The British do not usually celebrate invaders of their islands but when they come bearing gifts and a good business plan some 1,000 years later, that’s different! The Jorvik Viking Festival has thereby managed to attract huge numbers of visitors every February since its inception in 1985, when four Viking ships from Norway sailed up the River Ouse. Olaf Engvig, a maritime historian, writer and founder of a Viking boat restoration wharf, had sailed across the North Sea.
Boats were the main focus of the Festival initially, with regattas and races, but it has now expanded to include traditional woodcrafts, torchlit processions, costumed battle re-enactments and a variety of family events. There was even a boat-burning each year until 1999, when it was deemed too dangerous. Trond Svensson leads the Norwegian delegation each year.
The Festival takes place in York, which the Vikings named ‘Jórvik’. One year before the Festival began, the Jorvik Centre was opened for tourists and school visits. Unsurprisingly, the Festival is a magnet for children’s authors, since the Viking era is distant enough to be a goldmine for the imagination. The ‘Bloodaxe Book Challenge’ runs alongside the Festival to encourage children to borrow more books from their local libraries.
(Image: alh1 at Flickr.com / CC BY-ND 2.0)
