Ignoring the limitations of amateur recording, this video is close to what you might see of a full Viking combat demonstration at the 2009 Decorah Nordic Festival. Lots of info, lots of fighting.
Read more of what happens at these festivals here or through our subject tags below:
The winner says he had to test the non-viking weapon he’d made, so it appears here in this typically Viking-oriented skirmish. His long double-handed sword is a Thracian Romphaia, apparently a terrifying weapon in its day.
Grim’s Hall is one of my never-miss blogs. Today Douglas posted an excellent little video based on Lewis’ essay, “The Necessity of Chivalry.” It’s one of my favorites of his pieces, and I never saw it until it appeared in Present Concerns, about the last Lewis collection to be published with new material:
“This story is important to me because people in America aren’t aware that black farmers are still around,” Mr. Santiago said. “People don’t know what their struggles are and that they are still being discriminated against. For the most part, whether they are black or white, the farmers get pushed down and end up having to sell their properties because they can’t get loans. Small farms are denied because they don’t usually have any collateral to get a loan. Through my research I’ve learned if you’re looking for stolen black land, all you have to do is follow the lynching trail. That’s how it started to happen. Black farmers were killed for their land.”
Tomorrow I’ll be delivering a sermon in campus chapel at our schools. If you think of it, you might pray that I do more good than harm.
Here’s something rather nice: An old TV production of my favorite short story, P.G. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred Flits By.” It’s a little slow for my taste, and they make some odd changes to the text for no apparent reason, but all in all it’s not bad. David Niven is excellent as the inimitable Uncle Fred. (Now that I think of it, that’s a self-contradictory statement. If he’s inimitable, it’s impossible for anyone to portray him excellently.)
Your guide to “the world’s wondrous and curious places” now has everything on one map, “the definitive map of the world’s extraordinary sights.” Atlas Obscura invites you to at least consider planning a trip to the Royal and Ancient Polar Society in Hammerfest, Norway, not too far from the Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel, which is made of ice. If you like cute animals, perhaps you’ll like Japan’s Cat Island or Zao Fox Village, both near Sendai. But if obscurity is really what pops your doldrums, check out the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum of Logan, Ohio or the Spam Museum of Austin, Minnesota.
Good sparring here. For more spear fights, see below:
“We train as researchers but spend our days managing the emotions of late adolescents, haggling over budgets, and figuring out how to use Moodle’s gradebook,” writes Jonathan Malesic, who used to teach at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, before he burned out.
“Eventually, I came to dread every class meeting.”
He describes his experience and some lessons learned.
Chronic dislocation produces the three main components of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of professional ineffectiveness. Burned-out professors, then, are people who cannot muster the strength to do the intellectual labor of their job, who see students as problems, and who feel their work has no positive effect.
Introverted teachers and students appear to be at greater risk for burnout in increasingly social learning environments. English teacher Michael Godsey tells this story:
After 11 years of teaching English at a public high school, Ken Lovgren left the profession, mostly because he was drained by the insistent emphasis on collaboration and group work. Engaging in a classroom that was “so demanding in terms of social interaction” made it difficult for him to find quiet space to decompress and reflect. “The endless barrage of ‘professional learning community’ meetings left me little energy for meaningful interaction with my kids,” he told me.
They no longer teach axe skills in high school, but thankfully the Internet has it covered. This is a longer video than we normally post for the Friday Fight, but it will give you an idea of how demonstrators need to practice in order to fight each other safely.
Compare this to the fighting we see in these videos:
I think I’ve written about the old TV show, Tales of the Vikings, here before. It formed the spark that first roused my interest in the Vikings. Judging by the clip below, which recently appeared on YouTube, it was about as cheesy as I figured.
According to the link, there are six extant episodes available on CD now from this site. I had been given to understand that all episodes had been lost forever. So this is good news. Except that I’m reluctant to order from an unknown site.
I probably will, though.