Tonight, children, a story. An epic adventure with danger, passion, deadly battles, journeys to far-off lands, and… magic! Or at least the rumor of magic.

My fellow Viking reenactors probably wouldn’t like me to say this (we try to discourage the use of the word “barbarian”), but if there was ever a genuine, real-world Conan the Barbarian, it must have been Harald Sigurdsson (1015-1066), known as “Hardrada” (or Hard Ruler, but not till after his death, and certainly not to his face), king of Norway from 1047 to 1066. If there’s a more sprawling epic made out of a single life in world history, I don’t know about it.

Harald was the half-brother of King Olaf Haraldsson of Norway, better known as St. Olaf. He shared his brother’s exile when he fled to Russia (about 1028), and was fighting at his side (he was only fifteen years old) when Olaf died at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030. Then followed another flight to Russia. After that he journeyed to Constantinople, where he became the captain of the emperor’s bodyguard, the Varangian Guard, which at that time was made up entirely of Scandinavians. He fought a number of successful campaigns for the Empire, an enterprise that proved so profitable that he was accused of malfeasance and imprisoned. He managed to escape (with the loot), and returned to Russia (where he married a princess), and proceeded home to Norway. Continue reading King Harald and the flag →

Despite my reservations about the tone of the article (“How do we know the Epicureans were so great? Because they weren’t Christians!” More or less), I find this story utterly fascinating.

The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius’s eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets.

By way of Mirabilis.

We had our annual Viking Youth Camp on Saturday, at the Danish American Society in Minneapolis. For a change we had a pretty nice day, by August standards in Minnesota. It was warm, but not stinking hot, and it was humid, but that’s not as bad if it’s not stinking (see above) hot.

Unfortunately the good weather wasn’t matched by good attendance. A lot of people who’d said they’d come didn’t show. So perhaps we’ve fallen under the classic Catch-22: If the weather is bad, it’s too lousy to come to the camp, and if it’s good, we can go up to the lake instead.

My charge for the day was to oversee the Stone Toss Game. It’s a game played with stones and stakes in the ground, kind of like horseshoes, except that there are limits to the science you can apply, because the uneven stones and the uneven ground make every toss a surprise.

I noted that the littler the kids were, the better they seemed to do at the game, as if proximity to the ground gave them the home court advantage. The exception was a somewhat older kid, perhaps Junior High age, who racked up a phenomenal six points, something I’d have sworn was impossible. I was later told he’s borderline autistic, and wouldn’t be at all surprised if that didn’t give him an advantage in some way.

Avoidance, alas, doesn’t seem to confer any benefit at all.

A man of Finnish and Norwegian descent wants “U.S. Postal Service to add kilts as a uniform option for men.” He says the current uniform chafes. He said, “there are plenty of approved uniform items that very few mail carriers wear, including a cardigan sweater, vest and pith helmet.”