Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Quisling’s place in this account is defined by a sharp reversal: in Norway, his name remained synonymous with treason and public disgrace, while Varg Vikernes invoked him as an admired political and spiritual predecessor. The book presents Quisling both as a historical leader whose collaborationist government ended in defeat and execution, and as a contested legacy that later nationalists reinterpreted through claims about pagan belief, mystical philosophy, and ancestry.

Political Legacy and Public Reputation

Quisling founded a collaborationist pro-German government in Norway during the Second World War. Tried for treason shortly after the war ended, he was executed. His surname subsequently entered international usage as a synonym for a traitor; in Norway, the name remained anathema. That charged reputation is not incidental to his later significance in the narrative: it supplies the very stigma that makes his example useful to those, such as Vikernes, who define themselves against prevailing Norwegian social and political values.

The contrast between Quisling’s lasting notoriety and the relative obscurity of other figures around his political milieu is made explicit through Hans S. Jacobsen. Jacobsen published Ragnarok, a journal named for the Nordic myth of apocalypse and rebirth, as a vehicle for ideas he hoped to bring into National Union. The account notes that Jacobsen is now largely forgotten, whereas Quisling’s name continues to loom over Norway. Vikernes, the book argues, understood the force of that difference: he associated himself with Quisling not only through an extreme vision of Norway for Norwegians, but through a name capable of provoking a strong response in a social-democratic public.

Universism and the Disputed Religious Record

Vikernes defended Quisling’s religious significance by pointing to Universism, a mystical doctrine Quisling developed and discussed in a 1929 publication. According to Vikernes, the doctrine and the youth division of National Union reflected a heathen orientation; he also asserted that the youth division had planned to open an Ásatrú church in Norway. These are presented as Vikernes’s claims, not as settled descriptions of Quisling’s own religious identity.

The historical account complicates that interpretation. Quisling drew on a wide range of ideas, including Gnosticism and Taoism, and on philosophers such as Nietzsche and Kant. Hans Fredrik Dahl, a leading Quisling scholar and author of a two-volume biography, regarded Quisling as a Christian, albeit one who considered himself more reflective than many fellow believers. The book describes his philosophical project as an attempt to reconcile Christianity with science. Quisling left unfinished manuscripts for a larger spiritual and philosophical work: he had assembled 930 handwritten pages but did not complete the project. Although researchers could consult the manuscripts, few had examined them in detail before a critical appraisal appeared in 1996.

Oddvar Hoidal, another Quisling expert, saw Universism as appearing to encompass a Nietzschean will to power supported by a natural oligarchy. The surviving evidence therefore does not resolve Quisling into the simple heathen predecessor Vikernes claimed. Instead, it shows a body of philosophical work whose interpretation remained disputed, and a later admirer selecting from that ambiguity to support his own outlook.

Vikernes’s Claim of Kinship

Vikernes’s identification with Quisling extended from ideas to family. He said he wanted to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Quisling’s execution on October 24, 1995, by paying for a wreath and placing a cross on Quisling’s grave in Telemark. He expected that others might gather there but said he could not attend. He also claimed descent from Susanne Qisling, born in 1811 and deceased in 1891, explaining that one branch of the family had spelled its name without the u. Vikernes offered an aristocratic interpretation of the surname, connecting it to descent from a side branch of a king’s lineage.

Asked whether he had spoken with Quisling’s original relatives, Vikernes replied that they had all changed their names. He was considering changing his own name to Quisling. The proposed name change would have made his claimed kinship public and explicit, turning ancestry into another component of his political self-presentation. In the book’s account, Quisling’s name functions simultaneously as a family claim and a deliberate provocation: what most Norwegians reject is precisely what Vikernes presents as a source of distinction.

Postwar Currents and Later Reinterpretation

Quisling’s legacy also appears in the book’s account of postwar Norwegian radical politics. It suggests that his Universism, with its speculation about life on other planets, may have contributed to a setting in which UFO interests and nationalist politics could overlap. After his execution, activists who entered the political vacuum left by his removal encountered a postwar fascination with UFOs that could be combined with elements of Universism. This is offered as a possible historical connection, not as proof that Quisling directly founded or organized a later UFO movement.

Anders Lange provides a related but distinct example of the surrounding political landscape. In the 1930s he served as secretary of the ultra-patriotic, anti-communist Fedrelandslaget, where Quisling had been one of Fridtjof Nansen’s trusted helpers. Lange had earlier described himself as a fascist and supporter of Mussolini, then distanced himself from totalitarian views after the war while retaining racial elements in his politics. In the postwar period, he became a prominent opponent of state intervention in private affairs. The account does not portray him as Quisling’s direct successor; rather, it places him among figures whose careers help explain how nationalist ideas and political affiliations changed across the war and its aftermath.

Significance in the Book

Quisling’s narrative role is largely mediated through the people and movements that claim, contest, or inherit his legacy. For Vikernes, he offers a charged precedent: a Norwegian nationalist whose name already carries the stigma of treason, but whose mystical writings can be recast as evidence of a suppressed heathen tradition. Against that appropriation, the book sets the historical account of Quisling as a Christian thinker with an unfinished philosophical project and a complicated intellectual inheritance.

The resulting portrait depends on the tension between reputation and reinterpretation. Quisling’s public disgrace did not erase his political and philosophical afterlife; it made his name especially potent for later mythmaking. Yet the record presented here also places limits on that myth: Vikernes’s assertions about paganism and blood relationship remain distinct from the more cautious evidence about Quisling’s beliefs and historical context.