Neanderthals

Neanderthals have a brief but pointed role in the book: Varg Vikernes places them in a prehistoric racial narrative in which Cro-Magnon people conquer Europe and eliminate a competing population. The passage presents this not as an independently established account of Neanderthal history, but as part of Vikernes’s ideological mythology, where conquest becomes both an origin story and a claim about racial nature.

Place in Vikernes’s Origin Story

Vikernes invokes the Neanderthals while describing the emergence of what he calls the Cro-Magnon archetype of his race. In his account, this population enters prehistoric Europe with superior skills and abilities, defeats its competitors, and establishes a pattern of dominance. The Neanderthals are thus cast as the rival population against which his imagined ancestral identity takes shape.

Conquest and Its Interpretation

The passage makes the outcome explicit: Vikernes says that the Cro-Magnon population wiped out the Neanderthals. He interprets this as the first known example of genocide, then presents it as revealing an ambivalent nature in the White Man. That interpretation turns a claim about prehistoric displacement into a political parable: violence is made foundational to the identity he constructs, rather than an incidental feature of its past.

Narrative Significance

Neanderthals are not developed as individual beings or given a perspective of their own. Their significance in this episode lies in how Vikernes’s account uses them—as the defeated other in a story of ancestral conquest. By attributing the historical claim and its moral interpretation to Vikernes, the book exposes the ideological work performed by the story without presenting that racial narrative as neutral history.