If some political discourse makes a case for the dark medievalism of the foreign enemy, other strands of political discourse, especially but not exclusively on the far fringe of the right, glorify the medieval as the crucial foundation of modern identity. Both ways of utilizing the medieval—as an emblem of brutality and as the root bed of authentic culture and traditions—ossify and embalm the medieval. The Middle Ages as a static incubator of national, ethnic, and racial heritage has proliferated among the politically extreme.

In the six years since Anders Breivik killed 77 Norwegians in the name of an anti-immigrant, anti-leftist, Islam-ophobic agenda, ethnic nationalism has increased in fervour far beyond Norway. Although he explicitly disavowed neo-Nazism and white supremacy, Breivik's thought was mired in the swamps of such hatred. Claiming to have been motivated by the loss of his Norwegian and Western European identity and culture, Breivik attacked govern-mental buildings to harm those he perceived as responsible for surrendering his “indigenous” culture. The majority of his victims were wounded and killed during a subsequent attack on the same day on the island of Utøya, at a summer camp run by the Workers Youth League. His victims were teenagers whom he saw as the next generation of leftist multiculturalists who would perpetuate the same surrender of Norway's native white culture as their parents. His attacks were carried out under the flag of the Knights Templar.

Breivik prided himself on being a new incarnation of a Knight Templar, and his manifesto, 2083: A European Dec-laration of Independence, digitally self-distributed on the day of the attacks, is rife with engagements with the medieval. Some of the more high-profile discussions of Breivik, such as Åsne Seierstad's book-length study of Breivik and Karl Ove Knausgaard's essay in the New Yorker, dismiss Breivik's medievalism as little more than a superficial and immature manifestation of his online avatars in World of Warcraft. Despite it being a major aspect of his manifesto, Seierstad barely discusses Breivik's claim to be a new Knight Templar, noting almost in passing the court psychologists’ opinion that the network was entirely fabricated, which she accepts without discussion.