"The human race is going to die in 4/4 time": The Out-of-Step Pagan Philosophy of Moondog

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Louis Thomas Hardin (1916-1999), aka. Moondog, is one of my greatest personal heroes. Among the most iconic figures of the American music underground, Moondog was seen almost every day at the corner between 53rd and 54th street and the Avenue of the Americas in New York City from the late 1940's to 1972. An dynamite-related accident left him blind as a bat at the age of 16, lending a distinctly Odinic look to this six foot tall character, who spent his days composing, and selling pamphlets of sheet music and poetry. Beyond that, he perhaps as famous for his music as he is for dressing in a viking inspired getup, consisting of hide shoes, poncho, cloak, and distinctly Wagnerian headdress, which was all too often mistaken for a childish publicity stunt. Making enemies in New York is easy, as Moondog biographer Robert Scotto noted, in a city that “offers a bewildering mix of talents and posers.”

Though the older Moondog looked like he had stepped right off the stage from Wagner's Ring Cycle, the young Louis Hardin was the son of a preacher, on a mostly bum-steered mission to convert American natives. Louis was greatly impressed by the otherness of their way of life, which would later prompt him to seek out a more primeval grounding for himself. His encounters with unflinchingly heretical chiefs offered him an alternative, authoritative point of view quite different from that of his father, who was lukewarm and distanced in all matters. His evangelical upbringing in an uncaring home resulted in his rejection of Christianity, and the staunchness of the Indians proved an excellent mirror to Moondog's own notorious stubbornness.

But it was the blinding accident that set the ball rolling: His creative thirst awoke when his sister read him Jesse Fothergill's novel The First Violin, a bildungsroman about an adolescent English woman studying music in Germany. This itself foreshadowed Moondog's own Teutonic journeys many years later. As he grew, his first encounter with the ancient North came by means of a braille transcription of Beowulf which, along with radio performances of Wagner, inspired the hope in him that he would one day write an opera of his own. His life as a composer proceeded with his move to New York in 1943, where he (barely) got by on street-level panhandling, and by posing for art students. He assumed the name Moondog in 1947, at 31 years old, in honor of a pet bulldog he once had that used to bark against the moon. He was yet unaware that the name in Old Norse, Mánagarm, is a poetic synonym for the mythological wolf Hati, destined to swallow the moon at the end of the world. The synchronicity later dawned on him, and Moondog shared with his mythological counterpart a certain contempt for the world he was dealt.

By 1948, Moondog had grown sick of New York and decided to leave “Coca-Cola culture” behind. He hoped to go live among the Navajo in New Mexico, but they firmly rejected him. He noted how they envied the culture he had left behind, while he coveted the culture they themselves were leaving. The final straw came when a group of them lead him between lanes on a busy highway and left him there. He traveled around the country instead, and by fall 1949 he was back in New York with a new elkskin cloak and square, wooden drum. Both of his own design. His awkwardly cut, “square clothes” and self-invented instruments would soon become emblematic of his unique musical style and personality.

Moondog in his spot on 53rd and 6th.

Moondog in his spot on 53rd and 6th.

Ever since Moondog first set foot in New York, he had the attention of celebrities, artists, hipsters, tourists, and flâneurs. Years before the full bloom of his “viking self”, he had already influenced, befriended, or been approached by today famous figures like Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dean Martin, and Bob Dylan. Muhammad Ali always referred to him as either “Moon” or “The Dog”. He performed with Tiny Tim and once jammed with Marlon Brando, who played the bongos. All the while, he was making five dollars a day on the street while sleeping on the floor of his record producer's basement. It was there he wrote “All is Loneliness”, a harrowing composition which would later be covered by a range of artists, including Janis Joplin, usually in far simpler rhythms than Moondog himself intended. The English folk-revival band Pentangle later recorded a song about him, and the Beatles may have plagiarized his name when they first started performing as Johnny and the Moondogs. David Bowie would later claim the sight of Moondog as his first distinct New York memory. He was less than enthusiastic about modern pop music: “The human race is going to die in 4/4 time”, he joked sardonically.

