by Moore, Tim
'It's just a good look for me, I suppose,' said Dagmar, who didn't seem to mind when informed that he'd given himself a popular Icelandic girl's name. It was a good look for almost all of them. Dagmar was unusually tall, and his nose more obliquely broken than most, but otherwise he displayed the characteristics that made the Tÿrslið male the convincing embodiment of well-fed wealth and hirsute virility in an age where these were prized, and which had failed to invent the toothbrush.
For a while we all gazed into the fire. Then Orc seemed to lose patience with himself and his fellow Vikes. 'Cut the crap, guys,' he blurted. 'It's the fighting.' He placed a large, firm palm on the meaty hand axe tucked in his belt (crafted, like his antler-handled sword, by the group's own blacksmith), and stared at me through those gingery curtains of hair. 'What I've learned with this lot has given me an awful lot of confidence in real-world situations.' He took a deep draught of Fosters, then smiled distantly. 'Funny to think I used to run away from trouble.' I was hoping for a chorus of fatuous laughter to swell up out of the fireside shadows; instead, many heads nodded in thoughtful assent.
It was a new experience to hear a violence buff calmly rationalise his passion. Orc offered an analogy with American football, another of his brawn-centric pastimes. 'I guess it's just that buzz when you leather a guy – I mean, really leather him.' He scratched his patchy beard. 'Anyway, you'll see what I mean tomorrow.'
The cat was out of the bag, and my Vikings now took turns to boot it around the fire.
Tentatively at first, but then with competitive, beery abandon, they assailed me with tales of physical ruthlessness. I learned of the twenty-three admissions to Accident and Emergency spawned during Tÿrslið's weekly training sessions in the previous year alone; I was shown how repeated metallic blows to unprotected fingers had endowed many of those around the fire with hands set in a clawed curl, one that made grasping small objects a challenge. I heard of the growing number of once-bitten Dark Age groups unwilling to accept a rematch with their warriors: 'Oh, bollocks,' said Orc, recounting the tremulous mutter he'd once overheard from the opposition lines as Tÿrslið took to the battlefield, 'it's that full-contact lot.'
Their proud refusal to fight to a script had meant history being rewritten before the public's flinching gaze. Supposedly victorious Saxon and Norman armies had been regularly battered to defeat, and recreations of inter-Viking conflict settled in the actual loser's favour. Had Tÿrslið been asked to perform a Canute re-enactment, it might have ended with the North Sea in full retreat.
Visceral combat realism was Tÿrslið's mission, and any tale that embodied it was worth a boast. Rodstaff told me of the occasion he'd taken his sister and her son to their first Viking battle event, engineering his own violent death right before them. 'Oh, great,' he overheard the boy mutter as he lay there motionless, fake blood pulsing from his abdomen, 'so who's going to drive us home now?'
Dagmar described a battle so gruelling to participant and observer alike that a horse and an elderly female spectator had both suffered cardiac arrest; Hrothgar dug about in his sea chest for their promotional brochure, whose cover featured a pinioned pagan having his prosthetic stomach luridly sliced open below the headline 'We Maim To Please'.
The images revealed within detailed Hrothgar's own obsession: honing the group's special effects to forensic levels of gory detail. I saw Tÿrslið warriors being disembowelled, strung up, set ablaze, even beheaded. For years, Hrothgar had toiled with an alchemist's passion to perfect the recipe for blood, a blend of golden syrup, food colouring and washing-up liquid whose proportions he would not reveal. The apogee of his dark art was showcased in the newspaper cutting he now presented. Dominated by a picture of a smiling Hrothgar arm in arm with a wizened corpse, this was a souvenir of the occasion a large number of policemen had descended on his house after a horrified neighbour spotted him lugging the pictured dummy, a favoured Tÿrslið prop (nicknamed Kenny in honour of the oftslain South Park character), into the garage. 'One of life's great pleasures,' Hrothgar sighed as he closed the book and settled back on his sea chest, 'is driving to a Vike meet with Kenny in the passenger seat.'
I gasped, I drank, I gawped, I clapped my dress-clad thigh and drank some more. Because when all was said and done, this was the sort of stuff I wanted Vikings to say and do, and how I wanted them to say and do it. What of it if they sliced orange cheese on a board of non-European wood, if every so often an electronic warble asserted itself from the sea-chests beneath us?
