Tag Archives: Minnesota Horse Expo

Uncategorized

My equestrian weekend

2 Comments

I wanted to upload a picture, but I’m having connection problems tonight, and anyway I didn’t take any photos this weekend that were much better than pedestrian (and you can’t have pedestrian at a horse show). The perfect thing would have been to get someone to snap me with an Icelandic horse, wearing my Viking gear, but that obvious idea never occurred to me at the time.

Anyway, it was a good weekend. In fact, although there were difficult parts, I’d say it was the best time I’ve had in a couple years. The first fling of my freedom, you might say, if you were in alliterative mood.

I’d been to the Minnesota Horse Expo at the state fairgrounds once before, years back. At that point, we were able to get a parking spot in the lot even though we weren’t bright and early. This year, although the horse barns and Coliseum are at the west end of the park, I had to park back near the east entrance. It’s gotten to be a big deal. There was no handicapped parking section. It was a long trek from my parking spot for someone with a recent hip replacement, but I made it, and I wasn’t even terribly stiff the next day. Continue reading My equestrian weekend →

Uncategorized

Norse horse

1 Comment


Icelandic horses at the beginning of summer. Photo credit: Guillame Calas. Creative Commons license.

Fair warning: There won’t be a post on Friday. I have faith in you; somehow you’ll endure.

I’ll be playing Viking at an odd venue on Friday and through the weekend, the Minnesota Horse Expo at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul. The Viking Age Club & Society has been asked to provide context for the Icelandic horse exhibit this year. There will even be fight shows in the arena, though sadly the fighters will be old guys (not me; I’m still not up to that), as our young Vikings aren’t available. In real life, the Vikings would have probably had the stallions themselves fight, using goads on them. It was the Vikings’ favorite sport.

Things I’ve learned about Icelandic horses, mostly through internet research:

• It’s illegal to import any horse into Iceland, even an Icelandic horse. Once an Icelandic horse leaves the island, it must stay away forever. They’re afraid of bringing in exotic diseases or parasites.

• Icelandic horses have two extra gaits, which other horses can’t do (and only some Icelandics can do). One is called the tölt, a “four-beat lateral ambling gait” said to be “comfortable and ground-covering.” The other is the skeið, the “flying pace,” “fast and smooth” according to Wikipedia, a “two-beat lateral gait.” (Skeið was also the name of a kind of Viking ship; Erling Skjalgsson owned one of those.)

• Breeders of Icelandic horses consider them the purest of the northern breeds.

Author and artist William Morris (1834-1896) made a tour of Iceland with friends in 1871, producing a journal which I consulted (through a kind loan by Dale Nelson) in my research for West Oversea. He grew very fond of the horse he rode on that tour, and planned to bring it home with him. However it went lame before embarkation, so he took another horse instead. It lived to a good old age and grew very fat on his estate in England.

I shall tell you more about Icelandic horses next week.

Uncategorized, Writing

Plans: How to make God laugh

4 Comments

I have to get back in the habit of blogging five times a week, even when I don’t have a book to review or some link to share. I think I won’t go back to talking about my personal pains and neuroses, or at least not as much. Anyway, I’m presently enjoying one of the most pleasant periods I’ve enjoyed in some time. I’m done with grad school – nothing left but getting the document in the mail. I’m still adjusting to the freedom. And I’m coming up on two months since my surgery, so my incision’s largely healed up and I’m suffering more from the stiffness caused by learning to walk straight and unsupported again, than from post-procedure discomfort. I don’t recall ever feeling so stiff as I did last week, but then I’m calling on muscles I’ve permitted to dog it for more than two years.

My obvious next project is to start the next Erling book. Don’t have a title yet (I do know the title of the next book, assuming things fall out as I plan), but I know the period of history I need to cover. The days of purely imaginative Erling novels (West Oversea, Hailstone Mountain) are over. Now we get back to established fact, and the epic face-off between Erling and King Olaf Haraldsson, who was destined to be Norway’s patron saint.

But I wasn’t sure how to approach this stretch of the story. Part of the problem is that it’s going to involve the lowest moment in Erling’s life. You’ve got to finesse that kind of plot point with great care.

Last night, driving home from work, my mind sparked across one of those synaptic gaps that puts two things you’ve been thinking about separately into bed together. And I figured out – I think – a way to approach this book. So I sat down and wrote about a thousand words.

This is what we writers call “a start.”

Oh yes, it’s time to start playing Viking in earnest again. Next event – we’re helping with the Icelandic horse exhibit at the Minnesota Horse Expo at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul, April 22 and 23. I plan to be there both days, if my body fail me not.