Hirdmenn

  Reimagining Prehistoric Dance and Experience To do the prehistoric “Spear dance” dance works, I read studies about the actual iconography and about the symbolism of the viking age. I am also a huge lover of Finnish and Nordic mythology and that has hugely influenced my performance. About the weapon dancer: https://bornholmarch.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/A_storm_of_swords_and_spears_The_weapon.pdf About the symbolism by the incr edible Tomáš Vlasatý : https://sagy.vikingove.cz/en/friendship-with-the-god On this blog we have been mostly talking about recreating prehistoric fighting, but the interest of the group is much larger. In my (Arttu) work I have tried the same methods to recreating prehistoric fighting by creating an interpretation of prehistoric dance.  I have done 4 different performances on this subject. The first one was a solo dance where I improvised a set of material that imitated dancing in the stone age rock art. It was considered quite a success. I reprised the wor

The inspiration for wooden bosses came originally from an article describing the Tira bog find. The first shield we built was mostly inspired by this find. (Read about building the first shield here: https://hirdmenn.blogspot.com/2020/06/making-of-our-first-viking-shield.html ) In the making of our first shield we got a birch burl that I (Arttu) shaped first with power tools close to the finished shape and to give it an authentic finish I did the final shaping with an axe and chisels. The work was frustrating and I hated every moment. The wood was so hard that it did not want to cut in any direction, and was really unrewarding to work with. After the shape was ready it was rewarding to test it. In the first test we compared the wooden umbo to a plank a little thicker than it. The result was that the plank broke in two pieces, whereas the umbo got only a small arrow mark. Its first scar if you will. (See the first test here: https://youtu.be/jbnn0td5k70 ) Later among many of our