Thulean Archives

Why is winter and frost such a central topic for Immortal? And why would I know anything about that? Let's find out. Back in 1991, April, before immortal even existed, Harald and me decided one evening, or rather, one night, it was 3:00 o'clock in the morning, to go visit Euronymous, the Mayhem guys. And we took my car, a Ford Taunus 1.6L. When we came to Åsane(?), that is outside of Bergen, or part of Bergen today. We filled up the tank of the car and drove off and realized that we actually didn't pay for the gas. So we had a laugh about that. We accidentally stole gas. Of course, in the Norwegian mountains in April, you still have snow. And on the way up into the mountains, we had a flat tire, so we had to change the tire. And the spare tire was not a winter tire, so we started spinning instead of getting up. And we had to go back down and change one of the front wheels to the back wheel and so forth, to, you know, get two winter tires for the wheels with traction. Now, I don't know much about Harald's background. I don't know how much time he spent in the Norwegian mountains and such before, but at least when we were there, he was really impressed with the snow blowing on the asphalt and talked about how it looked like spirits floating over the ground. And it was pretty cool. After all, snow is cool. And of course, when you're driving from Bergen to Oslo, it takes forever. So we had that impression for a very long time, that's for sure. When we arrived in Oslo, I asked Harald, well, where does he live? And it turned out Harald didn't really know. And he kind of remembered that in fact,^[1] he didn't live in Oslo at all. He lived in Ski, outside of Oslo. And he didn't have the address in his head. We were already there. So what were we supposed to do, just go back? Nah, we just drove to Ski. And then we saw a couple of middle aged women talking. And we thought, you know, why not just ask them? So we just drove up to them and asked them, you know, "Hello, do you know where these guys with long hairs are playing in a band?" And one of them said, "Oh, yes, I know." Wow. And she said, "Just follow me". So we got, you know, followed her in her car, and she drove for like 10 minutes, and then she stopped, got out of the car and pointed to a building up, you know, by the edge of the woods. And she said, up there. And then she drove off. Okay, so that's how we found out where they lived. Ask some random women in the approximate area. And she knew where it was. So we knocked on the door Euronymous opened. Dad stayed in his room. And I think I covered the time we spent there in another video. We stay the night over. We slept in Hellhammer's room. Hellhammer, he had a big bed, so we slept there. And then the next day, we picked up Padden from Old Funeral. North of Oslo, like couple of hours away. So we spent much of the day doing that.^[2] And brought him back. And he stayed there, I think, till the next day. And then we drove him back up there, and then we drove back down. And as you can imagine, we went rich, so to speak. And all of this, you know, it burned the gasoline. Go back to that later on in the video. And since we had a car and Euronymous didn't. He asked us if we could pick up some others. And we picked up Dag and Ivar. I think also they had a bass player in Dark Throne. And we picked up all three of them, brought them to Euronymous' house and talked a little bit with them. And this was in April, and they had just released the Soulside Journey album. And Euronymous was not very happy about how they looked and started to, you know, give them some lectures. And then we drove Dag and Ivar and I think third person too, home again. Note that we're spending fuel here. And then the next day we returned to Bergen and that is, we started our home journey. And when we arrived in the mountains, they were driving convoys. That is, the weather is so bad that you're not allowed or able to drive on your own. You have to drive in a convoy behind a truck that is removing the snow. And of course we had a rear wheel drive car with one summer tire in the front. So this was a little bit difficult and Harald was very stressed out and we could just barely see the rear lights on the car in front of us and he was driving. I didn't have a driver license, at the time, even though it was my car. But we got through in one piece. And then of course there was an uphill and we didn't get up and all the other cars just drove past us and we were standing there like, "Dude, what are we supposed to do, man?" And of course, "Ah, intelligent blue eyes", I had a solution. I got out of the car, open the trunk of the car and grabbed big chunks of ice from the... you know, next to the road and filled up the entire trunk of the car with blocks of ice and hard snow. That way we got some weight on the rear tires where the traction was. And we gave it another try. And now it worked because we had weight on the rear wheels, the wheels with traction. And we got up the hill. Except at the top of the hill, it became even more slippery. And then, of course, we started to spin. And I got into the back seat and started to jump up and down in the seat to get traction, at least for some moments. And we saw the clear asphalt in front of us, because it was a tunnel closing in. We managed to get in, and then we continued on. And naturally, at the ferry point, we did not reach the last ferry for the day, so we had to stay the night there. And we didn't have enough gasoline to keep the engine running with a heat on,^[3] so it was very, very cold. During the night I woke up suddenly, and the whole car was shaking. And I wonder what's going on. And I saw Harald, and he was literally sitting like this. He was so cold. So that was a wintry experience for Harald indeed. And after that trip,^[4] Immortal, Harald started to write about winter and snow and ice.

---

1. I didn't know him at all.
2. From a military camp. He was in the army.
3. Or anything to eat. And I was wet from carrying all the snow.
4. We had just enough fuel to drive home from there.