As mentioned in my previous post, I recently visited the beautiful fjords of Gudvangen. The Viking market is arranged annually by Njardar Vikings, and gathers hundreds of vikings from near and far away, in the dramatic landscape of the Nærøyfjord in Western-Norway.
I arrived the weekend before the market, and throughout the week I watched people arrive one by one to put up tents with beautiful wooden and leather crafts, precious metals, needlework, weaving and yummy meats and honey. The days and nights became filled with laughter, music and storytelling around the fires. I had a wonderful time, and brought a lot of memories as well as photos back home.
I ended up buying a gorgeous handmade replica of the Birka tarsoly to hang from my belt (which is also Birka) and used it to keep my money in, along with a lot of other things that made the contents of it rather scarce by the end of the market (such as a deer skull with large antlers to hang in the front of the viking-tent).
My lovely neighbors, Bjørn and Margrethe!
My close friends Silje and LC also came on Thursday evening :-)
We were lucky to have visiting musicians playing delightful medieval music throughout the market. Below is the Polish group Tryzna, playing cheerful tunes for us!
LC fixed the holes in my historical shoes!
Janne...I think she might be in love... Can you tell? ♥
...and there were kittens!
The weather in Gudvangen is quite extreme and shifting, and while we mostly had cloudy weather and some heavy rain, the market area looked especially lovely when the sun decided to visit us for a few days..
There was a class in historical bow shooting from horseback, and the teacher's horse was a friendly and sweet person. I was sitting there chatting with it when a photographer came by, followed by two more, and all of a sudden I was in the middle of a photoshoot with reflectors and all. He also snapped one of me with my own camera. How he was able to get photo that much clearer and sharper than me using the same camera I will probably never understand, but I do understand that I can no longer blame my equipment when being discontent with my photography. ^^
Beautiful Magdalena in her sexy-dress, aka the "I am getting a tattoo on my upper arm-dress" and the "my dress had become too small so I had to rip it open-dress".
On Friday there was a championship in glima-wrestling. The vikings were fond of sports, and glima was used extensively in the Viking-age as a way of training strength, technique, endurance and courage. As usually, the championship was lead by fellow viking and Glima-master Lars Magnar Enoksen...
...who I caught one night in the photo below while sitting outside my tent illustrating one of the more brutal techniques of glima on a pair of unfortunate grapes... ^^
The good man Kai Uwe Faust in deep concentration, while my brother is receiving his third handmade tattoo by him...
...this time a customized Mjölnir on the upper back. He got him to pose for some photos afterwards, and I took the ones below.
Saturday night is was time for the gilde, a large fiest of shameless amounts of foods, beer and mead (and apparently strange things like cinnamon-whiskey and chocolate liquor which I luckily managed to steer away from).
And a fine fiest it was!
There was live music by Danish group Virelai, and the mood was fantastic, people were clapping and singing and enjoying life. There were also increasingly tilted camera angles.
...and dancing ^^
I was pondering how different a fiest for history reenactors is compared to a modern-day party, where people sit in a circle with plastic bags filled with aluminum beer-cans and listen to digital music. It can hardly compare to the flickering candles and warm atmosphere of a historical market, with ceramic bowls and wooden cups of homemade beer and mead being passed around, people singing old medieval tunes and others taking the stage while the crowd claps and stomps to the beat of drums, flutes, harps and hurdy-gurdies...
Ah, those viking market-feels...
But before I knew it, and although it had been a week, time was way to short and all of a sudden the night was over and the last morning came close. I must confess that I sometimes feel like Sundays are tainted by upcoming Mondays, and that is especially true when you need to get ready to travel 1200 years forth in time... ^^
My next adventure is however not so far away in time, because after a week of work I am packing my bags again and heading westward, leaving to see my second homeland Iceland again for two weeks.
Design and content is the intellectual property of Valkyrja.com and is protected under the Norwegian Copyright Act and International copyright laws. Contact: mail@valkyrja.com
