Celebrating Vikings in Yorkshire

The JORVIK Viking Festival has been going strong since 1985 - but Yorkshire has celebrated their Viking history for much longer than that. When and where did it all start? How are they related to modern day reenactors? And just what did Edwardian Brits think of people dressing up as Vikings?

Join us as we speak with Dr Chris Tuckley, head of interpretation for the Jorvik Group, to find out more.

Show notes:
Ripon Millenary Festival
Sketch of the Ripon Viking Boat
Redress the Past

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Transcript

 Miranda  00:00

Hi, and welcome to That Jorvik Viking Thing Podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Schmeiderer. In Viking times, a Thing was a gathering a place where leaders and warriors could meet and talk. In the 21st century, our Thing is a virtual place where Viking academics and enthusiasts from around the world can come together to share knowledge. So hold on to your helmets as we learn more about Vikings on That Jorvik Viking Thing Podcast.

 Miranda  00:39

Today we're joined by Dr. Chris Tuckley, head of interpretation here at the Jorvik Group. If you've ever visited the Jorvik Viking Centre, DIG, or Barley Hall, you've seen his incredible work. He's with us today to talk about how people have celebrated our Viking heritage through the years. Welcome to the podcast, Chris, thanks for joining us today.

 Dr Chris Tuckley  00:57

My pleasure.

 Miranda  00:58

So you're going to be talking to us today about Viking events and kind of the history that Yorkshire specifically has with Viking pageantry. What brought you to that topic?

 Dr Chris Tuckley  01:08

Well, I've been involved with the Jorvik Viking Festival for many years now in a range of different roles. The first Jorvik Viking Festival that I was part of was way back in 2004, when actually I was working for York Museums Trust front of house at the Yorkshire Museum. And I was operating that art cart during the February half term. And there was this event going on the city wide event called the Jorvik Viking Festival. And for the art cart activities. I was making little cardboard helmets, swords and shields and decorating them with children. And that was my first taste, my first brush with the Jorvik Viking Festival. And the year after that I was working in front of house as a Viking at the Jorvik Viking Centre. So again, sort of on duty during the Jorvik Viking Festival. And then the year after that, I was working on programming the Jorvik Viking Festival. So that was my first sort of office job in the museum sector was working on the events program for Jorvik and its sister attractions.

 Miranda  02:10

So you've had quite a lot of involvement then.

 Dr Chris Tuckley  02:12

Yes, absolutely. I'm a big Jorvik Viking Festival enthusiast and nerd. And I sort of try and collect as much information about the Jorvik Viking Festival as I can. And it's sort of branched out into other areas now and I've started to collect references to other Viking festivals, other large scale public events, where Vikings play a role, where they appear in the public arena. And that has sort of led me down the path of looking at the history of these sorts of events in Yorkshire. And they go back a very, very long way, a surprisingly long way. And I keep finding them, so every time I think I've come up with a full list of festivals and events over the last 150 years or so that have featured Vikings, I stumble across yet more. The Jorvik Viking Festival is the only one that has happened with any regularity. The others have been occasional events, sometimes happening every 10 years or so, or to mark a particular anniversary or something of that kind. The Jorvik Viking Festival has run since 1985, right up to the present day, obviously this year it's slightly different and we've moved to a completely online model for the very first time in Jorvik Viking Festival's history. But as an event in the city of York, it has run uninterrupted in spite of blizzards, floods, you name it, since 1985, every February. This is the first year that we've been fully online with That Jorvik Viking Thing.

 Miranda  03:48

So it seems that people - you mentioned they've been celebrating Vikings in Yorkshire for quite a long time. How far back do those celebrations go?

 Dr Chris Tuckley  03:56

Well, the earliest reference I've come across is to the Ripon Millenary Festival in 1886. That's the earliest where I've come across people dressed as Vikings, performing, taking part in a procession in a very sort of public way. Whether they're exactly celebrating the Vikings in some of those earliest events is debatable. The Vikings seem to fulfill a particular kind of role in those early pageants and processions but certainly in that Ripon Millenary Festival in 1886, there's a procession that was part of the celebration, a procession of around 500 pageant members on the Friday the 27th and Saturday the 28th of August in that year in the grounds of the Studley Estate, and then on the Saturday, that procession branched out to conclude at the town hall. And within that procession, there was a huge boat drawn by horses, and this boat had the reputation, at least in the local press, of being a genuine Viking boat that had been unearthed locally. Of course it wasn't. But the boat was piloted by a Viking crew. And the souvenir program that was published to mark the occasion contains a nice description of the scene that these Vikings presented which I can read to you now, if you like.

 Miranda  05:23

Yeah, sure, please.

