Kari Tauring, February 23, 2025
Going down the root in Völva Stav means exploring an historical moment from within your known lineage and connecting it forward into the moment in which you find yourself now. Figuring out what your ancestors did, and why, helps you understand how you got where you are and what you owe to your existence. It helps you trace both talents and traumas that are carried through the body in a family of origin.
I have gone down the root to explore the word viking and it's meanings in the historical context of my lineage. There are varying definitions of the word depending upon who is using it, and in what time period they live/lived. Exploring my relationship to the word viking and its varied definitions is part of my öorlog work.
Viking - 1970's Minnesota/Wisconsin, USAI grew up in a Norwegian American/ Lutheran extended family in 1970's Minnesota and Wisconsin. The definition of viking I learned was: a Heathen male who, unbound by common laws of community, commit murder and rape and enslaved others. We understood they drank to excess and became violent. A viking woman was a mythical sex pot with a metal bra.
Viking was not a word you would call someone and nothing you would aspire to be. Some men in rural Scandinavian communities dressed as horned vikings for Norwegian Constitution Day parades on the 17th of May. Some used this "viking identity" as an excuse to get drunk and violent.
To balance this image we had a cartoon viking named Haggar the Horrible, launched in 1973. His wife wore the keys (ran the home) while he was out raiding. A bumbling fool, Haggar was, to me, the Sergeant Schultz of the Nazis in the show Hogans Heroes (1965 - 1971). We watched the re-runs throughout my childhood. Sergeant Shultz was the lovable German among the very wicked who made us think of the very wicked more as stupid and pitiable. Through Haggar I learned that vikings were dirty, only bathing once a year. And they rarely told the truth. Both historically inaccurate portrayals. Though they pillaged other lands, they were really just regular family men with nagging wives. Again, nothing to aspire to.
And there's the Minnesota Vikings football team. Like Pirates or Buccaneers it seems appropriate for such a sport. My only connection to the football team was getting "Benchwarmer Bob" Lurtsema's autograph at the fair in Polk County, Wisconsin. Funny that was since the Vikings were Green Bay Packers rivals. He joined the team a year before Haggar was launched. I had no aspirations or connections beyond that.
In Academia, viking refers to Scandinavian ship going privateers in a specific Gregorian time frame. Those of the so called Viking Era. The academic era begins when vikings violently pillage the church of St. Cuthbert on the holy island of Lindisfarne in 793. It ends in 1066 with the Norman Conquest of Anglo-Saxon England.
The word viking along with the runes and poetic myths were all used in the 1800's in Nationalistic propaganda. In Germany, viking came to mean a superior culture with a mythic origin story going back to the Norse gods. This was powerful enough to allow them to kill off anyone that did not fit into their idea of the super-race. I definitely knew about that one growing up. Nazis were despised in Norway and my grandfather, I am told, held a grudge against Sweden for letting the Nazis walk into Norway. My grandmother was staunchly anti-fascist. She didn't even tolerate ethnic jokes as far as I can remember.
I was invited to perform from the Eddas at the Midwest Viking Festival at the Hjemkomst Museum in 2010. Performing there each year caused me to delve more deeply into the study of the word viking. I came back each year to perform and deepen my learning. It was there that a re-enactment colleague referred to Leif Erikkson as a viking. I literally clutched my amber and said, "No. He was a Christian not a viking." My colleague looked at me quizzically. Apparently his family story didn't match mine. In my Norwegian-American story, Leif paid his Heathen father's shild (man-debt for murder) by becoming a Christian vassal of the King of Norway. So he could not be a viking.
Under the Academic definition of "Viking Age" I have to concede that Leif Erikkson sailed to North America during these dates and was by that definition a viking. This meant there could be Christian vikings. Christians who acted in ways outside the community norms and stole people and land. Of course I knew that even Nazi's claimed to be Christians. But somehow this shook me a little.
We also grew up understanding that Leif Erikkson was a Norwegian. The humorous song by Stan Boreson, "Just a Little Lefse" which I learned from Mike and Elsie's Norwegian Songbook in 1985, maintained that Leif fixed his leaky ship with lefse so he could beat Columbus to the New World. A Facebook friend from Iceland asked why "we Norwegian-Americans" claim Leif as Norwegian since he was a Greenlander with his father Erik the Red who was an Icelander before that."
I replied that "Erik the Red was first from Norway. He got kicked out for not paying for murders he committed. Then you guys kicked him out for the same reason. But Leif mended his father's reputation by becoming Norwegian again." This makes Leif Erikkson a hero in the Norwegian-American origin story. This is why we have Leif Erikkson Days each October in small rural communities across the Midwest. Of course, the Saga stories tell it a little differently than the lore handed down in Norwegian-America.
