, that the name was made up to make people believe such a thing existed and that it never did. Both men have obvious reasons to minimise, and it would be careless to take either as a final word. But their accounts converge with the court record, with the absence of any documentary trace, and with the plain scale of the thing, which was around thirty people, most of them under twenty one, in a country where they all knew each other by post before they met.
The honest verdict is unglamorous. There was a scene with a doctrine, a headquarters and a very high tolerance for its own worst members, and inside it a small number of people committed serious crimes for which they were tried and sentenced. Calling that an inner circle adds a hierarchy that did not exist and removes the individual responsibility that did. Both of those changes flatter everyone involved, which is why the phrase has outlived every person who could have corrected it.
The music that came out of the same rooms is a separate subject and a better one, and it is set out in second Wave Black Metal Explained.
For the genre from the beginning, including everything that happened before and after Norway, read the full story.
