Perfect Day for Vikings

This one is for you, Gail 

I like this place.  I like seeing people out and about.  It thrills me to see families having fun together and smiling.  I love seeing the sea every day, and I’m in love with Wales’ summer weather. 

Summer in Wales is short, but the days are long.  Sunrise takes place at 5:26 am, and sunset is 9:21 pm. Even though the sun is up, most days we’ve seen so far begin with overcast skies and damp air, but by noon, the sun radiantly breaks through. These long days are why wildflowers flourish and roses and hydrangeas burst with mounds of color as if celebrating their brief growing period.  One might think winters here would be brutal, but they are not.  We are told that typically, winters have mild temperatures hovering around mid-forties, but there is frequent rain and wind. Although the skies are usually gloomy, people don’t let that stop them; they get out. Outdoor enthusiasts still hike the many trails, and the ones with no tactile nerve endings even take to the seas to sail or even swim.

Today’s Viking Festival was hmmmm, rather home-spun, but authentic.  Still, everyone loved it.  Parents dressed up and their kids wore helmets and waved plastic swords about, making me think someone was surely to get hurt.  This festival was an annual event in Amlwch for many years, then in 2011 it ended.  We are told that people who were kids in 2011 now have children themselves and put this year’s festival together to share and pass on that cultural heritage with them.  Today’s festival is the first in 14 years.  From past generations passed on to the next, old swords and shields were unpacked. Ancient leather-working tools, and melting pots for smelting metals for weapons, helmets, garment fasteners, tools, and jewelry were brought down from the attic.  Out came old Viking wear, tunics, braided belts, soft-soled boots, and head covers.  Most people prepared themselves for authenticity as they donned their old Viking costumes by letting their hair and faces go unwashed for days prior.

Under the shelter of Viking tents filled with pelts as bedding, dozens of Viking couples demonstrated old life activities. Iron racks held kettles of food that, in those times, simmered nonstop over the woodfire.  As the days went by, they threw new ingredients into the pot, whatever they had. 

We watched characters carding wool, making yarn, and dying it in tiny pots over a fire, kept going with puffs from leather bellows.  Men showed us how they meticulously carved antlers and goat horns into knives and sewing needles.  Virtually every craft necessary for sustaining life and for making war was demonstrated there.  It occurred to me that many of these crafts and skills carried out in the Viking age were still being used centuries later by settlers in our country to feed and protect families as they found homes in the New World. 

We met a bunch of today’s festival Vikings as we learned more about history’s Vikings and their crafts.  We shared a bit about each other as well, learning, for one thing, that most of the festival Vikings are from England, not Wales.  But the Vikings raided, settled, and traded in all of the British Isles and a great number of other countries to boot.  They were the first.  One historian told me the Vikings arrived in America 500 years before Columbus, landing in Newfoundland and then settling for a brief while in what is now North Carolina.  A little fact-finding says, no, there is no evidence that the North Carolina part is true.  

We watched men compete in ax-throwing.  Hitting the target with the blade and not the handle or the blunt end is much more difficult than it looks.  Later, there was a logging competition, seeing who could stand balancing on a section of log about 15 inches in diameter, and ax through it the fastest without falling.  Their labor made me breathless and want to sit down and rest a while. 

Lines of kids armed with wooden blades and shields battled it out with grown-up Vikings.  Although a little tentative at first, there was a lot of shouting, running, and whacking.  Again, the mom in me emerged as I recalled the Eagles’ lyrics, “somebody’s gonna hurt someone before the night is through.” 

There were food trucks, but not as many as a festival in America might offer.  There was no roasted corn.  I say boo-hoo!  There was no funnel cake, cotton candy, or pineapple whip.  Stan says boo-hoo!  But among a few other things, there was wood-fired pizza and a soul food truck featuring jerk chicken.  We chose to have Loaded Hog Roast Bap:  pulled pork drizzled with barbecue sauce on a pile of hot skin-on fries, decorated with scallion slices and a dollop of apple sauce.  How about that??? 

As the main event of the festival, in the early evening today, the Vikings are going to gather and walk to the port in Amlwch.  There will be plenty of man-type shouting and noisemaking along the way.   At the waterfront, torches will be set afire and thrown forward to burn a Viking boat in the water.  All that excitement will be followed by fireworks.  Woo-hoo!

Stan and I won’t be there for that.  We’re ode, as some people say.  We will be safely home and enjoying our wine before that all begins!