Fifty attacks on Christian buildings in four years is the figure the Norwegian police were working with by 1996, and it is the figure every account since has repeated without much interest in what sits inside it. A little under half of them did real damage. The rest were attempts: a fire that would not take, a door forced and left open, a can of paraffin found in a porch on a Sunday morning. Five men went to prison. Most of the fires on the list belong to nobody.
What follows is the register in date order, with the buildings named and their ages given, because the buildings are the part that goes missing first in the retellings. A wooden church in this country is not a generic object. It is jointed pine, tarred every few years for two or three centuries, standing above a village that paid for it out of its own pocket, and it burns to the ground in under an hour. The norwegian church burnings are told almost everywhere as a story about a music scene. They were first of all a run of arson attacks on buildings that people had gone to some trouble to keep standing.
What the count actually contains
The Church of Norway recorded roughly thirty five fires in its buildings between 1990 and 2020, and the nineties hold twenty five of them, the worst decade on the record by a wide margin. Not every one of those was set on purpose. Wiring, lightning and candles account for a share of any such list, in Norway as anywhere else. Somewhere around two dozen fires and attempted fires in that decade have been attributed to people connected with the black metal scene, and 1992 on its own accounts for at least five buildings deliberately set alight.
The word attributed is carrying a great deal of weight in that sentence, and it is worth saying plainly what it means. In every Norwegian church fire of the period that was actually solved, the person convicted came out of one small music scene. That is not the same statement as the scene setting fifty fires, and the gap between the two is where most of the mythology has made its home. After 2000 the national figure falls away to eight church fires in ten years, then seven in the decade after that, which is what an ordinary rate looks like.
1992, from May to Christmas
The register opens on 23 May 1992 with a failed attempt on Storetveit Church in Bergen, later charged and proved in court. Two weeks after it, at a quarter to six on the morning of 6 June, the Bergen fire service was called to Fantoft, where a stave church raised at Fortun in Sogn around the year 1150, bought and moved south in pieces by consul Fredrik Georg Gade in 1883, was already beyond saving. Nobody has ever been convicted of that one. It produced the single object that fixed the whole business in the public mind, and it is dealt with on its own page in fantoft and the Photograph That Followed It.
Then the fires left Bergen. Revheim Church in Stavanger on 1 August. Holmenkollen Chapel above Oslo on 23 August, a timber building put up in 1903 to designs by the architect Holger Sinding-Larsen and given over to church use in 1913. Ormøya in Oslo on 1 September. Skjold in Vindafjord on 13 September, consecrated on 26 October 1887 and standing about five hundred metres from a medieval church site recorded as far back as 1322. Hauketo in Oslo on 3 October. The old church at Åsane in Bergen on Christmas Eve, a stone building of 1795.
On Christmas Day 1992 the Methodist church in Sarpsborg, built in 1857, burned as well, and a smoke diver died fighting it. That fire is the only one in modern Norwegian history with a death in it. A man from the satanist milieu was suspected and never charged. It is also, reliably, the fire that goes missing from the retellings, which prefer the medieval roof and the photograph on the record sleeve.
The only Norwegian church fire in modern times that killed someone is the one nobody was ever convicted of, and the one nobody repeats.
1993 to 1995, and the people who were in no band at all
The second half of the register is longer, thinner and almost entirely anonymous. It also runs on for two years after the arrests, which is the fact that does most damage to the idea of a directed campaign.
| Date | Building | Place | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 February 1993 | Lundby New Church | Gothenburg, Sweden | Burned |
| 13 March 1994 | Sund Church | Sund | Burned |
| 27 March 1994 | Seegård Church | Snertingdal | Burned |
| 16 May 1994 | Gol stave church | Buskerud | Attempt |
| 17 May 1994 | Åmodt Chapel | Buskerud | Attempt |
| 4 June 1994 | Frogn Church | Drøbak | Burned |
| 7 July 1994 | Church on Jeløy | Jeløy | Burned |
| 21 July 1994 | Odda Church | Odda | Attempt |
| 10 December 1994 | Åkra Church | Åkra | Attempt |
| 22 December 1994 | Askim Church | Askim | Attempt |
| 26 December 1994 | Klemetsrud Church | Oslo | Attempt |
| 25 May 1995 | Såner Church | Vestby | Burned |
| 14 June 1995 | Moe Church | Sandefjord | Burned |
| 3 November 1995 | Innset Church | Rennebu | Burned |
Almost none of that column produced a conviction, and almost none of it involved anybody who had made a record. The men whose names the newspapers were printing were by then in custody or serving sentences, since the arrests had come in August 1993 and the largest trial ran in Oslo in May 1994. Whoever was pouring paraffin into porches at Christmas 1994 was doing it after reading about it, which is a different crime with a different cause, and it is the part of the wave the coverage helped to manufacture rather than to report.
What the courts established
Varg Vikernes was arrested in Bergen on 19 August 1993. His trial opened in Oslo on 2 May 1994 and ended on 16 May with a sentence of twenty one years, the maximum available in Norwegian law at the time, for the murder of Øystein Aarseth of Mayhem, for the arson of Holmenkollen Chapel, Skjold Church and the old church at Åsane, for the attempted arson of Storetveit, and for the theft and storage of 150 kilograms of explosives. The jury acquitted him of Fantoft, so the building that gave the whole wave its picture is the one nobody was ever convicted of burning, and the judges recorded their view that the acquittal was an error without disturbing it. He got out of prison briefly in October 2003, was picked up within a day, had thirteen months added to the term and was released on probation on 22 May 2009, having served close to fifteen years.
Bård Eithun was convicted of the Holmenkollen fire and of a killing at Lillehammer in August 1992, and was sentenced to fourteen years at the start of 1994. He was released in 2003. Snorre Ruch was given eight years as an accomplice to the Oslo killing and had no part in any of the fires.
The remaining two convictions belong to musicians whose bands had nothing else to do with any of it. Tomas Haugen, who plays guitar in Emperor and records as Samoth, was convicted of the Skjold fire and given sixteen months. Jørn Inge Tunsberg, of the Bergen band Hades Almighty, was convicted of the Christmas Eve fire at Åsane and served two years. That is the whole arson file: two churches with two convicted men each, one attempted arson, and a list of some forty other incidents that were never fastened to anybody at all.
What was rebuilt
The part of this story that gets no coverage whatever is the part the parishes paid for. Holmenkollen Chapel was rebuilt on its own site and consecrated in 1996, in timber again. Åsane finished a new church in 1993 and then put the old one back up on the stone walls and foundations that had come through the night, which is a stubborn and rather Norwegian answer to an arsonist. Skjold was replaced in 1998 by an octagonal stone building seating four hundred, designed by Nils Vikanes and consecrated on 16 May 1999.
Fantoft took six years. The reconstruction was finished in the late nineties, and the site has carried a security fence since 1997, which is the smallest and clearest measure of what actually changed. Before June 1992 a medieval stave church on a hill outside Bergen did not need a fence.
A register of dates makes a poor legend, and that is exactly the reason to keep one. Four years, around fifty incidents of which fewer than half caused serious damage, one death nobody answered for, five convictions, and a good deal of rebuilding done quietly by people who never gave an interview about any of it. The music all of this attached itself to is a far larger subject than a court file, and it is set out in the long version.
