Ihsahn
Real Name: Vegard Sverre Tveitan
Emperor started out as a very extreme satanic black metal band at the heart of the legendary church burnings in Norway. Even though Emperor stopped using corpse paint in 1993 because they felt the meaning was lost, and it became trendy, their use of stage names seemed to stick around. Vegard Sverre Tveitan started out in earlier bands as "Ygg" which is believed to be short for Yggdrasil, an immense tree that is central in Norse Cosmology. Later Tveitan chose the name Ihsahn while in Emperor, to this day the origin is still a mystery. During a 2009 interview Ihsahn had this to say concerning the name origin "I think that there are only three people on Earth who know that and I would like to keep it that way. It’s nothing too serious; it’s just that I have kept it as a secret for so many years (laughs)."
