The musical composer Richard Wagner promoted a Viking mythology as the common religion of the early Germans and Scandinavians. He wanted to loosen the hold of the Mediterranean civilizations, including Christianity, in favor of indigenous northern European culture. Then, he wanted to lose all religion.
In his music and writing (like Art and Religion), Wagner’s work was a reproach to the formalistic theology and state authoritarianism guided by German (Prussian) bureaucrats. He also detested a passionless rationalism that arose during the Enlightenment. He held out the mythology as a doorway for getting back in touch with the authentic emotional roots of German-Scandinavian identity.
Wagner is most famously known for his cycle of operatic dramas called “The Ring of Nibelung” (Der Ring des Nibelungen).
The Ring cycle of operas begins with the wise woman Brunnehilde, a plot of her father— the god Wotan (Odin), to regain the magical ring of power with which to rule the world and ends with the opera “Twilight of the Gods” (Gotterdammerung).
These operas fully realized his concept of the “total work of art” (gesamtkunstwerk) which envisioned a combination of poetry, music, dance, visuals, and stage drama into a coherent operatic drama (see his essays in The Artwork of the Future, 1849). He called them “Dramas.” They were creations of alternative worlds.
So, his musical compositions are notable for their complex textures, harmonies, and use of musical phrases to highlight the presence of characters, places, ideas, and plot elements. The goal was an authentic immersion into a representation of the feeling and nature of primeval life. Then, he hoped, there would be the possibility to implement a totalistic displacement of the Christianized and rationalistic cultures of contemporary Europe.
Wagner was committed to showing how his project was the historic culmination of authentic northern European development. He believed that this evolution started with the Viking mythologies about the gods. So, for Wagner, it was essential that he find enough authentic materials to start his work of social reconstruction. However, the primary written sources about the early Vikings were sparse and untranslated.
Going back to the future
Wagner searched and searched for a translation of the Viking sagas to inform his drama. Finally, in the Royal Library of Dresden, he found a copy of H. von der Hagen’s 1815 translation of “The Saga of Volsungs.” Knowledge of “The Saga of Volsungs” provided enough inspiration for Wagner to complete his cycle of operatic dramas, the “Ring of the Nibelung.” He also was influenced by Willem Grimm’s Deustcher Heldensaage (The German Heroic Tale).
Wagner’s operas probably did more than anything else to create the romantic noble savage imaginary of the Viking crusading around wearing dramatic horned helmets. For the first full production of “The Ring of the Nibelung” at Bayreuth in 1876, Wagner’s costume designer, Professor Carl Emil Doepler created headpieces with long wings pointing upward for the female Valkyries who escorted heroes to Valhalla. He put fairly innocuous cow horns on the headgear of the male Vikings. But rather quickly, the Vikings started to be popularly portrayed with dramatically larger bull horns. Before long “a small herd of ‘viking’ helmets was…on the move,” says literary historian Roberta Frank (2000) in her definitive “The Invention of the Viking horned helmet.”
By the late 19th Century, the horned helmet was branded “Viking” on consumer goods, paintings, popular histories, and children’s books. The Scandinavian cruise ships of the Hamburg-America Columbia featured the helmet with horns on its menus. Imperialist Rudyard Kipling naturally picked up the imagery for his A School History of England that he wrote with C. R. L. Fletcher. An illustration for the book depicts the Danes arriving on a ship with a horned dragon prow and stepping off with horned helmets adorning their heads.
In May 11-14, 1889, the whole “The Ring of the Nibelungen” was debuted in the United States by the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The horned Vikings made their famous full-force landing in America.
Wagner was so successful that even Christians started to imagine horns on the Vikings and other primitives. Late 19th-century artist Hermann Wislicenus took up the famous tableau of the conversion of the Saxons and added horns on their heads and on that of their idol too. Maybe, he was just too tempted to associate paganism with the Golden Calf during the Exodus of Jews from Egypt. Ansgar, the missionary to “the North,” was portrayed in 1889 as evangelizing the horned-helmeted pagan Swedes.
