I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (13 page)

At any rate, it was certainly a surprise to attend the Reykjavik Viking Festival some years back, and find that those attracted to the Dark Age lifestyle were fired not by a determination to overturn lazy clichés about meaded-up berserkers, but a desperate eagerness to reinforce them. For every quietly toiling craftsman seated at his stall rubbing beeswax onto a drinking horn or carving runic symbols into a sheep's knuckle, there were three dozen woolly coated, hugely bearded madmen waywardly clattering each other with stubby axes. The overbearingly dominant emphasis, at least to a man who'd rather foolishly come along with two very small children in tow, was on full-blooded violence and bellowed obscenity.

It was a matter of some relief to find my initial research suggesting that active interpretation of this era and its people had matured considerably over the intervening decade. A helpful representative of Britain's largest period group, which with a prosaic restraint rare in the re-enacting world styled itself The Vikings, replied to my enquiries with a businesslike rundown of its activities, one that found space for the phrase 'fitting a show around the client's needs'. That its 1,000 members were a breed apart from the sweary barbarians I'd encountered in Iceland was made plain by his assertion that 'in having local groups who are themselves members of the national society, we can be likened to the scouts'.

With the wardrobe shame of Cinderbury still fresh in my mind, proper kit was a prerequisite. 'Re-enactors should be happy to lend you authentic clothing,' advised my friendly pagan scoutmaster, 'but footwear is expensive and made to fit.' So it was that a few evenings later I found myself drawing around the soles of my feet, and posting the result – along with sufficient arcane measurements required to map my ankles, heels and arches to NASA-satisfying detail, and a bankers' draft for 250 – to a specialist German cobbler called Stefan. It was an improbable introduction to the age of craftsmen, one that endured for thousands of years and died only recently. I was the wrong side of forty and had never before had anything made to fit me, nor spent as much on an item you couldn't inhabit, drive or plug in. When the neatly wrapped parcel arrived I tore it open with Viking impetuousness.

The browned foot-wrappings thus liberated, stinking of gamey death, seemed an unlikely introduction to the world of bespoke couture. By appearance and odour, they might have been pulled off the feet of one of those eerily preserved peat-bog bodies. The untanned leather was stoutly unyielding; when I tried them on they fitted like a glove, a glove made out of bark. What an effective indicator of the befuddling shifts in relative economics over the last thousand years that reproducing such harshly spartan footwear, hardly recognisable as shoes, should now cost more than nine water-resistant, softly cushioned pairs of Primark's finest. Or, I don't know, half a new flat-screen telly or loads and loads of DVDs and crisps and stuff.

Hobbling, blistery discomfort aside, the principal issue revealed while wearing them in around the house was one of traction. Picking myself off our parquet for the third time, I began to credit Jean-Luc's explanation for the difficulties even he experienced staying upright in
caligae
: humans, he believed, actually walked differently back then, placing the whole foot flat on the ground with each stride, in the manner of rural Africans. What chance of talking the old-time talk, if I couldn't even walk the old-time walk? I could already foresee my end, slipping skullfirst onto the stone threshold as I ran from some longhouse in a period rush.

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 it.

'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.