Icy civility

There was also the sheer horror, tales of how his victims were paralysed with fear who just stopped running and lay down before he shot them dead in the head, how he roared a joyous battle cry, looking angry and smiling simultaneously.

And how in police custody after the massacre, he appeared more concerned about blood loss from his cut finger and posed like a bodybuilder for a police photographer.

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The icy civility of Norwegians appeared then to be breaking. A victim's relative threw a shoe at him. Tens of thousands of Norwegians spontaneously protested, singing a children's song that Breivik had said was Marxist propaganda.

After a few days, Breivik's time in the sun was over and it was the turn of the survivors of the mass shooting on Utoeya island to recount their tales. One by one they confronted him.

"Victims remembered the gunman being a monster, being two metres high," Geir Lippestad, Breivik's lawyer, told Reuters.

"The trial brought him down to just a human being with very bad thoughts. If you looked upon him as a monster, that would have taken away responsibility as society. The society has some responsibility about how this was possible."

Breivik seemed particularly uneasy one day when a young girl sat in the court to testify. She had put on a top without sleeves to show him, and the world, the now dangling limb that was once a healthy arm.

Breivik looked shocked, fidgety, his face flushed.

"On July 22, he was in control," said Eskil Pedersen, the leader of the Labour Party's youth wing and a massacre survivor, referring to the date of the attack last year.

"A lot of survivors have said that during the trial he has been brought down to mediocrity."

On the last day of the trial hearings, two months ago, he gave a final speech. Few remember the diatribe. Most international TV coverage had long gone. Some people yawned. Others just walked out of the court.

Breivik's days of fame were over.    

"The first day everyone listened," said Larsen. "On the last day no one did. He looked kind of helpless when people walked out of the courtroom."