Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocation

by Michael Z. Williamson

Dear Crazy Einar: Recently, my cousins and I went on our first strandhogg. Despite the gaiety of the event, I found I got little pleasure from burning and pillaging. The whole thing made me feel a bit remorseful for those we left stripped poor and homeless. What should I do? —Confused Young Norseman

  Dear Freak of Nature: I’d check your ancestry. Sounds like some of that civilization stuff. Did one of your forefathers travel to the Mediterranean? Take a local wife? That probably explains it. Either that, or you’re an adopted Dane. Don’t worry; with time, you’ll learn to appreciate the stark beauty of hovels lit by firelight and the whines of kicked dogs.

  Dear Crazy Einar: What colors have you found most frightening on Landsknechte? —H R Puffinslash

  Dear Puffer: Is there anything unfrightening about landsknecht? It’s not so much the colors as the slash and puff codpiece. Makes me want to reach for a warclub and langseax.

  Dear Crazy Einar: is it true that Vikings didn’t kiss to greet each other due to the velcro effect of their manly beards? —Goatee

  Dear Fashionable: No, that was because of their permanently stiff upper lips.

  Dear Crazy Einar: I engage in some unusual behavior and need your advice. Last night, I watched The 13th Warrior and The Vikings from a chair surrounded by shields, while clutching my spear, with seax by my side, wearing leather and a spangenhelm. —Clinging

  Dear Clinging: I understand your background. Please go ahead and tell me about your unusual behavior.

  Dear Crazy Einar: What’s an appropriate ax for 12 year old girls?

  —Hunting

  Dear Hunting: Depends on the size of the girls. Anything from a light hatchet to a small skeggox. However, I believe the risk of a pre-teen apocalypse is slim, and you will not be culturally popular in the event.

  Crazy Einar will be happy to answer any questions on business, social etiquette, or whipping serfs into submission, provided such inquiries are in poor taste and addressed to this paper.

  Crazy Einar is a eleventh century Viking (T)raider settled in northern Scotland, and those farmers were dead when he arrived. He deals in cutlery, armor, and garb, all acquired legally under his laws as overlord of Scotland and Vinland.

  So You Are Going To Be Raided By ViKings

  Welcome to our introductory lesson on receiving Scandinavian visitors. If you live in the Mediterranean, coastal or riverine Europe, riverine central Asia, the British Isles, North Atlantic Isles, Greenland or North America, their world tour may be coming soon to a village near you! This free brochure will help you properly welcome these unexpected guests.

  1. Have a smooth beach nearby. While the handlers are capable of landing on anything from finished timber docks to shattered cliff faces, a well-prepared beach will make their departure easier afterwards. If departure seems awkward, they may elect to stay over.

  2. An ancient Scandinavian law states that anything not secured is theirs. To avoid disputes over this precept, the following simple suggestions may help:

  Secure the following: Unattached women, attached women, prospective widows, gold, silver, gems, furs, spices, food, dogs, sheep, cattle, beer, mead, wine, ale, food and books.

  3. Provide PLENTY of refreshments. Beer, wine, mead, ale, sweetmeats, meat, vegetables, salt, bread, and fish will all be graciously accepted. Bring all you have and lay in extra. Then stock more.

  4. Entertainment is good. Bored Vikings feel obligated to provide entertainment to you, the host. Dancers, minstrels, jesters and others are a good start. Comely wenches are better. So are sporting games with swords and shields. Any martial competition will be enthusiastically joined, but be warned! They excel at these events, and the lack of referees in the traditional rules can be confusing.

  5. You may be unsure of etiquette regarding the above. Relax! Vikings are informal folk, and will gladly take any of the above at any hour of the day or night. They LOVE being surprised, and will cheer loudly. They may light spontaneous fires for ambiance.

  6. Rumors to the contrary, Vikings do NOT put heads on pikes. The Vikings are civilized folk. As such, all heads are put on forks.

  7. Have lots of firewood and other fuel handy. Vikings are used to cold weather. Remember that these are the people who regard the Orkneys as a summer resort...so plan accordingly. Pitch-soaked reeds and thatch are greeted with hearty approval.

