Standing On a Hill in My Mountain of Dreams

Thoughts on Romanticism, Led Zeppelin, and wandering with Caspar David Friedrich above a sea of fog.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1817. Via Wikimedia Commons.

I first heard the song “Going to California” when I was fifteen. 

At that age, I was rediscovering the fantasy genre that I had enjoyed as a little girl, and my head swirled with the mystical visions of Susanna Clarke’s fairies and Erin Morgenstern’s nocturnal circus. Diving into a new world of speculative fiction for adults would leave a lifelong imprint on my own writing projects. 

At the same time, my love for classic rock truly blossomed, and I had already fallen for Led Zeppelin’s fantasy-inspired songs. I was delighted to see a rock band directly reference J.R.R. Tolkien in its lyrics (see “Ramble On,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” etc.), and I was eager for more. 

“Going to California” is one of their gentler tunes from perhaps their most famous album, Led Zeppelin IV. (The album features hits like “Stairway to Heaven” and “Black Dog,” among others.) When I first listened, I was hypnotized by the lilting acoustic riff, the otherworldly lyrics, and the feeling that I was being allowed into something bigger than myself. I wanted to write a universe for that melody—it sailed me to a land of gods and kings, a place where melancholy and adventure met at the crossroads under a crescent moon. 

Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams

Telling myself it’s not as hard, hard, hard as it seems…

- Led Zeppelin, “Going to California”

At fifteen, I only possessed a cursory understanding of Romanticism. I knew that the Romantics were distinguished by a capital “R,” signifying their separation from modern romance authors, or the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages. What I had not yet pieced together was that the essence of Romanticism could be found in works outside the genre’s formal boundaries. “Going to California” perfectly captures Romanticism’s interiority, as well as its preoccupation with sublime experiences. 

Oh, the sea was red and the sky was gray

I wonder how tomorrow could ever follow today

The mountains and the canyons start to tremble and shake

The children of the sun begin to awake… 

- Led Zeppelin, “Going to California”

The artistic and literary movement that we refer to as “Romanticism” found its footing during the late 18th century. I wrote a bit about the Romantics as part of my essay on the evolution of the Gothic. (Gothic literature began as an offshoot of Romanticism.) To refresh your memory, this is what I wrote then: 

Romanticism, if you’re unfamiliar, emerged as a response to the Enlightenment, which championed reason and rationality, civil liberties, and constitutional government. While the Age of Enlightenment brought enormous progress, writers like William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Percy Shelley felt that the Enlightenment philosophers’ focus on rationality was too cold, and didn’t accurately reflect the scope of human emotion. The Romantics instead emphasized the importance of an individual’s emotions and spirituality (while often bucking traditional religiosity). They held immense reverence for the natural world, and they were particularly interested in sublime and uncanny experiences—these poets and writers knew the power of vast landscapes, how standing at the edge of an overlook in the Alps made one feel impossibly small, teetering on the brink of infinity.

The Romantic poets loom so large in my mind that I sometimes forget the painters. But the other day, as I was listening to “Going to California” for the millionth time, it occurred to me that if you wanted to create a visual representation of the song, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (see above) would be a strong contender. 

Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in Swedish Pomerania, a part of the Swedish Kingdom that fell on what is now the Baltic coast of Germany and Poland. He experienced a tremendous amount of loss as a child, with multiple siblings and his mother passing away before he reached adulthood. Perhaps this informs the loneliness of many of his paintings, as well as his devout Christian faith. His works weren’t without controversy—like the American Transcendentalists who would emerge in the first half of the 19th century, Friedrich saw God and nature as intertwined, and he frequently made use of religious allegory in his landscapes.* For many art critics of the time, religious art and landscape paintings were distinct genres and certainly not to mingle. 

God is everywhere, in the smallest grain of sand.

- Caspar David Friedrich

Cross in the Mountains (the Tetschen Altar), Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1808. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Friedrich was even accused of sacrilege for his 1808 work, Cross in the Mountains, otherwise known as the Tetschen Altar. It was Friedrich’s first work to achieve wider recognition, and one that solidified his reputation as a prominent German artist, despite the fuss that was made over its subject matter. As you’ll see above, the piece utilizes a distinctly German landscape to evoke the solemnity and solitude of Jesus Christ’s final moments, with the cross silhouetted against a darkening sky. To a modern viewer, Cross in the Mountains is a powerful, spiritual image. But to many of Friedrich’s contemporaries, it was wildly inappropriate. In this response, we can see how we take the Romantics for granted—it was they who transformed the way art, nature, and spirituality interacted in the Western canon.

Romantic artists like Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner, and Théodore Géricault moved beyond prior trends of depicting nature exactly as it was, and instead imbued natural landscapes with emotion, movement, and grandeur. For Friedrich, mist-cloaked mountains, crumbling Gothic ruins, and barren winter trees allowed him to create works of art that stood in conversation with nature, rather than simply observing it. In paintings like Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Monk by the Sea, he also made use of the Rückenfigur (or “back-figure”), a compositional device in which a subject is seen from behind, often contemplating a landscape or view (though not always—Jan Vermeer’s The Art of Painting provides a strong counter-example). This invites the viewer to imagine themselves in the same position, and the landscape beyond becomes an extension of that inner-reflection.

Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1810. Via Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

This, of course, brings me to the sublime. Sublimity in nature is a major theme across Romantic art and literature. Particularly influential was Edmund Burke’s 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which argued that “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime”:

The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.

When I first read Burke as a student, I was perplexed by the role of horror in the sublime. Yet when I look at Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, it all comes together: a lone traveler traversing a great mountain range, standing precariously close to the edge, forced to reconcile with how small he is and how easily the land could take him. Simultaneously, he is in awe of the view—beauty, fear, and astonishment coalesce in one image. 

The Abbey in the Oakwood, Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1809-1810. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California,” as the name suggests, is about seeking a new beginning:

Spent my days with a woman unkind

Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine

Made up my mind to make a new start

Going to California with an aching in my heart

Someone told me there's a girl out there

With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair…

And in that opening verse, I’m struck by the same sentiments that I experienced while revisiting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. As someone who has moved cross-country several times, I’m familiar with the anxiety and excitement of journeying into the world without knowing how things will go, or if you’ll succeed. It’s the feeling of standing on a rocky outlook over the clouds, unable to see what’s beyond, wondering if you can trust the land to catch you if you fall. 

Perhaps that’s why the Romantics, both the painters and the writers, have always resonated with me so deeply. I do feel that they are essential reading and viewing for fantasy writers (and my fiction projects are all speculative). But there’s a longing and emotional weight to Friedrich’s works that vividly connect to my own experiences, as I’m sure they do for so many artists.

The trail may be cloaked in mist, but eagerly we push onwards in anticipation of the summit. I’ll meet you up there, “where the path runs straight and high…”

*Invaluable to this essay was Art: The Definitive Visual History edited by Andrew Graham-Dixon and published by Dorling Kindersley (DK).