In one of the very rare quiet moments, Hrothgar stated how re-enactment groups could be sorted into five levels of authenticity. First up were the bibulous casuals who wore eBay fancy dress and taped hessian over their trainers; grade two re-enactors generally rented outfits from theatrical costumiers and 'looked OK from a distance'; he placed Tÿrslið in grade three, on the grounds that 'we do machine-stitch our clothes, but only on the inside where it doesn't show'. I never quite pinned him down on what defined grades four and five, but his respect for those groups who reached this level was tempered with scorn for the joyless sobriety that apparently characterised them.
'You get these obsessives who rope their camps off at events: they won't even talk to the public, and never want to party after hours.' Hrothgar shook his head, bemused by those whose re-enactment agenda found no place for alcoholic silliness. The odd muttered hint suggested Tÿrslið was something of a Viking Foreign Legion, an ask-no-questions refuge for those expelled from more sombre re-enactment groups for crimes against authenticity and decorum. But how glad I then was to be here sharing dirty jokes and supermarket lager round an oil-drum brazier, not squatting amongst moody Dark Age zealots, dyeing clothes in piss and silence. To be with people who were Vikings because Vikings got drunk and fought, not because they rotated crops and invented the stirrup.
With every passing hour and emptied crate, the group's already relaxed stance on historical accuracy relaxed further: cans were no longer decanted into wooden beakers, and someone popped open a tube of Pringles. Every so often an elder bawled, 'Thrall! Wood!', and Leicestershire's newest Viking would totter obediently off into the forest with an axe, barefoot. In three days we must have got through at least a couple of trees' worth: it isn't hard to see how the great forests that covered most of Iceland when the Vikings arrived are now barren arctic deserts.
We burned and drank; they held forth and I listened. Somewhere along the increasingly fuzzy line I learned that women were permitted to fight for the Tÿrslið cause ('in drag'), but that Bede no longer was. 'Ex-paratrooper, trained to kill at no regard to his own personal safety,' said someone. 'A psycho, basically.' Hearing himself thus described, the object responded with a yellow-eyed wink. He winked a lot more throughout Orc's account of how he'd been ambushed by Bede, Kato-style, at some recent event: 'Broke an ankle and snapped my Achilles, but I still fought on until the end of the day.'
The brutal camaraderie recalled my time with the Legio VIII. At one point Bede threatened to burn the Cornishman's false leg in the fire, only to be told that carbon fibre wasn't combustible. Any Vike who fell asleep in the minibus on the way home from an event could expect to awake in a state of imaginative comic humiliation: banana-horns would be lashed to his helmet, or his groin, or he'd find himself mummified in gaffer tape and somehow tied to the inside of the roof. Happy times, smiled their indulgent jarl, explaining with a sigh that things had calmed down now that so many Vikes brought their kids along. 'Gone are the days when we stayed out until 3 a.m., breaking things.'
Gone, perhaps, but not forgotten. There was the time they'd all been out on a beach after an event near Portsmouth, throwing pebbles at what they thought in the twilight was a marker buoy; moments later, a helicopter caught them in its searchlight and informed them through a loudhailer that they'd been stoning a nuclear submarine. Oh, and that Tÿrslið camp that was stormed by riot police, tipped off by locals convinced that a horde of crusty travellers had moved in. The bulk of Bede's army stories ended up wit
h a grenade going off in someone's face, and when the men of Tÿrslið weren't hanging each other off cliffs by their fingertips, they were confronting intruders with shotguns, setting light to restraining orders or reversing fork-lift trucks into their former places of employment. Their many tales of derring do – both as Vikings and as civilians – would later oblige me to take a long hard look at my suburban lifestyle and see it for what it really was: happy, secure and generally rather wonderful.
Quite the most repellently evocative tale was Hrothgar's account of the 1,000-a-side siege re-enactment he'd attended some years previously at a castle in Sweden. One afternoon, as he drank with his fellow defenders at a makeshift bar they'd set up along the battlements, the enemy had opened up with a volley of cabbages fired at great velocity from their hefty trebuchet; the soldier beside Hrothgar was left holding only the neck of the vodka bottle he'd been about to refresh himself from. The besieged army had two days to hone their revenge: when the invaders duly massed outside the castle gates for the final showdown, the gigantic butt of 'boiling oil' emptied upon their heads was a-brim not with water, as they'd been led to expect, but the manifold excretions of 1,000 unwashed inebriates, collected over forty-eight hours. The gathered audience watched the outraged event organiser stamp furiously up to the gates, cursing furiously; then saw him again, a short while later, being dangled by his ankles from the highest tower, trouserless and bleating. Well, whatever floats your boat. Then burns it.
