Howard Roark in a Tricorn

Once upon a time, long ago, in a far away kingdom, there was a boy, a loner who only lived for his work.

He found a better way of building, but to be allowed to build, he had to fight an uphill battle against tradition and mob spirit.

Sounds familiar? No, that kingdom is not the magic kingdom we all know as Manhattan.

Believe it or not, more than half a century before The Fountainhead, there was, well, The Fountainhead. Kind of.

The Dykemaster by Theodore Storm

I'm talking about Theodor Storm's 1888 novella Der Schimmelreiter, translated as The Rider on the White Horse and as The Dykemaster. (Honi soit qui mal y pense.)

The story is set in Storm's native Schleswig-Holstein, that wild but fertile land between two seas, known for its habit of changing hands between Denmark and Germany.

The main plot takes place in the mid Eighteenth Century. Nevertheless, elements of it date back to the Seventeenth Century, while the society described is that of the early Nineteenth.

Anyway, the young man in question is Hauke Haien, who makes his way to become the dike master of the county, the public works official responsible for the construction, maintenance, and integrity of dikes and levees.

That may have been the most important and prestigious office in a flat land only a few feet above the level of the North Sea, buffeted every fall and spring by nor'westers whipping up twenty-foot storm surges.

However, when we first meet Hauke, he's a mere farm boy. But instead of playing with the other reindeer, uh, village youths, young Hauke assists his father, who's moonlighting as a surveyor.

To be able to read his father's copy of Euclid, he learns Dutch. He keeps sitting on the dike, observing the sea in the wild. At home, he builds scale models of what he observed in nature, to test the new dike he conceived.

His invention is nothing less than the modern dike. Its gentle seaward slope dissipates the wave energy instead of taking the full brunt head-on like traditional steeper dikes.

Eventually, his father makes him apply for a real job, as a farmhand for the old dike master, Tede Volkerts. Quickly, he rises to become Volkerts' right-hand man. That, however, sets him at odds with the foreman, Ole Peters.

On top of that, Haien courts Volkerts' daughter Elke, pouring more oil into the flames of the foreman's jealousy.

When Old Man Volkerts dies, the powers that be see Haien as his logical successor. Yet, he doesn't own enough land to be considered. Elke, however, announces Haien is engaged to marry her — and the land she just inherited from her father.

As the new dike master, Haien proposes to reclaim land from the sea by building one of his revolutionary dikes.

However, a dike of the same height with gentler slopes requires much more soil to be piled up, without any modern earthmoving equipment, but with the villagers' dike taxes and forced labor. Obviously, that doesn't win him too many points with them.

As if that weren't enough, Peters, having married another land-rich heiress, becomes an overseer at the project. Expectably, he's always eager to spur the peasants into revolting against their young dike master, forever eager to wipe out Haien's work.

In the final and most difficult stretch of dike, the villagers proceed to bury a live dog. "If your dike is to hold, something alive has to be put into it" — preferably a child, but a dog might just do. But Haien will have no part of that mysticism.

He thwarts the superstitious yokels and saves the dog. Now the villagers believe the new dike to be cursed.

That echoes an old wives' tale that a breach in a dike can only be stopped if a child volunteers to sacrifice himself and be buried alive in it.

I won't give away the ending, but that legend may well be the key to it. In any event, the village remains protected by nothing but the old dike, and a storm season rolls around every six months.

You wonder why the book is called The Rider on the White Horse? Well, there's the small matter of a ghost horse apparently coming to life to serve as Haien's trusty steed.

Yes, the supernatural may be alive and kicking in the universe of the story, and Haien seems to attract such phenomena.

Are the villagers right that this heretic denying the omnipotence of god, that atheist, is the devil incarnate — or are they only smearing him because they're afraid of his superior intellect and willpower?

Either way, the plot may be derived from the 1838 short story "Der Deichgeschworene zu Güttland," set on the Vistula, in today's Poland.

Yet the characters are probably based on real heroes of the period: the engineer Hans Momsen — a farmer and self-taught polymath referenced in the novella — and the banker and developer Jean Henri Desmercières, who invented the new dike profile.

Of course Theodor Storm was no Ayn Rand: He was not writing as the last bulwark of individualism and had no philosophy to get across. And of course Hauke Haien is no Howard Roark: The Rider on the White Horse is much more ambiguous than The Fountainhead.

Yet, whatever the differences, whatever the ending, Storm sure knew his theme, and that could be straight from The Fountainhead. As he has the old schoolmaster narrating the main story put it:

For that is the way, sir: Socrates they gave poison to drink, and our Lord Christ they nailed to the cross.

That can't be done so easily nowadays, but — making a saint out of a tyrant or a bad, stubborn priest, or turning a good fellow, just because he towers above us by a head, into a ghost or a monster — that's still done every day.

Alexander Butziger is the author of the Kevin Traynor series of capitalist mystery novels. His latest book, Phantom Train, explores the nature of the paranormal. Adventure number three, Mysterious Boat, is forthcoming. More stories and his blog can be found at Reason and Liberty Central.