Today's Viking

This is serious.



INTERVIEW BY MILÈNE LARSSON

And now, just for the sake of historical accuracy in light of the preceding photo story, which is accurate in lots of ways but not so accurate in some key ways, we present an interview with a real, a seriously really real, Viking.

Vice: Hello, Björn M. Buttler Jakobsen, king of Foteviken’s Viking village.
Björn Jakobsen: It’s a city, not a village. I’m king of the only reconstructed Viking city on earth. We’re mostly active during the summer, but there’s a tithing operation all year round.

How accurate is the image we have of Vikings compared with what they actually looked like?
It’s the same as with our perception of cowboys. Everyone thinks they know what a cowboy looked like, that they carried Colt .45s and wore jeans with checkered shirts and a hat. But look at any old American photo and you’ll see that they wore long riding coats and carried regular shotguns. It’s the same with Vikings. The imagery of Vikings depicted in the films and images of modern times is not at all representative of what they actually looked like. For example, the most common assumption is that they wore metal helmets with horns. But metal was very expensive. A sword was worth as much as an estate, so it was something only the richest men had. Regular Vikings wore leather helmets with metal reinforcements, if they could afford it. They had bows, knives, spears and sometimes axes—tools they used in their everyday life for hunting, eating, or chopping wood—that could also be useful for smashing someone’s head in when going to war.

How did women dress?
Much like the men, only not in pants, and when they wanted to dress up they’d wear a pretty apron. Also, anything that emphasized the bosom didn’t appear until the Middle Ages. In medieval times, not only women enhanced their body parts, even men had reinforced crotches on their pants so that it’d look like they had huge packages. They even had fake balls and dicks that they could tie to their underwear.

Did the Vikings initiate that fashion?
No, but the Vikings were obsessed with fertility. It was very much a means of survival because if they didn’t have a lot of kids and some died, they had no one to support them when they were old.

How did this fertility obsession manifest itself? I read somewhere that Viking women carried penis amulets.
I don’t know about that but wedding celebrations, for example, weren’t finished until all the guests had seen the couple make love. Back then the wedding night was an open ceremony. Many old Viking rituals dedicated to fertility are still celebrated in the Nordic countries to this day. Like Blot, a ritual held on the darkest night of the year in December, to celebrate that brighter times are coming. We still celebrate it here at Foteviken.

What did they do on Blot night?
They got drunk and sacrificed animals and people to the gods and then drank the blood of their offerings.

They drank human blood?
Um, well… Let’s stick to animals. They didn’t let anything go to waste and ate the sacrifices afterward. They even made food with the blood, like the black pudding we still eat today.

How should one dress in order to look like a powerful Viking man, like yourself?
To define standing and wealth, you should wear jewelry in silver and gold and fancy fabrics like silk and fur—flamboyant, garish, hard-to-come-by details that were obtained from trading in the Far East. And you should have an impressive beard, as that was the strongest sign of manhood. Also, it’s said that the stronger colors you wore, the richer you were. Red and blue were signs of wealth because they were the most difficult colors to make. For example, the only way to make blue stick to fabric was to mix it with urine from a man who had been partying for three days.

Ew.
Ha. Yes, you had to cook the fabric in it. I have friends who’ve tried it and apparently it smelled so bad they had to evacuate the house and leave the windows open for two days. Cooked male urine does not smell good.

How about red dye?
The most colorful red was made from squashing a certain kind of Spanish lice.

So was there ever a Viking who was famous for his appearance?
Yes, Harald Hårfager, which translates as Harald Pretty-Hair. He was, according to the stories, a very beautiful man with long, shiny hair. The others made fun of him for his vanity.

Any final words on Viking clothing?
We’ve acquired most of our knowledge about how Vikings dressed from grave goods, and if you just look at how your grandparents were buried, it was in their best clothes. If I were to travel back in time to the Viking Age wearing the Viking attire I’m wearing, they’d probably think I was a ghost. I might very well be dressed in burial clothes. Nobody knows for sure what Vikings actually looked like. But I think the closest thing to it is still around today: the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia’s traditional clothing.

Thanks, Viking King! See you in Valhalla!