  8. The high point of their visit will be firelight rituals, where they may decide to adopt offspring, spouses, or livestock. You may be filled with trepidation at this idea. Relax! Despite rumors, Vikings are far more civilized than many allegedly superior cultures. They bathe regularly, take sauna, travel extensively, enjoy a high level of literacy, and pride themselves on gathering the finer things in life. Your social status may climb immensely with marital ties to them. And you’ll be far safer, one way or another.

  9. It is confusing to many cultures, but Vikings place women in charge of steads and villages. The extensive business travel the men engage in makes their regular presence impossible. If a woman gives you an instruction in camp, it would be in your best interests to do as she says. Trust us.

  10. Once they have enjoyed your hospitality, they may elect to make your village a regular stopping point. This is a high honor, and may require you to borrow or acquire additional supplies from nearby villages. You may wish to suggest these other venues to your new friends.

  One year I organized a small get-together, and did a round of promotion.

  TELL US ABOUT THE VIKING RAIDING PARTY ™.

  The Viking Raiding Party ™ is a party to celebrate our Norse heritage and to correct many of the wrong impressions about Vikings. Many people hear “Viking” and think “Murdering maurauder.” But there was a lighter side to Norse culture that also enjoyed looting, pillaging, and arson.

  WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENTS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE “VIKING RAIDING PARTY”?

  To participate, one must be of the proper ethnic background, or able to fake it. “Proper ethnic background” means of Norse extraction, which includes Scandinavian, Russian, Germanic, Baltic, Dutch, English, Irish, Scottish, French, North African, Turkish, Central Asian or East Indian. To fake it one must A) be blonde, or B) be a man with a beard, or C) wear trews and tunic or D) know at least three words of Old Norse, or E) know someone who does. So you can see it’s very exclusive.

  SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

  We’re going to start in the merchant area, swarm down into the bog, and graciously relieve camps of all the things they’d really rather not take home, like bhooze, bheer, food and other comestibles, and the occasional unattached wench or rogue. At least two camps have said we can storm their gates.

  AND WHAT WILL YOU DO IF THE GATES WON’T YIELD?

  I’ve got a lawyer and a two-year-old. The gates will yield.

  SO WHAT SHOULD PEOPLE BRING?

  Wagons and flagons, good spirits of both kinds, loud singing voices and sturdy walking shoes. But no attitudes. This is fun, not real pillage. Flaming brands and prybars won’t be needed. And if you’d like your gates to be stormed, let me know and we’ll arrange a special trip. The raid will leave from our camp tonight at exactly 10ish.

  Random Maunderings About The Celtic Peoples

  GAELIC

  Ah, Gaelic! A lovely lilting lyrical language . . . or else the incoherent slurs of drunken Celts, depending on one’s viewpoint. The roots of Gaelic go back thousands of years, and were refined by generations of use into its present fluid form.

  Of course, such perfection of anything, especially in speech, is bound to create jealousy. It was after the Vikings in Drag, led by William the Bastard (no, no! the other one—1066), created a unified Anglo-Celtic-Saxon-Jute-Norman-Roman England, that they saw how much better their northern neighbors had it and declared war. Cunningly, they gave the Celts writing.

  This dastardly plot was intended to pave the way for spelling, which would be the downfall for the Celts much as it was for the earlier civilizations of Europe. The Spelling Campaign of the w
ar introduced dozens of extra consonants per word, including such dastardly concepts as the “h”, which serves as a silent backspace delete. Assorted other letters, sprinkled without rhyme or reason, all failed in their intended plan, as all Celts are instinctively able to understand their native lauhngsuage.

  BAGPIPES

  The pipe were invented in Northern Greece by a drunken proto-Celt who grabbed a cow’s stomach and blew into the numerous openings while belching. Not having an ear for fine music, and having nothing but Yanni CDs to offer in trade, the Celts took the pipes elsewhere to find an audience.