 Dr Chris Tuckley  05:24

So it says that "A fierce looking crew of Vikings glowering on the show from their boat represents the inroads made on England by these marauders during the Danish period. It was no insignificant proof of their earnestness that, in spite of all the quips and cranks of the ever bustling and always irreverent jesters, whose butts they were, the sea monarchs never relaxed their deadly grimness. These fierce sea warriors wore eagle plumed helmets and strange savage colors, and bore murderous looking axes. Their grouping was easy and unaffected, and their fierce visages reproduced faithfully the Danish marauders. The figures were admirably grouped and brilliantly dressed. The bright helmets of the period, beneath which flowed locks of vivid red, caught the sun and dazzled the eyes to look at them." 

 Dr Chris Tuckley  06:15

And there is an illustration actually of this group that was that was made at the time. Interestingly, as well, the reaction of the audience to the passing of the boat is recorded. And it mentions "as it passed, the shouts of applause which followed almost drowned the strains of the band." So the Vikings were a really popular element of this procession. And so the Romans appear. And then I think St Wilfred appears after the Vikings, interestingly, because in conventional histories as we think of them today, and where we positioned in the Vikings, they occur later in the chronology. In many of these early pageants and processions, Vikings can stand for anything in that sort of post-Roman, pre-Norman Conquest period. So here in the Ripon procession, they are remarkably popular, they're the sort of exotic, frightening, murderous, grim looking figures. So whether we're quite celebrating them or not, I don't know. But they're certainly enjoying them. They're certainly popular, and people are enjoying them as they as they pass. 

 Dr Chris Tuckley  07:26

And so 1886 precedes the heyday of the pageant in Britain, and the advent of what was known as pageant fever, or sometimes pageant-itis. And this really is a phenomenon of the Edwardian period, not just in Yorkshire, not just in England, but certainly Yorkshire had a dose of pageant-itis and a number of pageants that happened in the period running up to the First World War, the outbreak of war. And often the same organizers were involved. And actually one of the organizers, one of the key figures, organizing the Ripon pageant in 1886, and then twice after that as well, he then pops up in Thirsk for the first historical play of 1907. And that one has been identified as the starting point, really of pageant fever in Yorkshire. And then subsequent to that we have a pageant in York in 1909, Pickering in 1910, and Scarborough in 1912, as well, and this period of pageants has been studied quite intensively recently. 

 Dr Chris Tuckley  08:39

There's been a research project called the Redress of the Past, which looks at historical pageants in England. And you can find there quite a wonderful website attached to the project where you can research these pageants and it often features photographs and other resources linked to these historical pageants, which were a real craze in this period. And they coincide in the Victorian period and the Edwardian period in England with a rise in nationalist sentiment, in a desire to revisit the past to make sense of English and British identities. So what people were doing was looking back at often the Vikings feature as a key element in establishing a sense of identity. Now often they're a sort of a positive influence, and the spirit of the heroic, adventurous, masculine and muscular Viking is sort of flowing into the English national character. And sometimes they're sort of the grit in the oyster. They are the sort of vicious, dangerous, exotic, foreign influence, this threat under which English or British identity forms and crystallizes, and it's by no means only England or Britain that are engaged in this practice. And we're looking back to the Viking past in making sense of 20th century national identities. The Vikings are really a really handy tool across the board, really, for people who are engaged in that process.

 Miranda  10:16

You mentioned that it's kind of this sense of heritage that people relate to the Vikings and celebrate the Vikings. Do you think that Britons in general understand their link specifically to the Viking period? Do you think that they have a sense of like a connection to the Vikings?

 Dr Chris Tuckley  10:33

Yes, I think with the Vikings, they become a bit of a blank sheet onto which people project their various desires. And I think the notion that we are linked with the Vikings is a really appealing one. Who doesn't want to look back into their family tree and discover that they are linked to Harold Hardrada, or Erik Bloodaxe, or whoever it might be. Now, the rationale and the methodology for doing that, I think is questionable, but it doesn't stop commercial genetics companies selling DNA tests on the strength of proving that you, yes, you can prove that you are related to Harold Hardrada. And as I understand it, with my less than perfect understanding of DNA and genetics and genealogy that in all likelihood, we've all of us got a Viking knocking around somewhere in our in our family tree, as well as all sorts of other people. And not just people from Northern European people from elsewhere as well, all flowing into our  family trees once you go that far back in history. 

 Miranda  11:41

So how do you think the Jorvik Viking Festival fits into all that then? Is the popularity of the festival of results of people celebrating their culture? Or is it something else?