The conversation turned briefly to Spangles, the Ford Capri and other areas of consumer nostalgia, interspersed with chorused one-liners from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, a cultural phenomenon I suspected was a dominant inspir ation for Dark Age combatants. For a while the woods around us were alive with the mutters and rustles of some bumbling teenage patrol on a night mission; like Bede, Orc had served time in the army, and for a vivid minute or two he described how easy – and entertaining – it would be to stalk and snatch a cadet, and bring him back to camp.
As these rustlings receded and the last distant scouting singalong faded, my Vikings once more filled the night with hairy-chested, hairy-coated reminiscences, euphemistic 'incidents' involving landladies, firemen, coastguards and – always – hog-whimpering insobriety.
'You sometimes have these "Superviking" moments,' smiled Orc, who dutifully recounted a great many. The common theme was retribution wreaked upon disrespectful civilians: the drunken MOP who smashed Hrothgar's windscreen and was chased at axe-point into Leicester town centre, where he hid under a car and refused to emerge until the police arrived; the taunting youths dispersed from outside a North London chip shop by a judicious display of weaponry; a group of the same punished in an undisclosed manner for spitting upon slain warriors at a battle re-enactment in Oxford.
It was no surprise when raucous words evolved to bellowed selections from Tÿrslið's extensive repertoire of ribald, self-penned drinking songs. Halfway through the first, Bede hauled himself groggily aloft and weaved off into the night, murmuring about 'a bad bottle'; we didn't see him again until morning. Flosi, who'd hitherto nobly restricted himself to wooden mugs of the 12 per cent cough syrup that is mead, now succumbed to the lure of bottled cider, and then – disastrously – Pernod blended with dandelion and burdock. It wasn't long before I found myself addressed with thick-tongued urgency.
'See, I'm just trying to set a standard, to stamp out all the really rubbish kit,' he shouted above a chorus of 'The Well-Hung Ploughboy', waving a chubby finger about. Forgotten now was a recent episode in which he'd fanned our waning fire with a battery-powered pump, brought along to inflate his air bed. 'But I mean, we're good at fighting – the best. Don't you forget that.' I told him I wouldn't. 'Those Romans you were with . . . I did some of that crap once, just poking each other with sticks . . . We don't have a routine or shit like that, we just . . . go right at it. Yeah? You'll see.' I told him I would, but wasn't at all sure I now wanted to.
They were roaring about badgers when I turned in, and were still at it long after I'd rolled out my sleeping bag in a corner of the coach-sized, orange-and-green striped, open-fronted tent I was to share with Hoketil and many tottering stacks of shields, table trestles and wooden chests. Here in the dark, away from the comfort of the fireside, that pagan wassailing had a distinctly less homely ring to it. Aglow with flames and ale, the distant faces I could see through the tent's open awning seemed increasingly sinister. 'You'll see.' Setting Orc's earlier words against Flosi's recent unsteady pronouncements, I wondered how I'd taken them as a warm invitation, rather than the cold threat they so starkly were.
How would it feel to be leathered, really leathered? I spent some time trying to rationalise the experience in terms of Newton's laws: it was all about momentum, probably, and the disastrous effects of resisting it. As a featherweight leatheree struck by fifteen stone of charging berserker, would I simply bounce lightly off into a distant part of the forest, like a plastic skittle struck by a wreckers' ball? Or would it be more of a hammer-on-peach job? The important thing, I decided, was to ensure that when someone hit me, I was already travelling in the same direction: this meant rolling with the punches, and counteracting an imminent shoulder charge, or similar, by running at least slightly away. None of that, though, would be much use when the hardware came out. 'It's that full-contact lot.' The Cornishman's palsied grasp explained just what that meant: heavy lengths of metal aimed at human flesh and swung without restraint. I flexed both hands in my sleeping bag, as if for the last time.
My exhalations steamed out into the cold air ever more rapidly. One ballad ended, and before the next began I caught the click-hiss of liberated lager, and snatches of Vike-talk: 'The thing about Bear is, when he hits someone they know about it . . .', 'So this guy whacks me in the guts, but he doesn't know I've got a blood-bag under my tunic – poor bloke almost fainted . . .', 'Ah, belt up, Flosi, you ponce.'