If people saw him as a living anachronism between the skyscrapers of Midtown, it should be said the feeling was mutual. Moondog claimed he never felt like an American. He idealized Northern Europe and referred to himself as a European in exile. When the music brought him to Germany in 1974, he was delighted to visit sites such as Teutoburg Forest, where Germanic tribes under the military leadership of Arminius lay waste to three Roman legions in the year 9 CE. As well as the Sachsenhain monument in Verden, where Charlemagne allegedly subjected thousands of pagan Saxons to forced baptism, before executing them en masse on the banks of the rivers Aller and Weser. These pilgrimages must have spoken to Moondog's yearning towards a more native and ancient atmosphere, as well as the Machiavellian sentiments of his personal philosophy. Every now and then, I make little pilgrimages of my own to Moondog's corner, where only his ghost remains to those who still remember, or are otherwise initiated into the secret of his existence.

While people tend to imagine Moondog busking on “his corner” on 6th Ave, this was not usual. For the most part, Moondog’s daily routine consisted of standing in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, tapping along as he wrote music in braille. He composed poetry, sold his own sheet music, sipped coffee, relished the sounds and rhythms of the city, chatted with strangers, joked with friends, and disarmed hecklers, rain or shine. For his poetic and philosophical content he relied heavily on the mnemnonic wonders of poetry, much like skaldic poets and bards did in the absence of the written word. When he wrote these poems down, he usually kept it down to only a few keywords in braille in which the poems were immanent, and used them recall their poetic content and structure like a true singer of tales. He composed hundreds of simple couplets in iambic septameter, mapping his unique view of the world. Here are but a few:

It seems that hills are made to fall, that dales were made to rise,
that mediocre nondescripts were made to compromise.

The only one that knows this ounce of words is just a token,
is he who has a ton to tell, but must remain unspoken

We grope with eyes wide open toward the darkness of futurity,
with faith in outermost instead of innermost security.

We were few and far between in prehistoric times,
and we'll be few and far between in posthistoric times.

There was a time when goods were made for wear instead of tear.
There is a time when goods are made for tear instead of wear.


Moondog in Hamburg in 1974. Copyright: Beatrice Fehn, via Moondogscorner.de

Moondog in Hamburg in 1974. Copyright: Beatrice Fehn, via Moondogscorner.de

Extraordinary expectations often follow extraordinary appearances. The bizarre viking image that made him so famous was, and is, far too often mistaken for a device he used to bring attention to himself. Moondog's image may have been carefully crafted, but was not intended as a cheap publicity stunt. Rather, it was an expression of who Moondog truly thought he was. Though his weirdness gained him some notoriety, it was also an opportunity for his critics to lash out against him. Some considered him no more than a naive autodidact, whose eccentricities awarded him undeserved fame. Even in the avant-garde, Moondog remained an outsider throughout much of his life.

For one thing, Moondog considered himself a sort of pagan. “I believe in the Norse gods,” he said. “When you think of the deity, you raise up your head, you just salute the invisible; it can happen any time; if you feel like communicating with something beyond humanity, you just do it.” Moondog's out-of-step spiritual convictions often go overlooked or understated when people write about him. No wonder: The average member of the public will have enough trouble coping with the weird viking costume, never mind making sense of the exotic and strange spiritual realm he inhabited. But to be fair, his odd brand of pagan ideas are idiosyncratic even by Modern pagan standards. Moondog longed for a different time and place, more 'true’ and authentic to his being. The clothes symbolized his rejection of those chronological and spiritual circumstances he was born into, as well as his strong affinity for the Nordic pre-Christian traditions. His fascination with the subject matter may have been difficult to reconcile with the sexy mystique of jazz, the music press, and the gatekeepers of the classical music intelligentsia. But it pervades his work, and he kept bringing it up in interviews. To add further emphasis with his syncopated out-of-stepness with modernity, he operated with an alternate calendar system of his own design, with the dawn of agriculture as its point of departure. Moondog's year zero is 8000 BCE to us.

