> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blackmetalzine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Tolkien and Black Metal: (Part 6) - URL: https://blackmetalzine.com/tolkien-and-black-metal-part-6/ - Published: 2026-09-28T13:00:30.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-28T13:00:30.000Z - Description: Tolkien and Black Metal, Part 6: Black metal wanted Sauron's vocabulary, not Bilbo's. On irony, Satanism and corruption. Read more in Part 7 - Author: Michael - Tags: Features ### **The Ouliphant in the Room: The Irony, Satanism and NSBM** Any honest account of the history of this relationship has to admit it isn't all equal in its sincerity or aesthetic. Tolkien's own recorded views were explicitly opposed to the uses some of his later borrowers would put his world to. In 1938, a German publisher preparing a translation of The Hobbit asked him to confirm his "Aryan" descent before proceeding. Tolkien's draft reply called the request impertinent, a symptom of the "lunatic" racial laws then governing Germany. Three years later, writing to his son Michael during the Second World War, he described Hitler as a "ruddy little ignoramus" who had taken something noble in the old Northern European spirit and ruined it, perverted it, made it accursed: the same corruption-of-a-good-thing that Saruman and Sauron enact within his own fiction, not a rival force but a parasite feeding on something that was once whole. At its core, "The Lord of the Rings" is about the corrupting pull of power and the necessity of mercy toward even the undeserving. Frodo's pity for Gollum is the clearest case, and the one act of mercy without which the Ring could never have been destroyed. At the Cracks of Doom, Frodo's own will breaks; it's Gollum, seizing the Ring in his final, desperate grasp, who unknowingly finishes what Frodo could not. He's only there to do it because Frodo had spared his life earlier. ![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032879.jpg) Mt. Doom by John Howe Set that against Vikernes, whose ethno-nationalist politics sit in direct tension with the author whose invented word for "darkness" became his band's name. Set it against the NSBM current running through the wider Norwegian and pan-European scene: Poland's Graveland, built by Rob Darken around an explicitly ethno-nationalist mythologizing of a pre-Christian Slavic past, or France's Peste Noire, which has repeatedly folded far-right nationalist imagery into otherwise well-regarded black metal. The overlap isn't only abstract, either: a Greek project called Draugluin, named for Sauron's own werewolf-sire (slain by the hound Huan so Beren could wear its pelt as a disguise in the quest for a Silmaril), wears NSBM's politics openly. It's worth being precise, though: this is the exception, not the rule. None of the other Tolkien-named bands here have any credible tie to NSBM, and most of the overlap is aesthetic and adjacent, a shared taste for the same wintry, mythic register, not a documented parallel between Tolkien-themed black metal and NSBM as a whole. ![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032880.jpg) Beren and Luthien by Alan Lee Part of this is structural, not personal. Almost all of the borrowing clusters around the villains' geography and language: Mordor, Isengard, Angband, the Black Speech, and almost never the Shire, Rivendell, or Lothlórien. Black metal wanted Sauron's vocabulary, not Bilbo's. Tolkien wrote that vocabulary to be resisted, not admired; a genre's worth of bands took it as something to wear instead. Even so, this is an incomplete picture: orcs, Southrons, and the armies at the Black Gate are only half of what Tolkien wrote, and almost no band in this history reached for the other half. Nobody wanted Bilbo's pantry or Sam's garden. The genre borrowed selectively, and nearly always in the same direction. That selectivity isn't only a matter of taste; it's a matter of fit. Black metal's own foundational aesthetic, cold, ruinous, built on performed evil, didn't originate with Tolkien at all. It's there already in Venom's blasphemy and Bathory's turn toward apocalyptic darkness, years before any band thought to borrow a name from the Black Speech. What Tolkien's legendarium offered wasn't a neutral costume closet for a genre already committed to darkness; it was a genuinely serious theology of corruption, built into the mythology from its first page. Melkor introduces discord into the Music of the Ainur at the very founding of the world. Fëanor's oath drags his own people into kinslaying at Alqualondë. Nine kings of Men are slowly hollowed into the Nazgûl, extending their lives while losing everything that made them men. An entire island civilization drowns for its hubris in the Akallabêth. Tolkien took evil as seriously, and wrote it