“Sögumenn, götulistamenn, handverksmenn sem bæði höggva í steina og tré eða berja glóandi járn, bardagamenn og bogmenn, svo eitthvað sé nefnt.”

June is nearing and with it the annual festival held at the Viking* Village in Hafnarfjörður: Víkingahátíð, the viking festival. I went there last year and I wholeheartedly recommend paying it a visit in case you’re planning a trip to Iceland around 14th-17th June. The festival is quite known in Europe and sees many travelers every year, craftsmen, medieval era lovers and just tourists in general. Many people dress up appropriately for the festival but naturally it’s not compulsory – it’s more important to be dressed up for the weather since the marketplace is, naturally, mostly outdoors and the location is by the sea.

The activities have previously included f.ex. archery and axe throwing and bardagasýningar, live battle re-enactments. Meanwhile adults can watch smiths and other craftsmen at work, listen to the many musicians performing around the area and try the whole roasted lamb**. …just kidding. I’m sure adults are also allowed to try their hand at throwing an axe if they like.

The marketplace opens every day at 13.00 o’clock and closes between one and three a.m. depending on the day. There’s a dagskrá, a schedule online that you can see in their news site over here. It’s available in English as well but I thought the Icelandic version would be far more interesting to the people interested in studying Icelandic.

One of the most interesting things for me this year is the gifting að víkingasið, a viking wedding. It will be held on Saturday at 14.30. The sad fact is that very little is known about the actual viking era weddings but since one can assume the folk arranging the Víkingahátíð might well be specialists in what little is known I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it!

Another definite must-see are the live battles. There are three of them every day by popular demand and they tend on the showy side. The one I watched last year began by a chieftain accusing a man for thievery and shearing off his hair. The acting was done in a very serious and realistic manner – huge chunks of his long hair really were cut off before the chieftain found out it was all a misunderstanding, and that the real thief was someone else. Besides, the men of the guy who received the haircut showed up and well, let’s just say it went rather badly for the chieftain.

Children especially loved these fights, but since the fights are done with real weapons it pays to keep the small ones in check so they don’t try to wander too close. The battle area is fenced off and no one who’s not partaking in the re-enactments is allowed to enter during the battles – well, it would be obvious to most people but not always (or so it seems) to small boys. This is why the fence has guards at small intervals whose only job is to keep the audience under control and occasionally carry the “dead” away from the battlefield.

Besides this my favourite parts were the many craftsmen who had arrived to both sell their goods and show how they were made. The food stalls were also most recommendable. I’ve never had better lamb stew than the one that had been made in a small-ish cauldron and was sold by cups near the battlefield… oh, the memories of that soup. I’m definitely going to try to find some more of it this year so see you at Fjörugarður!

*Here the word is used quite freely, however, real vikings were something entirely different. The word on its own is more like a term of profession and used to only mean those men that sailed away to raid shorelines elsewhere. In public use it eventually evolved into some kind of a generic term for Nordic people of the medieval era, probably due to a misunderstanding of some kind.

**Lamb is and has always been by far more common type of meat than beef or pork. Shortly after I moved to Iceland I ran into an interesting situation at the grocery store: beef and pork were both expensive, the types of meat that were affordable were lamb, horse and fowl!***

***Which is also much cheaper than “adult” horse.