A poem submitted by Moondog to the Norwegian-American newspaper Nordisk Tidende, December 30th, 1965.

A poem submitted by Moondog to the Norwegian-American newspaper Nordisk Tidende, December 30th, 1965.

Even if the spiritual dimension of his aesthetic and musical life never gained traction with the media or public, his notions about a pagan revival outside of the confines of centralized religion seem to have gone with him wherever he went. Throughout his work he made many surprising references to Norse culture. For example, the dense and esoteric title Logrundr, which he used for a large cycle of numbered compositions, is comprised of the Old Norse words lǫg meaning law or canon, and grundr meaning ground. In a different, musicological sense — Moondog's sense — ground is a repeating bass pattern played under a cascade of musical variations. This is technique is essential to Moondog's cataolog. Then there's the Heimdall Fanfare, a monumental rally composed for nine horns. Ginnungagap, Hugin and Munin, Buri - Bor, the heroic-lyrical Thor and the Midgard Serpent, and the epic poem Thor the Nordoom, to name a few. Some monumental compositions, like his magnum opus The Creation — based on the Norse cosmogony —, have only been partially performed. Most of his overtly pagan material was never formally published or recorded, at least not by himself. He envisioned a grand Edda Day ceremonial on the summer solstice. This was supposed to be a festival of avant-Nordic (dare I say, Scandifuturist?) panegyric celebration. A feast of poetic recital, musical performances, and ecstatic dance. In one sense, this dream was realized in a performance at the royal mounds in Uppsala in 1981.

Moondog at the Royal Mounds in Uppsala, 1981. Copyright: Stefan Lakatos, via Moondogscorner.de

Moondog at the Royal Mounds in Uppsala, 1981. Copyright: Stefan Lakatos, via Moondogscorner.de

One, seemingly more incidental recording reveals much more about Moondog's inner nature than you first may think: Frey and Freya Chewing on Two Big Soup Bones is exactly what the title states. However, it's not the gods Frey and Freya the title refers to; it's his dogs. In one recording he says:

“That's a great sound, you know, it’s... You can, you can see what's going on, you can see it all just from the sound, you know. All those white teeth shining there in the night, in the moonlight, yeah. There's snow all around. You can hear them breathing there as they're chewing. That's a very primitive sound. Oh my, it's primitive.”

For what Moondog lacked in eyesight, his vision burned bright in the world of noises. He loved all kinds of sounds, whether the symphonies of Bach or the rattle of the passing A train going up and down Manhattan. Though he insisted on a mutual rejection between himself and the modern world, the rattling of the subway train never seems far away in Moondog's “snaketime” rhythms.

Where but New York could such a man come to exist? Nevertheless, he ended up relocating to Germany in 1974. By then he had become so ingrained in the New York scene that many simply assumed he had died. Rather, it was in Germany that he enjoyed many of the fruits of his labor, living as a composer and touring musician until he died at the age of 89 in 1999. Or rather the year 9999 according to his own calendar.

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If you would like to learn more about Moondog, check out Robert Scotto’s biography Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue (2007), and the excellent online resource Moondogscorner.de.
For Spotify users I have compiled a playlist of some of
Moondog's available music.

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Brute Norse Podcast Ep. 19: Norway's Eternal Return

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In this episode Eirik takes an eldritch look at Norwegian identity, from the mythology and dreams of Iron Age expansionists to the national mythology of state bureaucracy. He attempts to negotiate between the representation, artifice and organism of Norwegianness itself, drawing on Thure Erik Lund's oddball idea of the "True" versus "Norwegian" Norwegians and Nick Land's concept of hyperstition, realizing his own participation in the ongoing ritualization that keeps the Norwegian creature alive.


Don't forget to check out some of the shirts for sale in the
Brute Norse Teespring store, and to support Brute Norse on Patreon!