Wagner’s goal to secularize thus even permeated into Christian writers who were unaware of the composer’s long-term goal. How did his plan work?
In a prose sketch by music historian Mark Berry (2006/2016, 168), Wagner is said to have “voiced his intention ‘to have the gods leave the stage [after] having educated mankind to freedom of ‘consciousness.’” The composer was one of the many Romantic artists and scholars who raised up religious imagery that was so powerful that the end result was a sort of emotionally overwhelming experience of Art that broke free from any specific religion. Friedrich Schiller called this “the aesthetic education of Man” (1795).
The music critic of the New Yorker, Alex Ross (2020, 25) wrote that the most notable Romantic intellectuals of Europe “all held that artistic mythologies could give new spiritual direction to what [sociologist] Max Weber would later call the disenchanted modern world. When [Friedrich] Schlegel spoke of a reversion to the ‘primordial chaos of human nature, for which I know of no lovelier symbol than the motley throng of the ancient gods,’ he might have been dreaming of the Ring…” Lawrence Scaff in his book Fleeing the Iron Cage (1991) summarized Weber as imagining that at its best, Wagner’s music induced a total delirious surrender of the soul for a moment of exorcism and ecstasy that served the modern human “as a surrogate for primary religious experience.”
In such a manner, the mythical evocation of Leif Erikson’s Vikings as bearers of an exuberant pagan consciousness would end up displacing Christianity leaving space for the creation of a secular consciousness. The literary process defaced the memory of Erikson’s actual religious identity as a Christian missionary. Wagner used the paganized Vikings like an axe against Christianity. It was an audacious sleight of hand. Wagner’s work was aided by his own first-hand knowledge and revulsion from Christianity.
Although his mother was a devout Catholic, and Wagner was baptized at St. Thomas Church, his religious inclination bent strongly in the direction of his stepfather’s skepticism. Later in life, he fell deeply under the influence of the atheistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly his The World as Will and Representation.
During this period of European history, a whole tribe of radicals took aim at religious beliefs. David F. Strauss influentially debunked the divine origins of the story of the life of Jesus while in The Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feurbach portrayed Christianity as the mythical sigh of people denied material subsistence. Wagner enthusiastically praised Feurbach’s notion of the “philosophy of the future” which offered a ‘ruthlessly radical liberation’ of the individual from the bondage of conceptions associated with the belief in traditional authority. Karl Marx said that Feurbach was too simplistic, ignoring a more complex alienation that was the result of class conflict being the occasion for myth-making by the elites to seduce and subject the poor in their struggle for material liberation.
During the revolutions of 1848, Wagner allowed that his desire was “to commit acts of artistic terrorism.” His work was a polemical artillery barrage against Christianity.
Marx’s life-span almost completely coincided with that of Wagner, and the revolutionary writer even coincidently visited Nuremberg at the time of the first Bayreuth festival that showcased the “Ring.” (Marx grumpily wrote his co-writer Frederich Engels that he couldn’t find a hotel room because of the “fool’s festival.”) Wagner never mentions Marx by name, but many have noticed similarities of Wagner’s “Ring” and Marx’s historical materialism. Both created a sort of fantasy history by which to convince people of the inevitability of secularism. The young Geroge Bernard Shaw, an ardent skeptic, published an anti-capitalist reading of the “Ring” under the title, The Perfect Wagnerite. He declared Wagner’s approach as “frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully modern.” He claimed that both authors ascribed “the predestined end of our capitalistic-theocratic epoch.”
Marxism ended up in the hands of the fanatical revolutionary V. I. Lenin, and Wagner ended up in the side pocket of Adolf Hitler. Max Weber found a sublimity in Wagner that encouraged him on his deathbed. But little did the sociologist imagine that his maid, who was present, would draw inspiration to follow Hitler. The costs of this type of secular displacement were immense, starting with the undermining of the moral values of Christianity. The “Noble Savage” idea makes for great swashbuckling drama, but one has to worry about its emphasis on primeval violence.
