Photo credit: Kelsey Patton

In a moment, the story behind the photo above, tentatively titled, “The Most Interesting Viking in the World.”

Høstfest 2013 is history, but my aches and pains linger. Those aches are not, as you might think, primarily the results of bruises suffered in fighting. I actually took remarkably little damage this year. It helps to have enthusiastic young men to bear the brunt of the combat. No, it just seems I have reached an age where sitting in unfamiliar chairs and car seats causes you to stiffen up.

Høstfest as a whole seemed to be quite a success, so far as I could tell. Minot, North Dakota hasn’t fully recovered from the flooding a couple years back, but the festival and the visitors have. Not the busiest festival I’ve seen, but plenty lively.

The interesting thing this year (as I mentioned before I left) was the involvement of the History Channel “Vikings” TV series people. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have almost no respect for that production, which sins against history in all kinds of significant ways. And pretty much everybody in our Viking Age Club & Society feels the same way.

But we have a relationship with Høstfest itself, and they asked us to welcome the History Channel people and participate in the promotion, particularly a “Viking cosplay” contest in which people were invited to upload photos of themselves in Viking costumes in order to win prizes. This we did. The “people from the History Channel,” in fact, proved to be (aside from a PR guy) the four lovely girls you see above, who wore copies of the battle costume of Ragnar Lodbrok’s wife in the series. They were not in fact actors, or even Hollywood people, but models recruited from an agency in Fargo. So it was easy to be nice to them, especially for me, whose idea of being nice to pretty girls is to leave them strictly alone, out of fear that they’ll think I’m hitting on them.

Nevertheless, somebody in the club – I won’t say who – thought it would be hilarious to do the photo above. And I was not hard to persuade.

As for fights, I won a few and lost a few. As so often happens, the younger guys seemed to figure out my moves as time went on, and my score went down.

I sold nearly all the books I brought. This will be the last event where I sell The Year of the Warrior paperbacks, as I’ve nearly run through the stock I acquired in my divorce settlement from Baen Books. In future I’ll just direct people to the e-book, available due to the Baen Reconciliation (new from Robert Ludlum!).

And now, pardon me while I lapse into a brief coma.