Migratory Meditations: Leaving a Homeland in the Hard Iron Age

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"It is sad to leave your homeland", an Afghan woman told me. Over the last nine months, I have had countless conversations with people about my intended migration from Norway to America. It is one of those things you can't help but mention. When every day is filled with soul-sucking bureaucracy, forms to fill, and the grueling uncertainty of the wait, the sum of obsession with all possible outcomes becomes an inevitable subject of conversation. You dream about it, and every waking hour it walks in on your trail of thought.

To her it seemed like an odd choice to make, that I would leave Norway. If she could, she would gladly sacrifice the saline shores of Norway to live with her loved ones in the valleys of Afghanistan.  War and persecution ruled that possibility out for the time being. No bombs have fallen over Norway since 1945, no mines haunt my childhood trails. The sad and happy difference, of course, is that I have a choice. My migration is a luxury, but that's not what she said. She said: It is sad to leave your homeland.

And I agree. Her statement stuck with me, not due to the contrast of our respective situations, but due to the skin in the game she displayed within it. She knew what she was talking about. Among the countless people who either cheered me on enthusiastically, or questioned my choice based on a general suspicion towards the American model, this comment came across as most sincere.

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Landscape is a core element of our identities. People are born, live, and die without ever leaving New York state. Many Americans have never seen the ocean. The landscape and traditions I was born into differ, sometimes drastically, from that of the big city in the New World. I was born in an ancestral homeland, with an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic affinity stretching back thousands of years. The single recorded instance of my line of descent ever migrating to or from Norway was a temporary stint in North Dakota that only lasted a generation, before my "squarehead" forebears - ethnic Norwegians both - married and decided, in spite of any promise of opportunity, to return to the old country.

Whenever I looked out the window, I have always felt backed up by countless generations of ancestors. People who changed only as slowly as the landscape, whose looks and traits I carry with me from cradle to grave, and that I may give to prospective children in the future. My paternal line of descent has not, at least to my knowledge, made any drastic choices in terms of landscape and identity since the Bronze Age. The Hindus place us in the dark Kali Yuga, the age of darkness and confusion. Hesiod might say we still live in the hard Iron Age of fuss and misery. To most Westerners it suffices to say the word "modernism" to conjure what seems to be an odd mix of alienation and prosperity. There is no shortage of either, but I believe it that even if all of the above is true, our age of cyberfuss is raised by the girders of some sardonic fate beyond direct control. The gods delight as much as they fear.

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My childhood landscape was filled with mysteries, vernacular traditions, and ancient sites, but if there is any truth and merit to what I have done in my work so far, the recipe should work also here. The Norse Vinland colony collapsed due to understimulation, starvation, and exposure. The cosmos they created in the wake of Leifr Eiríksson's landing collapsed under its own weight, and the Vinland landscape I look upon from my apartment is different. This is a strange world, and nobody really knows what the hell I am talking about if I mention my background. But then again, not everybody did in Norway either. I don't think I have ever been closer to what I believe to be the logical conclusions of the cosmology of the Eddas. When cosmogenitors of the legendary sagas break from society, it is never to live within nature itself, but to lay flat the forests, and to timber houses. Nowhere is the inevitable imbalance of the battle of culture versus nature better exemplified than in a metropolis like New York, a city with a population greater than the entirety of my home country. In a nation whose Norwegian diaspora outnumber the Norwegians of Norway itself.

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People talk about the lightning speed of the proverbial New York minute. Before I decided to move to New York I lived in a marshland cabin off the municipal water supply, often isolated during heavy snowfall or storms. It was fantastic, and I hope to live like that again. Time moves slow in that sort of scenery. A maturing experience for certain, but a life without hustle soon grows stale. In this swamplike landscape I was quite literally wallowing, waiting for the wind to blow in my direction, and it took some time for me to realize that nobody was waiting for me to be ready. I found my Will, and found my way. It only took me a while to realize.