 Dr Chris Tuckley  11:51

I think it's a real mixture of things. And that's always been the case. So even when you look back to the sort of the heyday of the pageants, which were large scale, but by and large, they were community driven. These were all grassroots initiatives. So communities would come together with armies of volunteers to script, organize, stage, costume, produce musical scores for these events. And these weren't exclusively Viking in focus. Although the Vikings are recurrent in a popular moment in these historical pageants, I think often the drivers are commercial, for instance. And again, it's not only the Jorvik Viking Festival. When Jorvik got the festival underway, one of the main reasons for doing that was to extend the tourist season in York, and a lot of local businesses got on board with that as a concept. And they've reported how footfall in York, in their businesses and in Jorvik Viking Centre increases for that week in February. And as the festival becomes more successful, so the impact itself is measured. And when you look as far back as the Ripon Millenary Festival in 1886, thousands of people are flooding into Ripon to watch and to take part. So it's a leisure activity. It's an important feature of the tourist offer. Even stretching as far back as the 19th century, people are arriving by road and rail to watch and to meet up and to take part in a range of leisure activities. So the appeal isn't just that sort of identitarian sort of appeal and although that, you know, that's undoubtedly a part of it. So I think there are a range of motives for taking part in festivals.

 Miranda  13:52

Well, obviously for these festivals and celebration, there's quite a bit of pomp and all of that. Are there any aspects of Viking culture that you find lend themselves really well to these modern day celebrations? 

 Dr Chris Tuckley  14:04

Well, I think what we have now in an event like the Jorvik Viking Festival, and its successor That Jorvik Viking Thing, is living history and reenactment feature in a way that they wouldn't have in those very earliest pageants and processions and festivals of other kinds. So Viking reenactment gets going during the 1970s and reenactments and living history has a different value set in a way from the pageants. Both value what they see as a kind of truthfulness to the historical record and an authenticity but they locate their authenticity in different ways and in different places. So an appeal to a kind of archaeological and a material authenticity is there from the get go. So the organizers of the Ripon Millenary event were aware, for instance, of the Gokstad discovery and the Gokstad ship. And they mentioned that and that inspires some of the decoration that appears on the boat that form part of the procession. 

 Dr Chris Tuckley  15:09

What you get in a reenactment circles from the 1970s onwards, and increasingly up to the present day, is a concern to replicate as closely as possible the material conditions, the dress, particularly the dress, the kit and other material aspects of people who lived in the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th centuries. So, although the people who organize pageants and costumed the Viking characters who took part referred in good faith back to the resources that they had available to them. The Vikings as they appeared then, with their horned or winged helmets, obviously look quite different from the reenactors we have taking part in our festivals today. Also, going hand in hand with that sort of authenticity that the reenactor would value, we have links to, for instance, modern day Scandinavian culture, and other kinds of Viking inspired and Viking influenced cultural products as well. And that's not unique to the 21st century. I just today come across reference to a festival of Norway in Scarborough in 1966, also known as the Scarborough Millenary or Millennium festival. And so it's looking back to its Viking past, then its legendary foundation by a Viking called Thorgil Skarthi, from where we get the name Scarborough. But actually, it involved the Norwegian Ambassador, it involved delegations from Norway coming over as well. And so you do have a concern in various events to establish links with modern populations, modern sort of descendant populations of Vikings and other historical peoples and communities as well.

 Miranda  17:06

You mentioned authenticity and how that's a key point in a lot of these celebrations. How far can reenactments and living history events be regarded as a legitimate tool for education rather than just entertainment?

 Dr Chris Tuckley  17:19

I think they're entirely legitimate, and they are part of sort of battery of resources that we can bring to bear on the education of the public about the Viking past. But as in all things, I think it's important to use them in their proper proportion, and contextualize them as much as possible. The difficulty with any of any of this stuff, and the difficulty at places like Jorvik, is providing enough context within the space of time that you have allotted to you, in the course of a visit to Jorvik, or in the course of attendance at a public event, or in as much as you can present it in an event program or a pageant program. We are always constrained by the attention span of the audience, by the amount of space and the amount of time that we have at our disposal. I think the important thing and what we what we try to do, as far as we're able, at Jorvik is to do no harm, and to always try to equip people to be critical about the versions of the past that we present to them. I think that that's more important at the moment than ever, which is why I guess sometimes we sort of hedge around a little bit our interpretations of the Viking past, which is probably quite frustrating for for some people. But as we know, from working at places like Jorvik and its sister attraction, DIG, everything that we do is an interpretation of the evidence, and multiple interpretations are available. And ours isn't the only authoritative interpretation of the past. I think with reenactment, as soon as you start to boil things down to a sort of absolutist version of the past based only on material evidence, automatically then you've got various pitfalls. And it's a kind of a reductionist version of the past. I think, what is in everyone's interest to do is to blow things as wide open as possible. And to, you know, make it clear that the past isn't really in anyone's ownership; it is something that's constantly changing and constantly being revised. And it's in constant dialogue with the present, and informs dialogues in the present as well, if that all makes sense. These are the sorts of thoughts that keep me awake at night.