The image of the “Noble Savage” defaced the moral teachings of Christianity that the 10th-century Vikings had adopted. One of the reasons that the Vikings had adopted Christianity so quickly was that its teachings promised to tamp down the incessant blood feuds. So, the “Noble Savage” myth’s cruelest effect was the diminishing of values such as forgiveness, humility, and admission of wrongdoing. This obscuring of such moral values is one reason that the Wagnarian tradition could so easily be utilized by the Nazis in their quest for racial purity and dominance. Likewise, the Communists saw a kindred spirit in Wagner. Lenin had been a casual Wagner fan and in 1924, “Siegfrid’s Funeral March” was played at his memorial.
On the other hand, J.R.R. Tolkien turned the Noble Savage tradition on its head by making the rural humble folk the heroes in his figural version of the heroes of “The Saga of Volsungs.” The axes were wielded by dwarves, short people with stout hearts. The evil marauders of the land were the legions of Sauron. Tolkein’s best friend C.S. Lewis came across Wagner in a review of a book titled Sigfried and the Twilight of the Gods, a translation of two parts of the Ring. He was gobsmacked.
“In 1934, Lewis and Tolkien spent an evening reading aloud the libretto of Walkure, as Lewis’ brother Warnie reported in his diaries: ‘Arising out of the perplexities of Wotan [the chief Norse god also called Odin] we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven.’” (Cited by Ross 2020, 643). Tolkien recognized a figuration of Christian ideas in Wagner’s portrayal of Norse mythology but felt that the composer left the Viking gods susceptible to being mouthpieces for the Nazis.
So, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was in a sense a salvation project for Nordic mythology from the Wagnerian abuse of it by the Nazis. The Christian Tolkien offers a kinder, gentler Ring with the humble people as the true heroes. In the end, Hobbits sit down to say graces for the meals that their wives cook. Toward the end of his life, Wagner, too, reclaimed an appreciation of Christianity. Can we wonder if that resurrection of faith as seen in The Lord of the Rings is actually the final act of “The Ring of the Nibelung?”
The reinvention of Wagner continues. Jerry Sigel and Joe Schinler re-invented Superman as a force for good disguised as ordinary Clark Kent. Captain American, a scrawny kid magically transformed, ousts the global terrorist, Johann Schmidt, who brews his insidious plans in his laboratory to the rhythms of the Ring. These superhero writers included a democratic appreciation of the ordinary man or woman who could rise to superhero status.
However, a darker Wagnerian-mythologized Viking narrative has continued to consternate the world. The Russian Wagner Group, co-founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, took its inspiration from the “Ride of the Valkyries” as used in the movie “Apocalypse Now.” Prigozhin showed off his toughness by using a hammer in honor of Thor’s Hammer. The other co-founder Dmitry Utkin, who gave his nickname to the Wagner Group would visit his troops wearing a helmet with horns, according to interviews with Wagner Group participants by Radio Liberty. New Yorker’s music critic says this shows how Richard Wagner has become “a vessel through which modern furies pass.”
By the late 20th Century, the romantic image was recapitulated in the Norwegian American redoubt of Minnesota with their rough and tough professional football teams known as the Vikings, notably not called “the Missionaries.” Since 1962, we have been thrilled to the comic book superhero Thor, a mighty warrior with the ugly parts taken out. The fairy tale conspiracy theory Q-Anon has rattled the Viking warrior cages producing the Q-Anon Shaman with bare chest and horned head garb — a sort of ridiculous end of the Leif Erikson Romanticism.
Another difference between the Wagnerian Nobel Savage and the Norwegian Christian Viking was that Wagner tended to be an avowed anti-modernist while the Norwegian adventurers were very curious about exploring new frontiers. So much so, that Norwegians later contributed to the Apollo moon program, a modernist project par excellence.
The warping effect of Wagner’s mythologizing can be seen in the helmet gear imagined for the Vikings as well as the secularized portrayal of the Vikings in Leif Ericson Park in Brooklyn. One design path was very exuberant while the park design path was more subdued in order to disassociate Norway’s connection to America’s enemy during the Great War with Germany. The end result of the design paths was the same: a growing displacement of Christianity and religion in general from Norwegian American consciousness. The result was a bit of schizophrenia between present thinking and actual history, the development of a hallucination that continues to haunt (adapting John Modern’s 1994 understanding of secularism).
