What can a child’s playground teach us about Viking religion in New York City?

The religious history of Norwegians in New York City has hardly been written upon. There is so much that we don’t know. Previous historians like those who produced the Encyclopedia of New York City have short-shifted the religions of the city. So, this study is a little bit like mapmaking to indicate places unexplored.

On our journeys in Brooklyn, we have often dropped by the children’s playground in Leif Ericson Park, which lies on the border between the neighborhoods of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. One recent visit was on a stunningly bright spring day that featured Chinese and Hispanic American kids joyously climbing the monkey bars that were shaped into an outline of a Viking ship. Their parents were seated on the benches gossiping or playing cards and mahjong.

You might ask, what do the monkey bars in the park have to do with religion? Weren’t you just sort of goofing off on a beautiful day?

No, no. Really, we had a serious purpose. We were trying to fill in the context to a mystery that has emerged in the city. Why were the Norwegian Americans increasing their numbers after a century of decline?

In the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, hundreds of thousands of immigrant Norwegians started out in Manhattan, left for Brooklyn, then for the suburbs, northwestern New York State, and the Midwest. The Norwegian Americans left in New York City dwindled down to 21,844 residents in NYC. The largest portion of them lived in the Sunset Park, Bay Ridge area.

Suddenly in 2010, this started to reverse.

By 2019, there were 24,018 Norwegians in the city plus another 4,000 thousand students, officials and exchange visitors. It is not just the Norwegian Americans who are increasing their numbers. For the first time in a long time, Whites of many backgrounds are increasing their numbers in the city. What is going on?

They are younger and highly educated. The new young Whites are part of the boom (before COVID) of young college students and professionals coming from all parts of the world. But do they come with religious beliefs and interests?

That probably depends on from what region they are coming from. A first impression is that the young Norwegians are quite secular. Likely, they are also very familiar with the history of religious and ethnic/racial heroism of their ethnic forebears in our city’s neighborhoods.

We decided to do a discovery journey on Norwegian Americans as an example of our changing city. After a long decline into small numbers, their increase is statistically very visible. We could comprehensively study them as our thermometer of demographic and religious change in the city. Historically, how does the rise, fall, and rise again of Norwegian Americans reflect important aspects of religious developments in the city?

We followed the trail of the Norwegian Americans to their long-term habitation area around Leif Ericson Park. Could it be that they were coming back to reclaim their home turf like the Jews are doing in Harlem?

Right away, we came upon several mysteries. First, there weren’t many Norwegians around the park. There were no Norwegian American kids manning the ship. In fact, we counted not one in the park, though a block or two away we did see two Norwegian flags. Where are the new Norwegian Americans settling?

Manhattan displaced Brooklyn in 2001 as the favorite destination of people of Norwegian ancestry, and the movement to Queens is steadily accelerating. In 2010 Brooklyn reversed a rapid downward trend in Norwegian ancestry residents, most likely gaining entrants in the areas nearest to Manhattan. Staten Island continues a quick hemorrhage of Norwegian residents.

There was also a curious and ominous silence about the religion of the early Norwegian Americans. In the 1970s, there was a famous murder in the park in which a female corpse laid ignored for days with her arms stretched upward as if asking heaven for help. It was as if God and compassion had been murdered out of the park.

There is a very muted allusion to the religions of the Norwegians in columns decorated like the turrets of the famous stave church of Borgund, Norway. Unrelated to the Vikings, a playing field in the park is named after Quaker parrots from Argentina who had escaped and roosted in the neighborhood.

As far as we knew, Leif Erikson (this is the spelling that we will use; see the note at the end) was a classic Viking, marauding around the world donning a horned helmet in the service of a pagan worldview. The park has a metal sign with a Viking ship and a mock-up of two ancient rune plinths designed by August Werner declaring the explorer, “the founder of America.” But there wasn’t much evidence of even pagan religion in the descriptions and symbols in the park either. In fact, we ourselves really didn’t know much about Vikings or Leif Erikson. The park was not much help as far as explaining the religious dynamics of the Vikings.

The flags that were a street or two away from the park did have a faint religious symbolism if you thought about it. Each flag was red with a blue and white crossing pattern. We found out that it represented Christianity, the official religion of Norway until 2012. Some nearby churches had details of ships and sailing life, though their congregations now are mostly Chinese and Hispanic. Hmm, Norwegian churches: what were their stories?

