THE VIKINGS ARE COMING!

The Jorvik Viking Festival: A week-long celebration of everyone's favorite helmeted rape-and-pillage invaders. I find it somewhat ironic that what started out as a hostile invasion complete with raping, pillaging and lots and lots of destruction is now a major tourist draw. All that aside, if you're going to have a Viking festival in the UK, York's the place to do it. York was one of the areas that the Vikings settled into and there were a series of Viking kings of York for much of the 10th century. While these Scandinavian settlers (not just from Denmark- there were "Vikings" from all of the Scandinavian countries) seem to have adopted elements of native-British life, Christianity for example, they left behind a legacy of Scandinavian culture too.

York is filled with place names derived from Old Norse. A good example is any street ending in "-gate", Old Norse for "street": Spurriergate, Hungate, Micklegate, High Petergate, Low Petergate, etc. Same for the four "bars" or gates into the old city walls. Norse personal names also became common for descendents of both the Vikings and the English and this pattern persisted until the coming of the Normans brought "Christian" personal names (Thomas, John, Hugh, William, etc) into vogue. The Vikings also deserve credit for bringing currency to Yorkshire. Anglo-Saxons relied primarily on barter/trade, while the Vikings used gold bullion as a form of currency and later took the idea of minting coins from southern England and began minting their own coinage (which btw was both fancier and more elaborate than that produced in Wessex to the south.) So perhaps it is fitting that we celebrate the Vikings with loads of crafts people selling "Viking" wares. And don't worry, modern Vikings accept all major credit cards!

The annual Viking festival in February was perhaps especially celebratory this year because it marked the grand reopening of the Jorvik Viking Centre after a 4 month period of renovation. I haven't been to see what's changed, but it is supposed to be even better and more realistic than before, incorporating additional information from additional/newer archaeological reports from the Coppergate excavations. When you weren't standing in a reaaaaally long line to get into Jorvik, you could also enjoy a number of activities throughout the city. In Parliament Street, a tent hosted various demonstrations/shows geared towards the younger crowd, while in several locations merchants like the one pictured above sold Viking crafts, replica weapons and metal work, carved things, pins, fabrics... the list goes on. There were also walking tours and lectures and even a planetarium show about how the Vikings navigated by the stars.

York Minster joined the fun and hosted a Viking Music night, featuring this AMAZING harp player/singer, an all-female a capella group singing Scandinavian songs, a concert choir singing a mass (I'm not entirely sure how that fit in with the Viking theme, and I don't have the program to check which mass it was to see if there's a connection. Oh well.), and a reading of Egil's Saga, a later epic poem written (supposedly) about events taking place in York under Erik Bloodaxe, twice king of York and twice deposed. All of this was of course incorporated into the pageantry of the festival by having King Erik himself along with his royal entourage in the seats of honour.I feel like the Festival is probably more exciting if you're like 8-12, since most events are geared to a younger crowd. Maybe I'm just growing cynical in my old age, but I find craft projects and digging up pretend Viking artifacts slightly less exciting than some other events like...

 The festival culminated in the Viking troops marching off for battle from the Museum Gardens, through the city of York and down to a lake outside of town for a ceremonial boat burning.

There they are, all lined up to go. There's actually three loooong lines of warriors- it was actually really impressive to see.

And there go the oft-forgot women & children, lugging all the supplies of course. The men have more important pillaging to do.

These two fine warriors were kind enough to stop for pictures with some kiddies.

Later that night to close the festival, they set a Viking boat on fire and set it adrift on the lake. I hear it was kinda neat and also involved standing around REALLY COLD for hours before they did so, but I wasn't there. I particularly enjoyed walking home and seeing all these dressed up Vikings going in and out of all the B&B's along my street and standing in line to checkout at the grocery store surrounded by Vikings. It was an interesting week :)