Viking Days brings shields, spears and swords to museum in Dickson

Aug 17, 2019 | 6:57 PM

If you ask Svend Nielsen, president of the Danish Canadian Museum in Dickson, Viking Days is a can’t miss event.

“How many places can you actually go and see where there is a re-enactment of vikings?” he points out.

“It brings about 1000 people in two days, and that in itself speaks to how people like the re-enactment of what the vikings did 1000 years ago. The actual vikings were far more gruesome than what you see on TV. They settled other parts of the northern part of Europe all the way down into France. It was not a bloodless thing.”

Portraying the many roles of viking society on Saturday were members of the Vikings of Finland Society ‘Ravens,’ who are based out of Edmonton.

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Nick Goetz, the group’s village blacksmith and co-leader, says educating onlookers is his favourite part of the job.

“Alberta has so much heritage, and then you go to Saskatchewan, you go to Manitoba, and the amount of Icelanders, of Danish, and Scandinavian; there’s just so many things we get to teach people that they don’t realize. It catches people off guard how much history is around them,” says Goetz, who recommends L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland if someone really wants a viking history lesson.

“People get to see how they cooked, how they did the blacksmithing, and they cant believe how steel was made; it came from the ground. It’s shocking when you see the technology they had (compared) to what they did, and they did it in the dark.

Viking Days also runs 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Sunday, August 18.

More information is at www.thedanishcanadianmuseum.com.

by Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

Viking Days brings shields, spears and swords to museum in Dickson

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