So, we wondered what happened to the religious part of the Norwegian immigration. We also wondered about the identity of Leif Erikson, and how did he end up being the name for the park. Do those original Vikings have anything to do with the old generation of religious Norwegians and their large churches in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, or with the new generation of settlers and their religion or lack of religion? It didn’t seem that this playground had much to tells us about religion in New York.

Then, we discovered that our beliefs about the identities of Leif Erikson and the Norwegians turned out to be wrong, exactly the opposite of what we were taught and what this park showed. There were buried secrets lying about that needed to be discovered and displayed.

We thought of Leif Erikson and the Vikings as horned warriors, raiding and rampaging the shores until they stumbled onto North America. A poster for a popular movie, “The Vikings,” released in 1929 was our image.

Based on the evidence that we found in Leif Erikson Park, that is the image that Norwegian Americans accepted also. The park was founded in 1925 as an effort to claim American identity and prestige for Norwegian Americans after a couple of rough years during World War I when Norway sided with the Germans against the United States alliance.

So, Leif Erikson Park in Brooklyn remembers the spruced-up Viking adventurer and warrior who discovered America.  Certainly, in Old Norse, vikingr means sea-rover or pirate, but somehow Erikson’s pirate background as a plunderer got euphemized in favor of “adventurer,” “explorer,” and builder of a new world. Digging a little bit into the archives revealed that this bland description desperately fails to capture the tremendous changes in his life and in those of his fellow Vikings.

We found out that adventurer and warrior were not the main reasons that he was on a journey that ended up in America one day around 1000 AD. You may be surprised to find out that he actually was a Christian missionary blown off course from his mission field of Greenland!

He founded the first church in North America and instigated the second one. In a study published in the Fall of 2020 in Nature magazine, we even know the approximate date when the first church in North America was probably founded: 1021 AD. We will fill in the religious history of Leif Erikson and his fellow Vikings later in our series. Right now, we want to resolve the mystery of how the threads of religion frayed away from the fabric of the Norwegian American historical narrative. We don’t want to make that mistake again!

So, how did we forget about Leif Erikson, the first known Christian missionary to America?

We discovered that the story goes back to a powerful secularization trend in 19th-century Europe associated with literary romanticism. The public was tired of the dry theological and rationalistic tracts that had battled it out in the 18^th Century. There was a desire to bring feeling back into the discussions.

In religion, you got a turn toward pietism that emphasized the revelatory possibilities of emotional prayer and hymns. In secular circles, romanticism was displayed in melodramas of nature, the heart, and heroes by such authors (American and British) as William Wadsworth, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and the Bronte sisters. In music, we might point to the German Ludwig von Beethoven’s dramatic Fifth Symphony. In scholarly circles, a secularism was settling in, so that religion became discounted as a causal force in the development of society. The search for deep feeling turned toward power, greed, heroism, and the inherent nature of human kinds (racism). As literary historian Roberta Frank (2000) put succinctly put it, “godliness everywhere giving way to manliness.”

The change of sentiment transformed Erikson from a missionary into a Noble Savage, an ideational move from supernatural religion to natural supernaturalism. (The term comes from Thomas Carlye, an influential Scottish essayist in the 19^th Century, but I am not using it in quite the same way.) How this secularization happened and ended up in a Brooklyn playground is a remarkable historical tale. Who would imagine that romantic operas have had such an influence in the way our children play and experience fun in Brooklyn?

How do you spell Leif Erikson?

In old Norse, the name is spelled Leifr Eiriksson, in modern Norwegian, “Leiv Eiriksson.” In modern Icelandic, it is spelled Leifur (or Leif or Leiv) Eiriksson (“ur” simply denotes the male gender). In Sweden, the predominant spelling is “Erichson.”

You will also find authentic sources spelling his last name with alternative spellings like “Ericsson and Eriksson.” The United States Postal Service has spelled his name Leif Erikson on the 6-cent postage stamp issued on October 9 1968. In 2000, Congress officially acknowledge a “Leif Ericson” as landing on the North American continent one thousand years before.  The park in Brooklyn uses the same spelling.

We use Leif Erikson as a simpler and closer approximation to the sound of the names.

What do you think?

NEXT!