by Moore, Tim
It was becoming clear from their online event calendars that even the most resilient living historians were reluctant to re-enact winter, and with the nights drawing in I seized upon an invitation to attend a three-day, participants-only 'livinghistory camp' in Leicestershire. Hrothgar, né Mick Baker, was leader (sorry, jarl) of a group that convolutedly styled itself Tÿrsli ð – Vikings! (of Middle England). Unfailingly genial as he had shown himself during our multi-media communications – after a couple of emails he referred to his members as 'Vikes' – as a grammatical statement of intent, that exclamation mark was a cause for some concern. Particularly once I'd scoured the group's website, and found my gaze snagging on words like 'shock', 'scare', 'unsanitised' and 'visceral'. And that was just on the homepage introduction.
A jocular multiple-choice quiz in their forum, intended to assess a Tÿrsli ð (pronounced tear-sleath) warrior's spiritual authenticity, included these 'correct' answers: 'Chainmail is for poofs', 'Smack him so hard he cries and looks like a twat' and 'Meths, mixed with mead or paraffin'. Scrolling down the index I came across a less flippant, and hence more worrisome discussion on the mechanics of combat: 'May I remind you all that we fight in accordance with the principles of Western Martial Arts . . . The whole body is a target. I do not want to have to slap anyone who says "it wasn't a kill because it hit my forearm".' Here, plainly, was a group hewn from the same bloodstained rock as those I'd seen in Reykjavik all those years before, belting seven shades of sheep-shit out of each other in a playing field. How glad I was, at least now that the scars had formed and half-healed, of the inoculatory beatings endured in Denmark.
It was a matter of some relief to find this pagan brutality tempered with more academic period-based concerns. 'Sorry to sound picky,' began a thread headed 'Taking the camp to the next level', 'but has anyone noticed that the picture on the food-stall living-history page shows a loaf of white bread and very modern orange cheese?' There followed a lively debate on historical interpretation. 'Too many of you turn up in Vike bling,' sneered one poster. 'I've been a member since 2000, and this is my first full season with shoes.' For another, the devil was in the detail. 'We should all STOP buying bowls in non-European woods. It should not be a question of "can the public tell the difference" but "I want it to be correct".' 'You try buying proper stuff with one wage and three kids to feed,' came one riposte to this; another muttered darkly about 'a disturbing trend towards fundamentalist sharia authenticity in the group'.
A 'green jade phallus' topped the lost and found section, and there was a goat for sale in the classifieds. Regardless of which faction now held the upper hand, I was evidently in for a hardcore time of it.
A week later I wandered down the aisles of the Co-Op in the Leicestershire market town of Anstey with Hrothgar's brief shopping list and a furrowed brow. In my basket lay a turnip, two leeks and half a dozen eggs; I picked up a couple of apples, making a note to peel off those sticky labels before laying them out on the Dark Age smorgasbord, and tossed them in. How grateful I was for my nutritional trump cards: two packets of Icelandic wind-dried haddock, one of which I'd torn open in a moment of calorific weakness on the North Circular Road, thereby obliging me to drive 100 miles up the M1 with all the windows open.
What else might qualify as Viking sustenance? Carlsberg? Danepak? Online research had certainly reshaped my concept of timelessly basic foodstuffs. Amongst the principal catalysts that drove the Vikings to foreign plunder, I'd learned, were the meagre nutritional possibilities of Scandinavian soil – onions, cabbage, barley and oats if you were lucky, barley and oats if you weren't. Broccoli, cauliflower, celery, lemons – none would grace a northern European market stall until well into the Middle Ages. It was still difficult to imagine life without the potato, but I'd also be deprived of spinach, sprouts and swede – a root vegetable which almost literally had Viking written all over it, yet wasn't mentioned in England until 1781. Carrots weren't encountered in the former Viking lands until the early medieval period, and even then were available only in purple or white – the carrot we know today was not developed until the late sixteenth century, rather splendidly by Dutch agriculturalists eager to show their allegiance to the House of Orange.
