I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (14 page)

'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.

'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.'