with as much weight, as almost any writer of the century, and that seriousness is exactly what made his villains' vocabulary such rich material for a genre that had already staked its identity on taking darkness seriously as subject matter. It's also what made that vocabulary such a good hiding place. A name lifted from the Black Speech reads, by now, as just one more of the genre's stock gestures toward evil, and real ethno-nationalism can travel inside that gesture looking exactly like more of the same. ![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000030885.jpg) Summoning The same rich vein that gave Summoning three decades of genuine devotion gave Vikernes a name for something much uglier, and from a glance at the merch table, the two can look identical. Summoning's three decades of sincere, unpolitical devotion remain the clearest proof that this material rewards reverence over posture. But they're no longer the only proof. Ghül's Shadow of Grief walks through Túrin Turambar's entire cursed arc, Beleg's death at his own friend's hand included, right down to a track called "Blood Stained, Son of Ill Fate," and treats every turn of it with the same gravity Tolkien gave it: not a monster movie, a tragedy. One of Nine dedicated their debut to "the great tyrant of Utumno," Melkor himself, and build their discography around the Nine Kings' slow hollowing into wraiths without once playing it for camp. Emyn Muil opened with that same doomed story of Túrin back in 2013, and has spent the decade since returning to Middle-earth's darkest corners, Númenor's own fall included. None of these bands sand down that darkness to make it palatable. They go all the way into Morgoth's malice and the Ring's slow corruption, and they treat all of it the way Tolkien did: as loss worth mourning, not evil worth performing, and never as cover for anything uglier than the fiction itself. Black metal's foundation, performed evil as a way of defining itself against the world, it made sense for a genre still figuring out what it was. Decades on, reaching for that same posture, whether it's the cartoon Satanism the genre has always had on tap or NSBM's actual hatred dressed up in Black Speech, isn't transgressive anymore. That's the easy way through material that rewards much harder work. Summoning, Ghül, One of Nine, and Emyn Muil have already proven black metal can meet Melkor's rebellion or the Nazgûl's hollowing as serious subject matter, with real intellectual and emotional weight, without needing a costume or an ideology to get there. Measured against that, NSBM isn't edgy. It's a failure of nerve: dressing that same hatred up as one more shade of Mordor, because reckoning honestly with what Tolkien actually wrote takes more courage than the costume allows. None of this draws an honest line from Tolkien's own work to Nazism, or to Satanism. He stood against both, in his letters and in his Catholic faith, about as plainly as a person can. What Vikernes did to the legendarium's reputation, he did almost entirely from outside the text. His engagement with the source material never went past the nouns: a teenage band called Uruk-Hai, an orc's name worn as his own, the word for darkness borrowed for Burzum's name. There's no Tolkien in a Burzum song the way there's Tolkien in a Summoning or a Ghül record, no story, no themes, nothing that reads as a real reckoning with what any of it meant to the man who wrote it. Tellingly, none of Vikernes's own politics show up in the music either. That's worth taking seriously: NSBM, as a label, is generally counted by what's actually in the lyrics, and by that measure Burzum barely clears the bar, whatever its founder believed and said everywhere else. Looking past the merch table, then, the two aren't really identical. The damage here is reputational, a name and a scene attached to a man, not a corruption of the ideas themselves. That's reason for some caution more broadly. Norse mythology carries the same weight: the same runes and gods claimed equally by sincere heathens and by neo-Nazis, and no one seriously blames Odin for it. Tolkien's legendarium deserves that same patience before it gets judged by its worst borrowers. He would almost certainly have abhorred how black metal treated his work at all, and its extremes most of all. But the poison came from outside the text, and the text never asked for it. Recommended Listening: ## Signup to our newsletter and Social Media Below you can sign up to our newsletter(s) one of those is The Infernal Records, a weekly newsletter where Fractal our dedicated researcher finds new releases of the previous week that are worth your time. You can sign up here: ## Unleashing the Darkness Within become a member of Black Metal Zine Subscribe Email sent! 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