Half an hour on I was I bumping off a muddy forest track and into a muddier car park, past a sign that welcomed me to Markfield Scout Training Ground. A troop of army cadets jogged into the woods with a stretcher, followed by half a dozen weary boy scouts. Then, through a thicket of sycamores, I spotted a huge swathe of orange and green striped canvas being raised aloft in a clearing, by a number of loud men with very long hair. Some of these, and the many wives and children helping to pitch camp, were clad in dour smocks, others in vibrant tracksuit tops. As I walked through the trees, the glint of weaponry asserted itself; so too did that of prescription eyewear. There was wood smoke and fag smoke, sheepskins and sleeping bags. Amid the striped pavilions so winsomely evocative of longboat sails stood an olive-green army-surplus tent. The battle for authenticity was evidently far from won. I didn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
I announced myself to a very tall man with flowing auburn locks and a Hawaiian shirt. 'Oh, there you are,' he said, in amiable Midland tones. 'I'm Orc.' He talked me through some basics as I helped erect the vast tent that would house his family. 'I'm on the Council of Elders,' he said, 'so I could have insisted on a pitch near the bogs.' He thumbed at a brick structure in the clearing opposite. 'But come on: what are the woods for?' All the while, Vikings of both sexes and most ages, perhaps twenty in all, walked in from the car park bearing ominously battered shields, archery targets, charcoal briquettes and crates of lager. The pervasive sense of the new age meeting the old was neatly embodied by the half-dozen children scurrying around, with hair and clothes that could have slotted in at Glastonbury or Cinderbury, and names to match.
'We don't throw axes, Indigo!'
'Emrys! No bare feet near the fire!'
An elderly dog shambled up and stared at me sullenly, followed by a mead-toothed man in baggy Gaulish trousers and a well-worn jerkin, bespectacled and all but bald. He introduced himself as Bede, and told me he'd be in charge until Hrothgar arrived.
Tÿrsli ð took its hierarchy seriously – full membership was granted only after twelve months of dogsbody servitude as a thrall, and warrior status came to those who had proven themselves in combat over at least two years. 'Don't worry,' said Bede, gruffly, 'you don't have to grovel until I put my collar on.' From within his clothing he extracted a torc, the open-ended ring of braided metal that designated status and leadership from the Iron Age to the Vikings. 'But for now, I'm ordering you to help put the chapel up.'
Only when I'd helped erect the relevant small tent did I ask myself, and then a portly and pallid young Vike called Flosi, what place a Christian edifice had in Thor's own campsite. 'We're Saxon crossover,' he said, in a rather piping voice. 'There were actually a lot of Christian Vikings, though strictly speaking—'
'Off he goes,' interrupted the weatherbeaten Kevin Costner who was tautening a rope-sprung double mattress in the tent beside us. 'You won't get away for an hour.' It didn't take long to deduce that Flosi was the most vocal of the pernickety pedants on the group's forum, and the only one present here; winding him up – and catching him out – was a favourite pastime amongst the others. A raucous jeer accompanied Flosi's mumbled admission that he'd repaired some utensil with superglue, and when he disappeared to the toilet block I was sniggeringly urged to peek beneath the sheepskins that carpeted his strenuously accurate tent: the garish blue vinyl of an air bed revealed itself.
A rheumy-eyed, straggle-haired young man and his female companion appeared through the trees, the former covering the ground with a conspicuously lopsided gait. 'Ah!' barked Bede, happily. 'It's the fucking one-legged Cornishman.' It would be a couple of hours before I had the most conspicuous of these adjectives confirmed, via a glimpse of flesh-toned prosthetic, and an account of the motorcycle accident that bequeathed i
t.
'You forgot epileptic,' came the wearily laconic reply.
'I won't next time,' said Bede, with a wink.
The afternoon evolved into a pleasant if rather nippy early evening, rays of smoke-filtered autumn sun angling in through the trees. A mobile rang; an infant bawled; someone lit up. ('About a third of us smoke,' estimated Orc, who was amongst the most enthusiastic.) A raven-haired valkyrie they called V approached with a sack of spare clothes, and upended it before me and my fellow novices, a stocky young couple who'd come to sample thrall life (only now do I realise that the phrase 'in thrall' is thus derived). I ended up with a pair of baggy brown trousers held aloft with a tramp-style rope belt, and a long, rust-coloured linen tunic that our wardrobe assistant said had once been hers. Three re-enactments in, and already I couldn't care less. I went back to the car to change, underlaying that rough and thermally inadequate dress with a couple of T-shirts, and finishing my outfit off with those million-dollar peasant boots. With no footwear available in the dressing-up bag, the novice thralls were obliged to spend the entire weekend barefoot.
