Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

Hammerfest

4:15 AM

My copy of The Völuspá is slipping from its precarious cradle around the faucet and threatening to plunge into the water below. 800 years old, it recounts the birth of the world and the final cataclysm. It was written by the völva, or seeress.  

My notebook, once balanced firmly on my knees, is dipping into the water. The screen of my laptop, still sitting on the toilet lid, is starting to flickr. I reach over and select a playlist, 99 Songs to be Played During the Apocalypse. It contains dire warnings and faint hopes, from the damnation of Gorgoroth to the unlikely optimism of Led Zeppelin and Queen.

8:52 AM

It’s now or never, so I put my pen to paper:

Northern Versions of Doom

Although the epic story of the Norse cataclysm is now shrouded in the mists of time, the chaos of Ragnarök has been resurrected in the Scandinavia of its birth in the form of Black Metal. In its bleak soundscapes and in its shrieking, thrashing guitars, one can hear the pounding of Nietzsche's godless hammers, the battering-ram rhythms of the Viking longships, the splintering altarpieces of Lindisfarne, and the smoke rising through the fractured rafters of the Holmenkollen Chapel. Forget Wagner, this is the real grinding, screeching deal.

4:22 AM

The screen is sending me signals in morse code. The deeper I look into it the deeper its messages become. My neurons are charged with caffeine and I can feel my blood pulse: green amber red orange warnings about something that’s gathering in my spine, charging my thoughts with endless troughs of empty space. And in these troughs crests appear, moving in a wave a million light years long. Or perhaps it’s just my eyelids that are blinking up and down, on and off, in an attempt to ward off the phantoms of sleep. I put my fingers here and there on the trackpad and the screen blinks on and off various websites, apocalypse.org, odinsrefuge.edu, endoftheworld.cia, while my thoughts slip toward Ragnarök, the final Battle of Evermore.

8:58 AM

I'm not sure Old Rex will be impressed with references to popular culture, but I soldier on:

The apocalypse of Ragnarök has been retold recently in Darkthrone's Panzerfaust and Transilvanian Hunger, and by Gaahl, the Sauron of Norwegian black metal, in Gorgoroth’s 2003 album Twilight of the Idols.

The music conjures the desolation of Tolkien's high dark plateau, Gorgoroth, the bleak realm of Sauron’s forges and mines. The music isn't recommended for suicidal adolescents, unless they find it somehow cathartic to travel deep into the county of Mordor, which if I had to locate on a map would be somewhere north of Hammerfest, in the north of Norway, in the Brotherland of Ice and Snow.

4:36 AM

According to the BBC, the town of Hammerfest has “a luckless narrative of natural disasters, fires, plagues and war, spanning a timeline from Napoleon to the Nazis." The name of the town is also the name of the music festival featuring Black, Death, Thrash, Doom, and other forms of heavy metal. It’s not a refined, Brideshead Revisited sort of affair.

9:03 AM

The strangest album of Norwegian black metal is by the noxious, solitary figure, Rheingold the Skald. Titled Raiders from the Frozen Skiff, the album follows the story of brutal free-trading aliens from another universe. Its final song, Loki’s Last Stand, screeches on for 6 minutes and 66 seconds. In it, the Frozen Skiff leader, Loki, makes an epic voyage into our own universe 1500 years ago. He and his gang of mutant thugs scrape precious heavy metals and sonorous crystals from the deepest caves and darkest quarries. With these they fashion tools to cut down mountain trees, jab iron girders into the sky, and place their icy castle in the fabled clouds.

In Rheingold’s song, Loki’s mutant thugs spend their days in the valleys below, burning the fields, destroying the homes, and raping the magical nymphs of the forest. At night, they tell stories of how when they die in glorious battle their souls will be flown to this same golden dome. And yet it will be a different golden dome, one that will last forever, in the City of the Gods. There, they will feast, laugh, tell stories, and fuck honey-tonged maidens until the rosy-fingered dawn caresses their heavy eye-lids and they ride forth again, to slaughter and fame.

The final minute of Loki’s Last Stand is at once violent and detached. From the ramparts of this golden cloud, Loki’s general Thorsten hurls boulders at the Reindeer People and at the scattered German tribes, who are forced to swap their native tongue for a strange dialect that comes from outer space — from a cruel, dark, metal outer space. Thorsten’s boulders pick them off one by one, pulverizing villages and churches, and sending the sackcloth priests back to the safety of Rome.

Despite its Wagnerian charms, Raiders from the Frozen Skiff hasn’t sold well. This is understandable, given that its six banks of stone-scraped guitars drone on for 66 minutes and 66 seconds in what can only be described as a cavernous and cacophonous scramble, and given that its Norse themes and characters are obviously ripped off from Marvel comic books.

From his cell in the Oslo Asylum for Criminally Insane Church Burners, Rheingold the Skald laughs at the critics. While he’s weak from scurvy and old age, he calmly tells the worried priest, “I have gifted humanity with the only language with which they could face the onslaught of the pink cubes. But humanity has rejected it.” When asked what he means by this, Rheingold’s eyes turn from dark green to icy blue, and he says, “No need to hold your breath. Just wait. I can feel them, riding the ether.”

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