It was a strenuous weekend, by my standards. And quite a lot of fun, all in all.

A while back a fellow I know through Viking reenactment alerted me to an event coming up in September in New Ulm, Minnesota. It’s a battle reenactment, in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (something that only happens once a millennium. I did the math). They’re bringing in a bunch of Roman reenactors from various places in the U.S., and they needed something approximating Iron Age Germans. Vikings are close enough for the purposes of the exercise.

You can read about the battle of Teutoburg Forest here, and about Arminius, the German chieftain who made his name there. Whatever it was. We don’t actually know what he called himself, but Martin Luther (who got pretty excited over the story of a German who smashed the Romans) decided his name must have been “Hermann,” and “Hermann the German” he has been, in popular imagination, ever since.

I drove down with a (different) Viking friend, and we managed to show up only about an hour late. (We wanted to avoid Highway 169 because the Renaissance Faire tends to back it up pretty awful on Saturday mornings in season. So we took a roundabout route, and managed to miss every intersection we tried to find. But eventually we made it, mostly by process of elimination.)

Then followed a time of standing around waiting for something to happen, and going to lunch, and coming back from lunch to discover that everyone had gone to the battle site, in the park under the Hermann monument.

Basically we’re not going to be really fighting. We’ll go through our choreography (which involves running uphill for me, for my sins) and when we actually clash, we’ve been told to basically just smash our shields together, and pound our weapons on the other guys’ shields, to make a lot of crowd-pleasing noise.

We were only about a dozen assembled, “Romans” and “Germans” both. In theory, there will be quite a few more people involved on Sept. 19, the day of the reenactment. But we few, we happy few, we band of brothers who came for the rehearsal will be leaders, at least in theory.

It was fun. I learned a little bit about Roman warfare. Got to try a Roman shield (rectangular and curved), which is somewhat heavier than a Viking shield. But its handle is mounted horizontally, not vertically like all the other shields I’m familiar with (you grip it with your knuckles down). There’s a logic to that, because it means you can have your shield “up” to some extent without bending your arm, and that’s handy when you’re tired.

We also practiced a Roman “turtle formation,” where everyone kneels down and forms a shield wall in front, over, and on the sides, to protect from arrows. We won’t actually do that in the battle, but it was interesting to learn.

Afterwards, we stopped at the farm of some friends of my friend, and I got to shoot off one of my replica Colt cap and ball revolvers, another event that only happens about once every 2,000 years.