So, for example, as far as we can tell, the Wagnerian type of horned helmet was not actually worn by Vikings and was costumed for dramatic effect to show the Noble Savage. The Valkyries’ helmets with large up swung wings were much more dramatic than the cow-sized horns on the male Vikings. But almost immediately, the popular vision of Viking warriors featured bull horns that equaled or even vastly outsized the Valkyries’ wings. The horned Vikings were a very visible testimony to their alleged skull-crushing violence and daring spirit, am advertisement that displaced any Christian elements in the image of the Vikings.
The tale of the helmets of Leif Erikson
What kind of helmet did Leif Erikson or his father, the belligerent Erik the Red, wear?
We have five extant examples of the Viking helmets, only one of which is mostly intact, the Gjermundbu Helmet. Its pieces, which were found in 1943, date to the 900s, very close in time to Leif Erikson. Putting together the nine fragments of the helmet results in an iron helmet that resembles the shape of an ancient peaked cap. The other fragments of helmets that have been found are similar. All are probably like the “simplified crested helmets” or the codus helmets that were widespread in Europe at the time. Not a horn has been found (Also see Langer 2002).
Français : Le casque de Sutton Hoo, vu de face. Photo de 2015.
accession number 1939,1010.93 / British Museum: online database: entry 86159
Date 28 December 2016
Source Self-photographed, user:geni
After the Vikings turned toward Christ, the helmets didn’t change, though we don’t know if the decoration painted upon them contained Christian elements. Most likely, some of the Christian Viking warriors’ helmets, clothing, and shields included Christian symbols like the Cross, though we have very little physical evidence.
Leif Ericson Park recapitulates the modernist near-sightedness on religion in the Viking traditions. The disjuncture between modern mythologizing and religious actuality is also a feature in the work of most late 20th-century historians and social scientists of New York City. They didn’t look upon religion with much esteem, but more like a suppressed memory of an unhappy marriage. Leif as a fire-breathing plunderer was safer than a fire-breathing missionary. Even better, the park planners honed down the rough tidbits of the horned Viking raiders by recasting them as “adventurers.”
The exaggeration of the Viking warrior with a head of horns doesn’t make an appearance in the park. We are left with sort of an innocuous presentation, neither Christian nor Norse divinities disturb the visage. A pall of banality is the result of this secular and politically correct presentation. Secularist plurality has no power to inspire. No life and death issues; no call to a clash of God versus the gods. Valhalla is a tennis court. If the park stops short of the ridiculousness of the Q-Anon Shaman, neither does it have much hint of the sublime or the Almighty power.
In a famous 2004 essay, historian Jon Butler concluded that “the interpretative mainstream” of American scholarly writing “overwhelmingly finds religion in modern America more anomalous than normal and more innocuous than powerful.” He observed that “After 1870,…religion often appears [in scholarly presentations] as a jack-in-the-box” popping up “colorfully on occasion…” Historians of modern American history assume “the essential disappearance of religion from public life…” As recently as 2024, this critique was still true. In the June 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books, Princeton historian Peter Brown offered a corrective, “modern historiography of the expansion of the early Church seems to have left little room for the Holy Ghost. Don’t get me wrong: I do not speak as a theologian but as a historian.”
Some of our noteworthy creations here in New York City are the product of a mighty river of spiritual inspiration that ended right here in New York Harbor with the arrival of the Norwegians and many others. Brown writes, “We should remember that the people we study lived in a world crowded with invisible beings. Some of these beings were demons driven by chill malevolence… But humans could also be touched by the warm presence of benevolent spirits, seen as ever ready to protect and to inspire individuals. … A language of inspiration, based on belief in the proximity of nurturing powers, served to explain unusual actions, new departures, and unprecedented acts of creativity.” New York City parks should communicate the power of the works of the Spirit among our people, not as an endorsement but as truthfulness to how we got here.
So, who is the real Leif Erickson?