By now everyone in camp was fully Viked up, the kids in tunics, the men in thick felt cloaks, the women largely headscarfed. But the specs and fags were still out in force, and Kevin Costner was slumped outside his family's pavilion in a Millet's camping chair. Flosi swiftly spotted my shoes and offered his appraisal. 'Not bad,' he murmured, 'though it looks like you've got a pair of M&S socks on under them.'
'Two pairs.'
'And obviously the laces let them down. Vikings had toggles like these.' He showed me those that fastened his own shoes.
'These were actually knee-length sea-boots until last year. Cost me a fortune, looked great, but then I did a bit of research and found they weren't quite the ticket.' I could just picture that round, boyish face contorted in flagellatory penance as he hacked them down into the spartan, ankle-high foot coverings I saw before me.
As he talked I recalled some photos I'd seen of the 1967 Peel Viking Festival, a pioneering event that had seen the Isle of Man sands thronged with warriors, valkyries and beached longships. What struck me about the monochrome festivities wasn't so much the preponderance of beehives and Dr Scholl's sandals – or indeed a captioned revelation that their vessels were customised lifeboats salvaged from the Titanic's sister ship – as the fact that to a hairy-coated man, every Viking on show sported a horned helmet. I'd like to think that even those of you who aren't shacked up with a direct descendant of Harald Hardrada would be aware that no Viking ever wore a horned helmet. Yet those trailblazing re-enactors weren't naive or ill-informed – they just didn't know any better. No one did: it's extraordinary how far our knowledge of ancient lifestyles has developed since the Sergeant Pepper era.
'The trouble with this lot,' Flosi continued, lowering his voice, 'is that they tend to dress how they want, not how Vikings actually did.' He tilted his head at a pair of Vikes sporting fur-trimmed hats of Cossack appearance. 'Those are Rus hats, worn by ninth-century Russians. They'll tell you that the word Rus means "Viking invader", but that's just conjecture.' He explained in detail how the Vikings' eastward forays might well have brought them into contact with the wearers of such hats, but emphasised the dearth of evidence that they ever brought the fashion home. 'There's far too much kit being justified on the grounds that it could theoretically have been worn or used.' He shook his head sadly, and took a sip of ale from a soapstone cup he'd found in Tesco, being sold as a toothmug.
Every so often a patrol of scouts or cadets trotted past, angling looks of curiosity and amusement in our direction. One group of the former tentatively approached the camp with cameras at the ready, and one of my Vikings urged them hither with a practised chorus: 'Photo opp-or-tun-ity, photo opp-or-tun-ity!' As the scouts snapped away the Vikings merrily yelled and charged and brandished; no pose was too cheesy. 'We're all shameless tarts here,' whispered an English teacher named Hoketil, raising a shield and sword high above his head. A couple of months before I wouldn't have joined him; a couple of hours before I might not have done so with a scout-blanching roar.
It is the Vikings' unfortunate historical lot to find themselves synonymous with violent sexual assault, yet my in-laws see off all related jibes with the arresting insistence that their Dark Age antecedents ran an equal-opportunity society. With their husbands invariably abroad trading, they tell me, Viking women would have taken charge of both farmstead and family. Obviously I've never had the heart to debate with them the nature of Viking commerce ('Here's my final offer: two kicks and a stab for that sack of grain, oh, and I'll throw in your dad's ear for those bracelets'), nor suggest how they'd react if I went off to try my hand at it, and sent them a postcard explaining I'd done so with the sole and noble intent of expanding their daughter's domestic and administrative capabilities.
Evidence of Tÿrslið's even-handed approach to maniacs of both sexes emerged when a bit of playful slappery between the Cornishman and his girlfriend flared up into a full-on grunting scuffle, and then a knife-versus-stave stand-off.
'Don't panic,' whispered Hoketil, sensing that I wasn't enjoying this spectacle as much as everyone else seemed to be. 'It's not sharp.'
