Black metal named its bands in languages nobody in the rehearsal room could speak, and it did so on purpose. Begun in 1991 by one musician working alone, the solitary project out of Bergen tore its name off the inscription on the One Ring and went out into the tape trade as Burzum, the Black Speech word for darkness that J.R.R. Tolkien built for the servants of Mordor, a tongue with a few dozen attested words and no living speaker, precisely the qualification the second wave wanted.
A band name in this music is a runestone raised at the treeline, cut in a script the valley below cannot read, and it does the same work the first tremolo riff does on the record: it tells the stranger to turn back before the first shriek on the tape has sounded. Nobody translated the stones. That was never their purpose.
The stones were cut in four kinds of script, and they read best in order of distance from home: the invented tongue first, then the dead ones out of grimoires and ancient temples, then the ancestral ground of Old Norse and Icelandic, and last of all the plain words copied off somebody else's tape. The illegible logos and the painted faces that stand beside these names belong to the wider story. The name comes before either of them. A band has to have one before anyone can draw it.
Black Speech cut over the door
Tolkien printed the Ring inscription in The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, and its last line closes on agh burzum-ishi krimpatul, "and in the darkness bind them". Varg Vikernes had already played, under the name Uruk-Hai after Tolkien's breed of heavy orc, in a tape act that split in 1990 without releasing anything at the time, before he cut the single noun off that line for the project he started in 1991. He was convicted in May 1994 of the murder of Øystein Aarseth and of arson. Every Burzum record since has carried the name chosen three years earlier.
Founded in 1992 by the guitarist Infernus, the second Tolkien band of the same city stripped its name off the fold-out map at the back of The Lord of the Rings and became Gorgoroth, the plateau of ash and slag at the heart of Mordor where Sauron's armies camped, a Sindarin name built on a root that Tolkien's own word lists gloss as dread or horror. Its first album, Pentagram, came out on Embassy Productions in September 1994. The map had done the naming. The band only had to read it.
The raid did not stop at the North Sea. The duo from the southern Netherlands formed in 2003 went into the same Sindarin and came back as Carach Angren, the iron jaws, the fortified gap Tolkien also called the Isenmouthe, where the ash plains of Mordor close on the inner valley of Udûn. Fenriz of Darkthrone ran a solo project as Isengard, Saruman's fortress, and put out Høstmørke under that name in 1995. The invented tongue had one advantage over every real one. Nobody anywhere could correct its grammar.
Demons called by their proper names
The dead languages came next, and the grimoires had done the collecting already. Formed in 1990 by the guitarist Morgan Håkansson with a declared aim, later put to him in interview after interview, of becoming the most blasphemous band in the world, the Swedish outfit took the name of the head of the Babylonian pantheon, Marduk, the god who in the Enûma Eliš splits the body of the sea dragon Tiamat in two and hangs one half overhead as the sky. Heaven, in that story, is built out of a killing.
Vorphalack founded the band in the Swiss Valais in 1987; his brother joined a year later as Xytraguptor. Together they raised it as Samael, after the accuser and angel of death of Talmudic and later Jewish lore. The Finnish trio formed in 1989 settled on Beherit, given out as a Syriac word for Satan, an etymology no source outside the band's own telling has ever pinned down. The Austrian duo formed in 1993 signed itself Abigor, a grand duke of hell who in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, in the illustrated 1863 edition, rides out as a knight with lance and sceptre at the head of sixty legions.
Latin reached the sleeves rather than the names. The band of the Mordor plateau later bolted church Latin onto the covers of its own records, turning the Jesuit motto ad majorem Dei gloriam inside out for Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam in 2006 and following it with Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt in 2009, titles in the language of the Mass turned against the Mass itself. Gorgoroth kept its Sindarin name through all of it.
A demon's name lifted from a grimoire is a live coal carried in a clay pot from one pyre to the next: the books had kept it glowing through four centuries of printers and inquisitors, and a band had only to tip it onto the first bar of a rehearsal tape for the whole cassette to catch. Nobody had to invent the fire. It was already lit.
The invented tongue had one advantage over every real one. Nobody anywhere could correct its grammar.
Lava, fog and the old words at home
Formed in 1993 by Shagrath, Silenoz and Tjodalv, the Norwegian trio crossed the sea to Iceland for its name and came back with Dimmu Borgir, the dark castles, the field east of Lake Mývatn where lava from an eruption some 2,300 years ago spread over a lake, then drained away and left its crust standing as towers, arches and caves. Icelandic folklore makes it the place where Satan landed when he was thrown out of heaven, and the entrance to the catacombs of hell. The debut, For all tid, followed on No Colours Records in 1995.
That field is fire poured out and then halted by the frost halfway through its own collapse, black basalt standing up in the shape of battlements nobody ever built, and it describes the band that took its name better than any press release could: an orchestra poured molten into the moulds of a fortress and left out in the northern cold until it set.
Closer to home the names grew shorter and quieter. The Bergen musician Hoest had played as Thule from 1993 before renaming the project Taake in 1995, the old spelling of the Norwegian word for fog. Founded by Dolk in 1994, the band from the Norwegian east took Kampfar, which it describes as an old Norse cry to Odin before battle. A word out of the grandparents' speech needs no translation at home. Everywhere else it sits like frost on a window. It can be seen, and it stays shut.
Names copied off another band's tape
The plainest stones were copied off other stones. Founded in 1984 by Euronymous, Necrobutcher and Manheim, the teenage trio south of Oslo pulled its name out of the running order of Venom's Welcome to Hell, released by Neat Records in 1981, where the fourth track is "Mayhem with Mercy", and became Mayhem. In 1986 the four from Kolbotn started out as Black Death, dropped it in 1987 and became Darkthrone, an English compound nobody had to look up.
The Uppsala band formed in 1998 went back to Von's 1992 demo Satanic Blood, found a song there called "Watain" and kept the title as its own name, Watain. A name copied off a cassette carries the cassette with it. The demos, rehearsal tapes and first pressings that took these borrowed words out into the world are now the quarry of the Black Metal Records Collectors Chase.
Invented, dead, ancestral or borrowed, every one of these words was raised at the same treeline and faces the same way, outward, across the desolation below, at a listener who was never meant to understand it and was expected to keep walking all the same. The logos made the names unreadable a second time. The stones are still standing.