It took only four days between my landing and my marriage to my wife, which was the object of my migration. Things move quickly when the ball starts rolling. Now I wake up in a landscape where every tree is planted by a human hand. Where the surface is peeled down to its granite bedrock, skyscrapers soar so high they go unnoticed on street level, and unsuspecting pedestrians walk on levels of surfaces hundreds of meters above the deepest tunnels and recesses of this Swiss cheese city. Trees are kept behind fences, like cages, and not even the wildlife behaves naturally, but in perfect accordance with the human compulsion towards order. Though the disorder of nature - naturally - oozes through the woodwork. Cruel Mother Nature always will. This is Moondog's city, the blind and visionary artist who never quite belonged in any urban center, yet could never have developed anywhere else. Where thousands like myself passed through, who walked up and down the old Brooklyn ghetto they affectionately called "Lapskaus Boulevard", where the psychic advised Johannes Hansen to return home to Oseberg, resulting in that famous ship find.

I don't know how this process will affect Brute Norse, but I will not be the first writer to leave that homeland.

These are speedy days, but so is the hard Iron Age.

So what the flip is Old Norse anyway? A guide for the perplexed

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Most readers will have some preconceived notion about what the the terms Norse and Old Norse mean. Even if your understanding of the subject is vague, you probably know that Old Norse is famously the language of the so-called Vikings – a historically recent ethnic term that is often used interchangeably with Norse. In casual conversation this works fine, and you're not confusing anybody by using any of the two. Academically (of course) it's much more complicated. If you look in an English dictionary dating to, say, the early 1900's you are likely to see Norse defined simply as «Norwegian». Historically this is what the word meant, but the meaning has since shifted. Today it generally refers to the Germanic speaking Scandinavian population, as well as that of their overseas colonies during the Viking Era and Middle Ages. As for the term «Viking» denoting Norse peoples: This is somewhat misleading because a viking was actually a specific kind of person within Norse culture. A title, really. But owing to its prevalence, scholars frequently resort to it for convenience. For example, Norse overseas colonies in places like Ireland, Greenland, and Russia, is sometimes referred to as The Viking Diaspora. But that's a discussion for a later time. Let's stick with Norse for now.

The first Norsemen

Outside the scholarly world, the term Norse is most commonly applied to the Viking Era, which kicked off in the 8th century for reasons varied and unknown (innovations in sailing technology is commonly assumed to be one factor). The Old Norse language was more or less fully developed by the 700's, having sprung from the preceding Proto-Norse or Proto-Scandinavian tongue (pick whatever term suits you, there's no consensus!), which in turn developed from a Northern dialect of Proto-Germanic.

For Norway, Greenland, the Faeroe Islands, and Iceland, it makes sense to talk about common Old Norse all the way through the 14th century, when the Black Death unleashed a period of Mad Max-esque socioeconomic and demographic turmoil, forcing Norway into a linguistic revolution that gave birth to the Middle Norwegian language. This made mutual intelligibility with Iceland a thing of the past.

Middle Norwegian is basically the sort of grizzly post-apocalyptic linguistic change you can expect when something like three fifths of the entire population shuffles off their mortal coil, leaving their brats with nobody to correct their baby language and youthful slang. Up until then, the differences between Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic had been a matter of dialect. Specifically the Old West Norwegian dialects of the early settlers.

It wasn't a unified language

Anglophone scholars divide Old Norse language into West Norse, which I described above, and East Norse which encompasses Old Swedish, Danish, and Gutnish (spoken on Gotland). These are distinct enough to be considered languages of their own. Still, all these variants of Old Norse were mutually intelligible to the point where West Norse speakers accepted the term Danish Tongue (dǫnsk tunga) as a name for their own language. This likely originated among Anglo-Saxons to describe the language of Scandinavian settlers, traders and raiders, drawing a generalization from what seemed to them the dominant culture – namely the Danes. This isn't entirely dissimilar to how we generalize by calling them Vikings today. This common linguistic identity, and the fact that they adopted a foreign term as their own, seems to suggest a sense of cultural kinship among Viking Era Scandinavians. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can still understand each other with relative ease, which is a fantastic linguistic privilege. And still, when reading Norwegian, Danish or Swedish runic inscriptions from the Viking Era, we may enjoy the distinct and recognizable traits of each.

