Tag: York Viking Festival

Three – No Four – Vikings I Met Last Month

For this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, Ritva has chosen to focus on portraits. Difficult. Because it IS difficult, and many of the few I do take are of family, whom I don’t usually feature on my blog. There are the images I secretly take whilst out and about, but few of those quite measure up as portraits so much as someone-doing-something-or-just-walking.

Then I remembered York Viking Festival, which I recently featured on one of my posts. So back we go, to a day when photography was not only permitted, but encouraged.

Tips on how to bump off your enemy, Viking style.

Tips on throwing a clay pot, Viking style.

Tips on working in wood, Viking style.

This last set is for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, because she invites us to take one photo, and crop it three different ways. So – two solo portraits, one two-handed portrait, all for the price of one shot of a Viking and his slave industriously working together.

Hands Put to Work at the Viking Festival

We were in York with the grandchildren on Monday. Its annual Viking Festival has begun.

Norsemen from Scandinavia went looking for places to settle, often in England and Ireland from about CE 800 to CE 1000. Like the Romans before them, many settled in the fertile lands round York. We came to find out more. We looked at demonstrations of working with wool. We attended a Brassica Massacre, where no hapless human was harmed as a doughty ‘Viking’ explained the ways to win in hand-to-hand fighting, by killing a cabbage impaled on a spike. And we chatted to a ‘Viking’ potter, as he worked away in freezing conditions to throw a simple pot.

Later, we were chuffed to bits to discover that the same master who had enslaved a willing William for twenty minutes or so last year was back again. This time Zoë couldn’t wait to have a go, and The Boss thought that if she came from the same stock as her brother, he couldn’t turn her down. After she’d swept the floor (inadequately), he set her onto a spot of woodturning – with his help. Many hands make light work.

Then he set about making Zoë a wooden medallion to thank her – and enlisted her help again. He was a good-humoured and generous master.

We had an excellent time. But we were pleased to retreat afterwards in our cosy modern clothing to a cosy house, and the comforts of 21st century living.

The header photograph shows hand-to-hand fighting in York – last year.

For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness #28 Hands which is this week hosted by Stupidity Hole.

Monday Portraits of not-so Marauding Vikings

The featured photo shows the Vikings as we always seem to think of them: a bellicose lot of marauders and fighters. In fact they were much like the rest of us – seeking a simple life of home, work and family. A trip to York, the Jorvik Viking Centre and the Viking Festival showed us an everyday story of country folk.

They must have been doing something right. They even had a willing slave in the form of my eight year old grandson cheerfully wielding his broom for his temporary Viking master.