Revelations of secular make-believe from a child’s playground in Brooklyn

Make-belief is not just the province of kids but is also fulsomely practiced by adults. When lacking a satisfactory answer to the origins of unique human cultures, some 19th-century atheists made up beautiful, romantic, elaborate mythologies about the original Nobel Savages. The Christian element of history was de-emphasized. As a result, at Leif Erickson Park in Brooklyn, the juvenile and adult imaginations came together to portray the Vikings as adventurers and the founders of freedom-loving America with the religious bits left out.

Influential in shaping a revised image of Vikings like Leif Erikson were the 19th-century romances about the “Noble Savage.” The romanticism seems to have had the effect of secularizing the self-image of Norwegians. In the hands of some great artists, the secularization was quite deliberate.

Notably, composer Richard Wagner emphasized the primitivism of the Vikings by featuring them with cow-horned helmets in his musical dramas. With an infatuation with myths about German and Nordic national greatness, Wagner personified heroes with his piercing eyes, square jaw, and strong nose. He became a walking image for the modern artist as hero.

His operas won widespread admiration as the leading edge of modernity pushing aside the traditional and Christian aesthetic values. Wagner reached back into Viking history to revise it into his vision of a pathway to a secular future. The operatic image of the Vikings then became part of popular culture and shaped in surprising ways our contemporary urban landscapes, even down to the details of the design of our children’s playgrounds like the one in Leif Erikson Park on the border between Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Wagner’s influence has seeped into popular American consciousness through his music like the anthem for weddings, “Here Comes the Bride,” and for big-budget movies like “Apocalypse Now,” and super-hero stories like “Flash Gordon” and “Star Wars.” Wagner affected modern aesthetics in the cities, particularly through artists.

Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Cy Twombly often blasted Wagner tunes into their studios while painting. Surrealist Salvador Dali reworked Wagner’s “real mountain of mythological images and hallucinations” and reveled in “Wagnerian ecstasy.” David Hockney’s “Wagner Drive” explored the mountains and canyons of life during the AIDs plague.

Architects of cities like the Chicago school leaders John Welborn Root, Daniel Burnham, and Louis Sullivan, took cues from the musical artist. Wagnerian influences echoed through the design of several NYC churches. Bertram Goodhue gave St Bartholomew’s a slightly wild and colorful Wagnerian style in its neo-Byzantine structure. The cathedral-like grandness of Riverside Church imbibed a modern heroic aesthetic that matched Wagner’s vision of overcoming religious traditionalists and sent out encouragement to Modernists in their war with the Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Even today the carillon of the church “marks the passing quarter-hours with a sequence based on the bell motif in ‘Parsifal’ (Ross 2020, 152),” invoking the search for the mythical Temple of the Holy Grail.

Another Wagnerian architect Ralph Adams Cram combined Wagnerian elements with an Anglo-Catholic high church sensibility to re-design the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Not unlike Wagner, he hoped that his design would contribute to overcoming “the evil heritage” of John Calvin. Cram says that in his drama “Excalibur: An Arthurian Drama” 1909), he was trying to do what Wagner did, to recreate a whole world that would displace the sourness that was found in too many churches. It would be going too far to call Cram a Wagnerian, but there were some significant common spiritual sensibilities that convened toward religious modernism in historical clothing.

Leif Ericson Park represents the culmination of Wagner’s project to march the gods off into the sunset, leaving a mostly secular park. In 1925, the local Norwegian American community leaders persuaded city hall to build a park to coincide with the 100^th anniversary of the arrival of a shipload of immigrants from Norway. The park was rebuilt by Robert Moses between 1934 and 1939.

At the dedication in 1939, Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia and Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha of Norway heralded the inclusion of Norwegian American sculptor August Werner’s replica of a rune stone found in Yune, Norway, with a placard added that read “Leiv Eiriksson/discovered America Year 1000.” The park also included a sports area called  Valhalla Courts named after the place mentioned in Norse mythology where the most valiant warriors went after death to await the final hopeless battle called Ragnarok against darkness. Its ten courts were heralded as a place where the newly popular American game called tennis could be played.

In 2007, the parks department broke ground for a redesign of the park. The celebration involved kids from PS 69 wearing Viking horned helmets and Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic snacks being served. In 2009, a Viking-themed playground was erected. Now, we have a wonderful, colorful hallucination of the ancient past. Kids can make-believe play without the contact of dangerous warriors or religious ideas.

Nineteenth Century romanticists like Wagner idealized the primitive and the folk traditions as the true sources of national identity, or at least, as a critique of Christianity and the emptiness of modern industrial society. Philosophers, historians, artists, literary writers, and musicians portrayed humans in their primitive state as uncorrupted by civilization. There was a sense that humans had lost a connection with the natural world and lost their inherent goodness and sense of right and wrong to the artificiality of modern civilization and religion. This idealization of the “primitives” actually was foreshadowed by the use of elements from pagan religion by critics of Christianity.

The intellectual path to Wagner’s “Noble Savage:” Tacitus; Rousseau; and the brothers Grimm

The Scandinavian countries were influenced by a long tradition of glorifying the Noble Savage that stretched back to at least the Roman historian Tacitus. The historian had lamented how Rome was losing its virile religious spirit and declining in power and purpose. The empire had a waning confidence in its gods. Tacitus looked for where his Romans could recover their ancient esprit de corps.