The extent of Old Norse and closely related tongues in the 10th century. West Norse in red, East Norse in Orange. Gutnish in purple.

The extent of Old Norse and closely related tongues in the 10th century. West Norse in red, East Norse in Orange. Gutnish in purple.

Terms, translations, and turmoil

Despite mutual intelligibility and common heritage, Nordic scholars are not on the same page as English ones when they discuss Old Norse in their native languages. Scandinavian scholars use the term «norrønt» which overlaps with Norse. But confusingly, it does not mean exactly the same. Firstly, the term excludes Swedes and Danes, and refers exclusively to the West Norse language(s) and populations of the Viking Era and High Middle Ages (8th through 14th centuries). One can easily write entire books about why this is, as people have, but bear with me.

One obvious reason is the historical and linguistic divide between Sweden and Denmark on one side, and the entire Western Nordic world on the other. Swedish and Danish language rapidly developed away from Old Norse in the High Middle Ages: 13th century Old Danish looks a lot more like modern Danish than 13th century Old Norwegian resembles modern Norwegian. In fact, most Scandinavians would have an easier time reading 13th century Danish, than they would trying to make sense of Old Norse. This means that Old Norse is a viable term for language in Norway and the Western Nordic from the 8th through 14th centuries, while 13th and 14thcentury Swedes and Danes spoke a different language entirely, though Norwegian would soon enough make a similar turn.

«Sven carved these runes after Uddulf» Coutersy of the Swedish National Heritage Board / Harald Faith-Ell.

«Sven carved these runes after Uddulf» Coutersy of the Swedish National Heritage Board / Harald Faith-Ell.

The Swedish dialect of East Norse, so-called Runic Swedish, appears before 800 and is gone by 1225, superseded by Old Swedish until 1526. The heavy West Norse connotations of Old Norse and «norrønt» also rest on the fact that the vast majority of surviving Norse literature comes from the Western Nordic area: Iceland, and to a far lesser extent Norway. Norway tends to mooch off Iceland, because Icelandic identity was reflexive towards Norway. They wrote a ton of historical fiction placed in Norway, and composed some great propaganda pieces for the Norwegian crown. Besides, Icelanders pretty much considered Norway the womb of the Icelandic nation, and suffered immense Norwegian cultural and political pressure.

Very few vernacular manuscripts remain from the other Nordic countries, but the literature and implications of identity permeates all Nordic scholarship on the matter to some lesser or greater extent. I will not go into the long-term political history of Scandinavia and the Nordic, but they all have in common a heritage of Norse prehistory that functions as a serving bowl of national myths of origin, which is politicized accordingly.

Norse culture and contemporary identities

The reception of Old Norse, viking, and medieval history is treated variously between the Nordic countries. Denmark and Iceland, it seems to me, are the best when it comes to popular representation of the Viking Era in particular. Denmark is rich in physical remains but short on written sources, with Iceland it's by far the other way around. And each country infuses the era with their own particular brands of plushy patriotic sentiments. Warning – stereotypes ahead. In Norway, as well as in Norse texts, the term Norse (Norwegian: norrønt. Icelandic: norræn) have strong norwegiocentric connotations. I've told Icelandic barhoppers I do Old Norse and they've corrected me to Old Icelandic, while Swedes might have no idea what I'm talking about when presented with the term. 

Such identity markers are visible even in the world of Academia, down to the spelling you see in the critical editions of Norse texts at your university library. In Iceland, as with the majority of international scholarship, Old Norse is taught with modern Icelandic orthography and pronunciation. This is what you hear in virtually every bedroom video guide to Old Norse pronunciation, which are a dime a dozen on YouTube. Norway is the only country (as far as I'm aware) where reconstructed pronunciation is taught. Orthography follows a convention called «Classical Old Norse», which intends to portray a normalized version of 13th century Norse spelling. This is the tradition I was brought into, though it appears to be rapidly disappearing. To this day, years after my indoctrination graduation, I still get A Clockwork Orange-like fits of nausea every time I hear Old Norse pronounced as if it were modern Icelandic. I'm sure the feeling is mutual.