 Miranda  19:40

But well, now I suppose that brings us to our ultimate question. Do you think that these events and reenactments and festivals have helped to change the reputation of historical Vikings?

 Dr Chris Tuckley  19:50

I think they belong on a continuum with other popular Viking themed entertainments and education resources. It's so hard to separate them out, they all feed off each other and inform each other and popular Vikings inform academic Vikings as much as academic Vikings inform popular Vikings. So I think about how difficult it is to measure and to quantify the influence of something like, for instance, to take an example, if we think back to well, if we think back to the 19th century, there's something like the Ripon Millenary Festival, or if we hop forward in time into the middle years of the 20th century, something like that 1958 film The Vikings, which was very popular at the time, and has continued to be popular. And it's still regularly shown on TV here in the UK as one of those sort of bank holiday movies that quite regularly pops up on TV and people still watch it and enjoy it. And maybe they've got DVD copies of it, and they watch it in that way as well. And then up to the present day, something like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, or Skyrim. And when I look back at Jorvik Viking Festival, and other reenactment events, and other Viking themed festivals, you can see these sort of an iconographies almost of the Viking world being reproduced. 

 Dr Chris Tuckley  21:20

So whether it's in the early days with the with the horned helmets, or helmets with other kinds of appendages, that are influenced by operatic productions of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and the kinds of costumes that were worn in those in those productions, or something like a reenactment battle by the Norse film and pageant society, and again, with people in fairly exotic looking clothing, and again, may be influenced by something like that movie, The Vikings or reenactment today, where people will have seen that History Channel show the Vikings and they will have been influenced by that as well. It's immensely popular, and it will have that sort of cut through from interested general audiences, to people with a real passion and enthusiasm for living history. And for, you know, living a kind of a Viking identity, which then feeds into how they perform and what they present at a festival event. It's so difficult to quantify and to qualify exactly where the influence of a reenactment event or festival begins and ends when it is part of that of that continuum of popular entertainment and imagery associated with the Viking period. So I'm afraid that's probably not a very satisfactory answer. But I would say that it has influenced it. It has influenced ideas about the Viking world and Viking reputations, in some way. But probably we can't consider public events to have influenced popular ideas about the Vikings in isolation from those other influences.

 Miranda  23:00

Fair enough. I love that you can just draw a line basically from this tiny little festival in Ripon all the way to our virtual Thing now online in 2021, that's so much fun.

 Dr Chris Tuckley  23:11

Yeah, I think I think we really can. I think it's interesting to look back and to read that account, as fleeting as it is, of people being excited by the appearance of those Vikings, those grim face Vikings as they came past on that boat pulled by the horses, and you can draw a line between them and our audiences today, and their excitement and their enthusiasm about looking back to the Viking past.

 Miranda  23:35

That's amazing. Thank you so much, Chris.

 Dr Chris Tuckley  23:37

My pleasure. No problem.

 Miranda  23:39

You can see some of the images Chris referred to in our show notes, just visit JorvikThing.com. Also, if you haven't already, you can still book your ticket for a tour of the famous ride at the Jorvik Viking Centre hosted by Chris. The event will be live streamed on Thursday the 17th of February. You can also see Chris's work at any of our attractions: Barley Hall, DIG, and of course, Jorvik Viking Centre. 

 Miranda  24:03

That Jorvik Viking Thing podcast is an Audible Associate. If you sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial using the code VikingThing-21, you'll get a free audiobook download, and you'll also be supporting your favourite Viking podcast. Even better, the audio book is yours to keep forever, no strings attached. This time we recommend "Yorkshire: A Lyrical History of England's Greatest County" by Richard Morris. Listen to the history of Yorkshire, meet the people who came and went and left their mark here. Encounter real and fabled heroes and discover why, from the Iron Age to the Cold War, Yorkshire has been such a key place in times of tension and struggle. All spoken with the usual Yorkshire charm you'd expect from God's Own County. 

 Miranda  24:49

Thank you for listening to That Jorvik Viking Thing podcast. You can find us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and anywhere you get your podcasts. 

 Miranda  24:58

If you'd like to support That Jorvik Viking Thing, visit JorvikThing.com to make a donation, as well as to find a whole horde of Viking related content. Don't forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode of That Jorvik Viking Thing podcast.

 Miranda  26:06

That Jorvik Viking Thing Podcast is a production of the Jorvik Group and York Archaeological Trust. Researched by Miranda Schmeiderer and Ashley Fisher with research support from Bede Rogerson and Philip Roebuck. Produced by Ashley Fisher. Sound designed and edited by Miranda Schmeiderer.