Typical ignorant right-winger perspective on display in the attached screenshot. Breivik had Wotan as his patron. He heard the wind beneath the soil. References to Eddas and Sagas were scrawled on his weapons. You can tell this is the kind of person that’s never read anything older than the 20th century, but there’s a lot of these people. I figure a lot of them read what I write, so I’d like to convey the proper perspective from the source literature.

The important parable here is the story of Völundr in the Völundarkviða, a poem from the Poetic edda. He was a famous smith, a creator of historically important magical artifacts, most notably to present-day readers he crafted Beowulf’s mail-shirt. There was a small Swedish kingdom that captured him while he was sleeping, stole his life’s work, and cut his hamstrings so he couldn’t run and enslaved him, demanding he work at a smithy on their prison-island.

Völundr doesn’t take this lying down. They have two sons and a daughter. He entices the two sons in sequence to the island with promises of magical artifacts, where he murders them. Then he crafts two chalices out of their skulls and gets the daughter to visit. He offers her wine, which she unknowingly drinks out of her own brother’s skull. He then rapes and forcibly impregnates her. She then falls in love with him (as women do when you rape them).

Now that the woman loves him because he raped her properly, she has him retrieve his magical artifacts that were stolen from him, which he uses to escape captivity. But he is sure to gloatingly inform the royals that he killed their sons and left their daughter with a rape baby.

From the perspective of the Eddas and Sagas, for thousands of years of European history, from prehistory to roughly the 12th century, there was not a single voice in society that would not agree that while you should act with charity, decency, hospitality, and kindness towards your rulers and neighbors, the minute that they fundamentally violate your sovereignty and rights there is only one response:

Kill their sons, and rape and impregnate their daughters. If you don’t have the chance to do the latter, you should kill the daughters too. Because if you allow people who encroach the sovereignty and liberty of others to live, you’ll just get more such encroachments. This isn’t some idle line in the middle of the Heimskringla, this is an entire Edda in the middle of the Poetic Edda. This is a fundamental, society-shaping moral fable.

Anyone who adheres to the Eddas in earnest would at least concede that Breivik at least perceived his actions as desirable and just, and likely would agree that his actions were morally optimal and objectively good.

And this is one of those essays that you just can’t say on Twitter, because it “supports terrorism” (whatever that means). Even though twenty thousand years of people in a good dozen countries of Europe believed something like this, and it being rooted in foundational ancient documents of morality, wisdom, and law, you’re just not allowed to type it into a Tweet. But we all know there’s only one way this ends. Their sons will die and their daughters will be raped.