VIKINGS IN BISLISCH!

On the 13th of September the local museum of the German Village Bislisch had the opening of their new Exhibition of Vikings artefacts and modern replicas. For the opening the Düsseldorf Vikings came to town to give demonstrations of their ancient crafts. They were a real nice bunch!


One of the pieces in the exhibition, beautiful!!!

We hadn't seen the name label next to these arrow heads and were trying to figure out why they had been made like that. Was it to make them go faster? Was it so they were harder to pull out of enemies chest? And then we saw 'Brandpfeilspitze mit Feuerkorb' and realized, 'ah they're fire arrows'. BODACIOUS!!!

Some very nice jewellery. I esspecially like the torque style one at the back.

One of the Düsseldorf Vikings. He's the one who told us about the Viking gathering at Tiel, which we just went to yesterday. This guy had pottery, helmets, jewellery, glass beads, drinking horns, leather bands and...


...axe heads!!!


Here's a band weaver. We just saw him again at Tiel and he recognized us.


Here's a close-up to show what the weaving disks looked like. He twisted then one by one in a certain way to get the pattern in the band. These ones are metal. He said originally they would have been wood, bone or horn. He said though that wood wore out the threads, bone made his group of discs too wide and horn was too expensive.


This lady was on the same tent as the weaver above. She's doing a very cool knitting crocheting thing that I really want to learn. The wools are all naturally coloured. The green was from birch bark and the orange from onion, cool!!!


Wow, check out this dude's bellows. He busy smelting bronze at the moment.


Here he is pouring it out into the bar shape mould.


And he is beating it a bit. We watched him for quite a while. The black smith gave Phoenix a bit of bronze at the end, naturally he was chuffed.


A carver, making a similar piece that was on display in the museum. He got this head done really quickly. In the morning when we arrived you couldn't really see what it was supposed to be, then we walked back this had appeared, amazing!!!


These were some of the real Viking artefacts in the display found locally.


I bought this bookmark from the weaver.


And I bought this (with my initials) from a Rhune carver, I don't have a photo of him and his stall sadly. I had a go at using an old drilling tool, it was really cool and amazingly easy. There was another man who happened to be at the stool who told us loads of cool stuff about Rhunes and the link between old and new Scandinavian languages.

After going to this opening I now want to learn all the crafts too, aaaah, so much to do so little time!!!