In his Germania (published in 96 AD as On the Origin and Situation of the Germans), Tacitus claimed that Rome was too civilized and corrupt, so it should draw lessons from the virility, honor, and pure simple lifestyle of the Germans and Gauls. He celebrated their warrior defense of freedom (though he said that they could be conquered because they drank too much).

Tacitus also refers to many other tribes such as the “Gauls” which was a Roman term applied to the Celts who had settled in northern Europe. They too were admired by the Romans as semi-wild, fierce, reckless warriors (see Polybius’ comments in Histories II:28). At times, the Gauls assimilated other northern groups that they conquered like the Germans and those peoples living in the area of today’s Scandinavia. A large contingent of red-haired, mustached, blue-eyed Gauls, who served as mercenaries, settled down in Asia Minor (Anatolia/Turkey) giving the name of Galatia to their area. Asia Minor was the crush zone of many immigrants and invaders, even a contingent of Vikings sailed down from the Dneiper River in the early Middle Ages.

The Apostle Paul traveled through the area where he likely would have become familiar with the famous statue “The Dying Gaul.” The pitiable but noble Gaul is sitting down naked on the ground, bending downward as he dies from a wound in his side. The emotion and dying posture are very similar to the Pieta of Mary holding the dead Jesus.

Maybe, Tacitus hoped that these Noble Savages would kill off the pesky followers of Paul.

Tacitus had a hatred of “the deadly superstition” of Christianity. Perhaps, he foresaw that the “Chresteans,” as Tacitus called them, would be a major threat to the pagan-based Roman Empire. He would not have appreciated that the German and other tribes would become Christian, sack Rome, and that the Dying Noble Gaul would become transformed into the pieta of Christ and Mary, a motif that first became popular in Germany.

Emperor Nero evidently took advantage of the widespread pagan dislike of the Christians to blame them for responsibility for the burning down of the city of Rome in 64 AD. He was pushing back on rumors that he was so unhinged that he had set his city on fire. The Roman dictator tortured and slaughtered the Christians to such an extent that even Tacitus was moved to pity.

However, that did not prevent the historian from casting this new religion as one more sign of the decay of Rome. In fact, Christianity revived the Roman Empire after it won the battle against paganism. The religion eventually also took over the Norse lands. The image of the Nobel Savage, thus, faded away. Yet, the idealism of a primitive hope lay buried as an unused hallucination paradoxically available to both Christians and anti-Christians in the 19^th Century.

The influence of Tacitus’ Noble Savage portrayal of the North Europeans revived when a copy of Germania was discovered in a monastery library during the 15^th Century. The diary of a papal secretary announced “Cornelius Tacitus’ book on the origin and situation of Germany is found, seen in Rome in 1455.” The Germans made the book a bestseller. The first printing of the rediscovered book included a commentary from Diodorus Seculus who noted that the Gauls wore “bronze helmets with high extensions which give them an appearance of great size. On many helmets, one sees horns…” However, literary historian Roberta Frank observed in a notable essay that Tacitus had only mentioned a few metal helmets and leather headgear without horns.

Perhaps, the greatest influence on the German/Nordic Nobel Savage ideas was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French philosopher wrote that civilization had ruined humans who were born innately good and generous with each other. However, as envy took root, the pure simple lifestyle of primeval humanity collapsed. As humans proliferated their numbers on the earth, they started to concentrate their avaricious efforts through inequality and the founding of cities. These concentrations of humanity became the central promoters of envy, jealousy, and self-conscious devotion to superficiality and inequality. Christianity flourished in the cities as a divisive force. Cities were like batteries storing up the worst of humanity. “Man was born free, but everywhere” now, Rosseau proclaimed, he is in the chains of urbanized evil desires,

Rousseau pounced on Christianity, with its doctrine of original sin, particularly that version taught by John Calvin, as a block to humanity’s return to an original pre-social simplicity. In his Discourses on the Origins of Inequality among Men published in 1754, Rousseau recapped a nauseating mantra of Christianity, artifice, and cities.

German and Scandinavian idealists picked up Rousseau’s ideas to join them with a valorization of folk traditions and romanticism about the tribal origins of European society. Philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder “taught that every nation had to have a mythology, even an ersatz one. Germany lacked a heroic age, so borrowed that of Scandinavia, laying claim to the viking-age North as Germania germanioissima, or ‘Ultra-German Germany.’” (Frank 2000, 202)

The brothers Grimm collected ancient fairy tales by which to educate children to their primitive German roots. They published their first collection in 1812. Other fairy tale collectors like the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe published immensely popular books like their Popular Tales from the Norese. Moe became a bishop in the state church, but his accomplishments there are mostly forgotten. However, his poem about Sunday in Norway’s mountainous pastures that mixed rural romanticism with an allusion to Christian faith took the status as a literary classic.

Richard Wagner cast these Nobel Savage ideas onto the Vikings through a re-writing of their ancient myths. He paradoxically did his work with an eye on the goal of eventually living without religion. Let’s look more closely at the audacious way that Wagner used a reshaping of the Viking image and mythological history to arrive at secular modernity. How did he do this?