The splinters of wood that flew up from the subsequent coming together suggested otherwise, but before these had settled on the ground the fight was over: the Cornishman stuck his good leg forward, hauled his girl across it and despatched her to the earth with an extremely hard punch in the chest. A mass cheer rang out, and barely faltered when the felled warrioress shot to her feet and stormed off into the forest.
As darkness came, the community lapsed into a more traditional division of gender roles. The women busied themselves with childcare and catering, some herding reluctant minimarauders to bed, others filling pots with hunks of meat and turnips, and tending these as they bubbled atop the kitchen-tent fire; the rest of us got stuck into beers and blokey pyromania, chopping wood with big axes, and heaving the resultant logs into the bisected oil drum that was our brazier. Perhaps to atone for this glaring aberration, the lushly goateed Rodstaff, a British Museum numismatist, told me he'd be lighting our showpiece fire with tinder fungus. I cleared my throat as a prelude to recounting my related triumph at Cinderbury – in shaming reality still the only moment that suggested I had a future in the past – when he remembered he'd left it at home. Bede then extracted a flint striker to bring light to the Dark Ages, and when that didn't work Kevin Costner bent down with a Zippo. Our de facto commander snatched it from his hands. 'Remember what I told you five minutes ago about being a leader? Well, that's being a fucking knob.' It seemed a little inconsistent coming from a man with a roll-up in his lips.
Bede's reign as jarl ended soon after, when a small Rover bounced up the path and disgorged a twinkly eyed, grey-bearded fellow of modest stature. With a chirpy and very un-Viking giggle he donned a fur-banded hat of precisely the type condemned by Flosi, and introduced himself as Hrothgar. 'For heaven's sake, let's get that going,' he said, surveying the moribund brazier. 'Anyone got a lighter?'
Night had long since settled on the camp when the stew and dumplings were ladled out into well-used wooden bowls. The most prominent non-martial accessory was the sea chest, in essence a wooden toolbox that was the repository of a Vike's period effects, and a good place to hide his phone and car keys. Half a dozen of these were dragged up to the now roaring brazier, and on them we sat, steaming bowls in our laps, wooden spoons in our hands.
Having enjoyed so little success asking previous re-enactors what had attracted them to their chosen period, I didn't really feel like despoiling the companionable fireside ambience with the same stilted enquiry. Oddly, as soon as the womenfolk went off to wash up, the men of Tÿrslið asked it of themselves. Perhaps my presence inspired these neo-Norsemen to see themselves through outside eyes, to wonder for the first time how on earth they came to be sitting round a fire in hooded cloaks, prodding embers with a pike staff, when all their friends were watching Taggart in
bed. Or perhaps they were just more expansively drunk than I realised.
'Quick straw poll, chaps,' chirped Hrothgar. 'Why do we do Vikes?' The first answers were shrug-and-a-swig-of-lager jobs, tales of simple happenchance. Kevin Costner had run into Tÿrslið at some sort of pagan Halloween event, and joined up on a whim when he found out they were based just up the road from him. 'To be honest,' he confided later, 'I'd rather be doing Robin Hood stuff.' The Cornishman had experienced a similarly indirect introduction, getting into medieval combat while working in an Oxford pub frequented by a fourteenth-century group, and transferring to Vikes by default when he relocated. Hrothgar's own re-enactment career had begun in the Napoleonic army – he remained a member of a period group called L'Artillerie Légère – but he didn't seem quite sure how this had led him to the Viking life. Perhaps he'd got a taste for unhinged mayhem at the Waterloo-era event that had degenerated into cannon crews firing diseased rabbits at each other.
For a few, as I'd guessed from certain references on their forum, this was the end of a natural progression from symbolic dressing up and combat to the real thing, one that had begun with school holidays spent rolling many-sided dice across an orc-strewn Dungeons and Dragons board. There followed studenty weekends devoted to LARP, live-action role-playing fantasies acted out by dozens, sometimes hundreds of costumed obsessives in fields or warehouses, and then a more focused interest in reliving real history with real weapons. To offensively patronise this section of the latter-day Viking community, it seemed to me that a dominant attraction of the Dark Age way of life was how closely it permitted them to dress and behave as if the world had been created by J.R.R. Tolkien. Referring to children as 'hobbits' didn't help their case.