  Their first demonstration was with one Joshua, at Jericho in 1394 BC—first use of sonic weapons and psychological warfare. Joshua used Method 1 of pipe warfare. This involves tuning several thousand pipes in unison, which creates a resonance that can bring down castle walls.

  Method 2 involves having several thousand pipers each tune to taste or lack thereof, which creates a subharmonic dissonance that sends people, dogs and Englishmen running and screaming while clawing at their faces.

  Finally, the pipes made their way to Scotland. The Scots, canny as they are, swapped the pipes to the Irish in exchange for whisky. Sooner or later, the Irish will sober up and realize they got the bad end of that deal.

  And I still haven’t been able to find a performer for my composition, “Fugue in C Sharp Suspended Minor 7th for Bagpipe, Saxophone, and Accordion.”

  My favorite recollection of the pipes is a gentle(?) who was with me at a convention in a hotel, staffed by rude people. He announced, “Boy! I’m mad. I should go home and get my bagpipes.”

  “Oh, you play bagpipes?” I asked, interested.

  “No, but I own bagpipes!” Shudder.

  What’s the range on the bagpipes?

  Twenty yards if you have a good arm.

  What’s the difference between the bagpipes and a trampoline?

  You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline.

  SCOTTISH INVENTIONS

  The Scots have invented many things over the years. Sure, you know of James Watt and the steam engine, Dunlop and rubber tires, MacAdam and modern roads, but did you know: copper wire was invented by two Scots fighting over a penny?

  The Scots invented golf, and introduced into the rest of the world? (By the way, we were joking!)

  It was a Scottish engineer who defined the exact time for a hot-air hand dryer to dry one’s hands only three quarters dry, then shut off to conserve power.

  The Scots, however, did not invent the term “Animal Husbandry,” so take your sheep jokes and ram them . . .

  THE MANLY WAY TO COOK MEAT

  by Crazy Einar

  The following bits of uber-macho silliness were written for one of my online hangouts—ManlyExcellence.com. The short summary of the site is that flame wars are not prohibited; they’re graded. If you come in there, you better be equipped with facts, debate skills and an attitude. If that doesn’t work, resort to personal insults. Just make sure they’re creative.

  There are some members with rather derogatory attitudes about everything from race to religion, but the free-speech atmosphere is refreshing. The whole point of free speech is to be able to make comments that others might find offensive. Though I do wish some of them were more intelligently made. Still, that’s the price we pay, and I approve.

  What I find amusing from my end is that crap written off the cuff for the sake of entertainment, on a site that endorses steroids, eating meat, voting Republican and shooting Mosin Nagants, gets taken so seriously, and how a few people can zero in on a phrase, twist it into their own context and pronounce me to be a “closet racist.” Yeah, whatever. I’ve never had a problem telling people I don’t like them, do so pretty openly, and don’t need to hint at it. You might have read that in here somewhere. If I were a racist, there’d be nothing closeted about it.

  Since the dawn of time, fire has been an indication of civilization. It treated flint, steamed wood, cast bronze, smelted iron, burned out peasants for the obligatory sacking and looting, hosted leaders and their war bands before they engaged in the slaughter of squatters or savages, and cooked meat.

  Today, the call of the flame is strong. Entire industries exist so that pussified office bunnies may feel its comfort, usually imprisoned behind glass and possibly with some frou-frou scented sparkly wax.

  I’m here to tell you what should be obvious: That’s not manly.

  A microwave is acceptable for warming a cup of second-rate coffee or leftover pizza. A stove or range is okay for soup, vegetables or baking a cake. For some modern dishes, they do excel. But they are utilitarian conveniences.

  There comes a time when a man must chop up meat (preferably that he killed and gutted himself with a knife, spear or bow, but a rifle or a punt gun is certainly an acceptable modern substitute) and apply it to fire, while quaffing ale and mead, insulting his foes (like that nancy-boy Mohammed chap and his boyfriends), scratching, belching and generally fuzzing the line between civilized and barbarous.

  It is time, then, to retreat to the outdoors and cook like a man.