Today the word viking has added layers of bizarre meaning and historical inaccuracy through television and movies, the Q-shaman, and plenty of US based hate groups hanging their hate on the word viking.
I am tired of the word viking and all the baggage it carries. I am done with using this one word/job description representing an entire era of other things going on too. When I share my bone and tree flutes I say Iron Age and people understand me. Nature instruments of horns and bones and trees flow from the paleolithic through the Bronze Age and into the so called Viking Era and the Middle Ages. Nature instruments are timeless and borderless.
Iron Age Gathering sounds safer than Viking Festival to me and to many others. Late Scandinavian Iron Age or "The Era of Younger Futhark Runes" would bring it into alignment with the Gregorian dates. Why not call it the Era of Ships? Or better still the Era of Sail Cloth! It's the woolen sail that brought Leif Erikkson's ships to North America.
It takes 2000 fleece to make a sail for one of these long ships. One longship sail is made from three strips, 750 sheep fleece each, to be cleaned, carded, spun, woven on a warp weighted loom. What a huge industry to support this job of going viking. How many people would it take to clean all that fleece? How many to card it? How many to work the drop spindles for warp and weft? And how many days? What size is the loom? How will we feed and house all the workers?
This industrious age needs hemp and nettle for the cordage, for the ropes we will need to hoist our sail. And the mast! Who will make the mast? This is the real Industry of the Viking Age. The entire community made it happen. And the entire community benefited - if all went well.
Going down the root - Bronze Age
It has always been about the sheep and goats for me. Our mother's mother's people are still goat people in Undredal, Sognefjord Norway. Our mother's father's people were sheep people from Orkdal Sør Trondelag, Norway and in Clam Falls township, Wisconsin, United States where grands and great-grands are buried.
In 2003 CE I began exploring the staff carrying women by starting in the Bronze Age 2003 BCE. The Scandinavian Bronze Age holds the tradition in sound, movement, and ritual iconography. Petroglyphs and figurines, large brass horns, and grave finds of women whose brass knobs outlived the wood of the staffs they capped. And this is when the sheep and goats began coming North with their new sounds of bleating and bells, new fibers to spin, new cheeses to eat. They changed the landscape with new grazing patterns. They introduced mining for Copper and Tin. So you see, my people were not Norwegian, they were extraction colonists of the Bronze Age.
In 2005 the artist Terri Allan read my "string skirt" research, built an inkle loom, made two warp string skirts of cotton in black and red, then burned the loom. These and a few other items she gifted to me and called "Huldre Medicine." I wore them when singing and staving songs about the huldre, Norwegian cow-tailed fairy women from 2004 - 2009.
When I became aware of the "Viking Re-enactment" community in 2009 I had no desire to switch from the Elder to the Younger Futhark Runes or give up the string skirts. But the Iron Age staff carrying women's graves and stories lured me in and I began making a "viking kit" with the help of historical costume elders in my Minneapolis community. I went to Norway in 2014 to attend a Viking Festival near Undredal. I was "disenchanted" with them for down-playing slavery in their re-enactments. I was impressed by the deep desire to keep Nationalism out of the festival. More festivals sprang up and I added three more "Viking festivals" to my tour schedule each year.
In 2015, Sarah Maas helped me make a replica of the Huldremose Bog Coat from Bronze Age Denmark.I began wearing it again in 2024 to honor her passing. I am being tugged back down the Bronze Age root. A horn playing friend on the West Coast US began asking me about my Bronze Age research. The dance group Frikar in Norway began exploring the movement of the petroglyphs from the Bronze Age in their new show about Stav! I'm going back into the Bronze Age and maybe further. I want to explore the Kven who came to Norway with their cows in 5000 BCE.
While our great-grands were goat and sheep people, our grandparents milked cows in Wisconsin. And that cow horn connects us to Norse Creation mythology and to the Lady of Laussel in 20,000 BCE before Norway was uncovered from the Ice! In 2025 you will hear the timeless notes of nature instruments and the cosmology poems that inform the meaning of these sacred notes in Nature. From a swan's radius bone to a tube of pvc...these three notes are older than words. You will see me spinning wool as folks would have done for millenia. You will see me dancing runes and building community through movement and song.
Connecting it to the now...it takes a village to build a ship. It takes the political will of a village to keep those ships from ever again raiding and enslaving others.
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