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# Tolkien and Black Metal: (Part 5)
- URL: https://blackmetalzine.com/tolkien-and-black-metal-part-v/
- Published: 2026-09-07T13:00:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T13:00:21.000Z
- Description: Tolkien and Black Metal Part 5 explores Tolkien-themed BM beyond Summoning, from naming conventions to deeper Silmarillion lore. Read more!
- Author: Michael
- Tags: Features

## Part 5: The Wider Constellation

Tolkien's legendarium didn't stay confined to Norway's second-wave or Austria's Summoning. Once the template existed, black metal bands worldwide began reaching for the same well, in at least three distinguishable modes of borrowing. Plus a fourth, much larger mode that barely rises above the level of simply using a name.

Before exploring the bands, it's worth being precise about what, linguistically, they were actually borrowing from, because the genre rarely distinguishes between Tolkien's invented tongues, and the distinctions matter more than they might seem to. Tolkien built not one invented language but a whole comparative family, complete with a fictional internal history of how they diverged from one another. “Quenya”, the "Elf-latin" of the high elves who journeyed to Valinor, was consciously modeled on Finnish phonology and Latin grammar, and functions in-story as a scholarly, almost liturgical language and by the Third Age, nobody speaks it day to day, and almost no black metal band bothers with it. “Sindarin”, the language actually spoken by most elves in Middle-earth, was modeled instead on Welsh, and supplies the overwhelming majority of place-names raided across the whole genre: Mordor, Gorgoroth, Isengard, Minas Morgul, Etc. 

![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032268.jpg)

J.R.R. Tolkien 1925/26 - During his early years as a professor at Oxford. 

“Khuzdul”, the secretive language of the Dwarves, appears only in fragments, Gimli's oath, the inscription on Balin's tomb, because Tolkien's internal logic held that Dwarves guarded their own tongue jealously from outsiders, and it shows up in this scene barely at all. “Black Speech" was engineered by Sauron himself as an imperial tongue for Mordor and never took root even among his own orcs, who mostly preferred debased forms of other languages instead, a detail that makes Black Speech, linguistically, a language of failed conquest as much as one of menace, which hasn't stopped it from becoming the sub-genre's single favorite source of band names.

None of the bands below engage with that four-way structure directly, a place-name is a place-name whichever language it's drawn from, but the sheer density of usable proper nouns Tolkien generated across all four tongues is the reason this sub-genre has had enough raw material to sustain three decades of near-constant borrowing without ever running dry.

## Mode One: The Quite Homage

Dimmu Borgir, the Norwegian symphonic black metal band, offers the subtlest example in this entire article: frontman Shagrath's stage name is widely understood as a play on Shagrat, the orc captain who commands the tower of Cirith Ungol, the spider-haunted pass into Mordor, in "The Return of the King". It's a quiet, unannounced homage buried inside a band whose imagery is otherwise gothic-symphonic rather than Tolkien-specific, a reminder that Tolkien references in this genre are sometimes worn so lightly they function almost as an inside joke, legible only to listeners already primed to look for them.

![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032273.jpg)

Dimmu Borgir 

## Mode Two: Total Devotion, Two Ways 

Two bands show just how differently "total devotion" to Tolkien can actually sound. The Swedish one-man project Cirkeln, active since 2018, builds its epic black metal on the legacy of viking-era Bathory rather than Summoning's synthesizer-driven template, riffing doom, traditional heavy metal, and raw black metal blended together, with lyrics that began, in the musician's own description, as direct interpretations of Tolkien's earlier, more mythological writing before morphing into the project's own archaic fantasy world. The 2020 album "Kingdoms That No One Remembers" still carries the clearest fingerprints: "Golden Rauros" takes its name from the falls where Boromir dies and the Fellowship breaks apart, and the interlude "Ainulindalë – Of the Music of the Ainur" sets Tolkien's own creation myth, the same discordant-Music cosmology discussed in (Part I) put directly to tape.

![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032274.jpg)

Cirkeln - Kingdoms That No One Remembers 

Avathar, discussed at greater length in an earlier article, as part of Summoning's own school, is the mirror image: Finnish, keyboard-forward, openly modeled on the "Minas Morgul" sound rather than reacting against it. Where Cirkeln proves Tolkien-themed black metal doesn't need Summoning's synthesizers to work, Avathar proves how far a band can go by embracing them completley, and still develop a voice of its own.