I awoke to the thwack of willow on skull. Two of Orc's boys were clattering each other with staffs by the kitchen tent, and with an intestinal lurch of foreboding I once again questioned the violent infliction of pain as a useful twenty-first-century life-skill. No more soothing was the stentorian reveille with which Hrothgar mustered the slumberers – a quavering blast on a cattle horn, precisely as delivered throughout The Vikings, an account of Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis's epic struggle for the throne of Northumbria. 'That's not nearly as funny as you think it is,' croaked Hoketil after Hrothgar discharged right into his blanket-shrouded head.
We breakfasted on wooden bowls of porridge, and then, after Flosi went back to 'authenticate his tent' prior to inspection, on Nescafé, bananas and many packets of supermarket bacon. None of it went down well with the butterflies that had made my innards their home.
The ensuing inventory of correctitude, ordained by Hrothgar at Flosi's nagging insistence, was a two-tier event. Flosi stood haughtily before period accessories hewn from European wood, while everyone else idly punted anachronisms out of sight or stuffed them into linen bags, shouting 'Au-then-ti-cate!' in Dalek voices. To the men and women of Tÿrslið , anything was historically admissible as long as it could be concealed at short notice. Hrothgar did his best to affect an air of stern dis approval, no easy task for such a reluctant disciplinarian, nor a Viking with a digital camera round his neck. 'Right, I'm going to walk round and take a few pictures, and I don't want to see anything out of period when we look back through them.'
Shortly after, we huddled around the little LCD screen at our leader's beckoning. 'Well, straight off in this first one, we've got two . . . three people smoking, and it looks as if Otto there is sending a text.' Kevin Costner's teenage son aimed a truculent shrug at the fire. Booze gr8, I thought. 2nite we mutil8 newbies. Hrothgar clicked on through the photos, tutting at a cotton headscarf here, a sleeping bag (mine) there. 'Now that's better,' he said, arriving at a shot depicting the interior of Orc's tent. 'Nice arrangement of weapons and shields . . . proper crockery . . . and I like how you've hung the clo
aks up over the bearskin standard.' ('Great eBay find, that,' someone whispered.) Flosi leaned forward and squinted at the image. 'Er, what's that, by the sea chest?' Hrothgar zoomed in, and we found ourselves looking at a huge packet of Pampers. He tried to frown, then let out one of those soprano chuckles: his Vikes were just too unruly, too flippant for all this, and ultimately so was he. 'Who am I to talk anyway?' he sighed, helplessly. 'Look at my sea chest – it's supposed to have rope handles, and they're metal. And that lock is fourteenth century at best, for God's sake.'
There was a loud tut from the rear of the group. 'Look, have we come here to fuss about bloody stitching, or fight?'
'Fussing sounds good,' I mumbled, amidst the roar of bloodlust thus unleashed.
And so, a moment later, two five-strong lines of heavily armed warriors stood facing each other across an adjacent forest clearing. Through a necessarily prolonged visit to the latrine block, I had missed being conscripted into this first round of battles, and watched proceedings from a hunched position on one of the tree-stumps that formed what Bede, newly returned to camp and a rather more reluctant spectator, had already dubbed death row.
The thrall couple, drawn on opposite sides, clutched their swords and circular shields in whitened fists; if maintaining balance in the dewy grass had already proved beyond my slick-soled peasant boots, then how would they cope in bare feet? 'Right!' bellowed Orc. 'Five on five, no running through the camp, Martini rules!'
Any vestigial misgivings at having not yet been conscripted to the Tÿrslið ranks evaporated when Bede revealed what this meant. 'Any time, any place, anywhere,' he mumbled, as the first grunt-accompanied clang rang out. 'You know – anything goes, no holds barred.'
I spent the following quarter-hour in a blinking, cringing flinch. Pikes, hand axes and mighty swords were wielded at full strength, meeting shields with a thudding crack and each other with a painful, grating slash. Worst of all was the softer, yielding thump that accompanied a body blow. After a while I became aware that the defensive twitches with which I reflexively showed empathy with those being hit were being precisely mirrored by Bede's jabs and swipes, enacted on behalf of the hitters. 'Bugger,' winced Dagmar in response to a lusty axe strike to the forearm, without interrupting his combat manoeuv rings. Even without a sharpened edge, the heavy-gauge steel their in-house armourer used was capable – as I now beheld – of cleaving a fat pike shaft in two.