  This is easy, as long as one understands the simple truths. Fire is fuel and flame. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t take a fortune in fancy stainless, digitally controlled hardware to produce it.

  Gas grills: Gas grills are right out. If you’re the kind of pansy who puts aluminum foil on the mesh of a gas grill to fry your burgers and brats, you’re, well, a pansy. All you’ve done is move a range outdoors to fry with. You’re probably cooking tofu burgers with bean sprouts. “But, Einar, the instruction say I shouldn’t get grease into the carefully fabricated imitation pumice rocks above the gas flames!” you say. In other words, it’s an expensive yuppie-scum wannabe grill, like those “gas fireplaces.” You may as well put your testicles up there and cook them, because you’re not using them.

  Perhaps you cook directly over the gas flames, and imagine this is manly. I take it you either have no tastebuds, or like the taste of partially burned hydrocarbons in your food. Still, at least you have an actual fire kissing the meat. It’s cooking, but it’s like the difference between a methed-up stripper smoking Marlboro Lights and Arnie smoking a cigar.

  Charcoal grills: Ah, now you’re almost there. Charcoal grills are acceptably manly, if done properly.

  First, no real man cooks with cute little “briquets” (that term just sounds phagadocious, when you say it) of ground coal dust held together with binder and soaked with glorified kerosene. If you are going to use charcoal, save money, show some class and testosterone, buy a bag of “hardwood charcoal.” It looks like someone chopped up a tree and carbonized it, because that’s exactly what it is. The taste and smell are superior. It’s easier to light and burns better. I find twenty seconds with an oxy-acetylene torch creates a good, hot core to pile the balance of the fuel on.

  Obviously, the best way to light this fire is with flint and steel, the Viking way.

  But isn’t it hard to strike a fire with flint and steel, you ask? Not at all. Flint is just a quartzite-a silicaceous rock. Steel is easy to find. My preferred method is to chuck a silicon carbide abrasive wheel in my half horsepower drill and run it against an old file. I get three feet of hot, red sparks.

  Of course, you can make your own charcoal, but the Vikings regarded charcoal as forge fuel. Proper cooking was done over an actual fire with wood.

  The way this works is to light your tinder, feed it kindling (matchstick sized pieces), then gradually work larger, to a small tepee or log cabin arrangement of sticks. They don’t need to be huge. This is for cooking, not burning a village before raping the inhabitants (always burn first. It’s so much more romantic by firelight). Thumb-thick is plenty large. For roasting or searing, just hack off some gobbets of flesh, skewer on a stick, dredge in salt or herbs, and stick into the flames until done. Alternately, skewer the whole joint or carcass, lay it across the fire on iron poles, and slice off the crispy outside as you go.

  Once the fire has burne
d down to coals, about a foot across and an inch or so thick, the artistic cooking can commence. Beginners will want a green stick or metal grate to lay meat on, to cook with sizzles. If fat falls into the fire and creates a burst of flame, don’t be a wuss and squirt it out with water. The gods are gifting you with a fiery seasoning for the meat.

  Ultimately, you will want to try a Viking steak. Blow the dust off the coals and drop the meat straight on. It will douse the surface fire and the coals will act as insulation. As soon as you smell scorching, flip over and cook the other side in the same spot. It will take fractionally longer. The proper way to eat this, of course, is to slice bits off with your seax and eat them off the back of your thumb, Viking style.

  Good ways to prepare the meat ahead of time include sprinkling with sea salt, crushed red chilies, pepper and/or crushed garlic. Appropriate marinades for overnight soaking include teriyaki, Worcestershire, barbecue sauce or hot sauce. Once the meat is ready, pour off the marinade and use it to sautee squash and carrots first, then mushrooms and onions, in a cast iron pan oiled with butter or olive oil. Take whole, unhusked ears of corn (this being America, the last bastion of Viking manliness), peel back one side, add a tablespoon of butter and a sprinkling of seasoning salt, close back up and toss into the coals until it smells ready. You’ll know when. Squash and carrots can also be basted with the marinade and laid on the fire/grate until done. A true master has the vegetable garnish ready just as the meat comes off the fire.