## Mode Three: One Realm, Many Bands

Few names in this history have been claimed as often, by as many unrelated bands, as "Angmar", the dark northern kingdom ruled in secret by the Witch-king before he became chief of the Nazgûl, its very name meaning "iron home" in Sindarin. Metal Archives alone lists at least five unrelated projects sharing the name outright: a Finnish act that started under another name in 1994–95 before becoming Angmar in 1997 (its album "Razorblade Redemption" followed in 2003); a French act formed in 2002 whose 2005 album "Metamorphosis" was released through Northern Silence Productions, and whose early demo was later reissued as a split with the far better-known Alcest; a Czech project formed in 2007; a Slovak black metal/ambient act; and a Mexican band built, by its own description, entirely from Tolkien's own words, drawing its lyrics directly rom "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings". Beyond the name itself, the same corner of Middle-earth has spawned outright derivatives, "Ered Angmar" ("Mountains of Angmar"), "Kingdom of Angmar", and others, each arrived at independently. None of these acts appear to have coordinated with one another; each simply landed, on its own, on the same conclusion that a ruined northern kingdom inhabited by wraiths made a fitting name for cold, misanthropic music. Angmar's combination of iron, ice, and an invisible undead king struck enough separate musicians, on enough separate continents, as self-evidently appropriate for black metal that it was independently reinvented more times than any other single Tolkien place-name in this article.

![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032276.jpg)

Map of Eriador

## Mode Four: The Pure Name List

Beyond these, fan communities have spent decades compiling long inventories of black metal bands that reach for Tolkien purely at the naming stage, with wildly varying depth of actual engagement: "Mordor" (Poland), "Morgul", "Angband" (Chile, formed in Santiago in 1993 and named for Morgoth's vast subterranean fortress-prison in the far north, built specifically to withstand the siege that Dagor Bragollach, the battle referenced on Summoning's "Minas Morgul", would eventually break, and "The Nazgûl". Most of these function exactly like Gorgoroth and Isengard: a loaded word borrowed for atmosphere, with no guarantee of any deeper textual relationship behind it. Taken together, though, the sheer size of this list is itself the point, no other single body of fantasy literature has been raided this extensively, this repeatedly, by black metal's naming conventions. 

## Past the Black Gate: Reaching for the Rest of the Legendarium

Everything covered so far in this issue shares one trait: it borrows Mordor, Isengard, Angmar, Angband, villains' geography, walled off and self-contained, useful precisely because it never requires reading past the appendices. But a smaller, more patient current within this same scene eventually pushed past that wall into the much larger, more mythological body of material collected in "The Silmarillion", not Sauron's fortress, but the whole tangled prehistory of Elves, Men, and fallen angels that Tolkien spent fifty years assembling and never finished to his own satisfaction.

Summoning got there first, and "Oath Bound" is the clearest example: rather than another song about a tower or a wasteland, the album is built around the Oath of Fëanor, the vow that drives the Noldor Elves to kinslaying, exile, and generations of self-inflicted ruin, a story with no Sauron in it at all, its darkness generated entirely by its own heroes' pride. One of Nine's "Dawn of the Iron Shadow" pushes the same direction further: the fall of the hidden city of Gondolin, betrayed from within rather than besieged from without, and the curse Morgoth lays on the hero Húrin, forcing him to watch his children's lives unravel from a mountainside prison without being allowed to die. Material with no orcs marching in formation, no ring to destroy, just a family destroyed by a doom none of them chose. The same family gets an entire release to itself which I'll discuss later on, where a dungeon synth duo builds a whole EP around Húrin's children specifically. Carcharoth took its name from the wolf bred by Morgoth specifically to hunt down and devour a stolen Silmaril, a monster that only exists because of Beren and Lúthien's doomed romantic quest into Morgoth's own throne room, one of the legendarium's few love stories and among its most frequently cited by fans as its emotional center. Even Nargaroth's contested naming points at this same deeper layer: Nargothrond is not a villain's fortress but a hidden Elvish city, destroyed from within by exactly the kind of pride and concealment that also dooms Fëanor's sons and Húrin's children.

![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/2026/09/1000032278.jpg)

Turin - Painting by Alan Lee 

None of this is a correction to the observation that black metal reaches overwhelmingly for evil's own vocabulary, these are still tragedies, still built from ruin and doom rather than triumph. But they mark a real shift in "texture". Mordor is a location; the Oath of Fëanor is a story, with characters who choose their own downfall rather than simply representing evil geographically. A band writing about Gondolin's fall has to engage with betrayal, grief, and consequence in a way that a band naming itself after a wasteland does not. It's the difference between wearing a word and telling a story, and it's a difference this genre took over a decade to start making consistently.

### Recommended Listening: 

[Kingdoms That No One Remembers, by Cirkeln10 track album![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/icon/a0031155717_3-40dc70e2-95c5-4b1d-896c-3918a6efe2f8.jpg)Cirkelnbmurator![](https://blackmetalzine.com/content/images/thumbnail/a0031155717_5-7dbafa1b-35da-4e40-b0a7-fffc44cd287a.jpg)](https://cirkeln.bandcamp.com/album/kingdoms-that-no-one-remembers?ref=blackmetalzine.com)