Monday, October 5, 2009
In a scene reminiscent of the Viking age, two bearded men in fur robes and leather armor instructed children in swordplay. They were two of many cultural ambassadors on the Douglas County Fairgrounds at 19th and Harper streets for the eighth-annual Nordic Heritage festival on Saturday.
With more than a dozen booths, the festival celebrated the cultures of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark.
According to Marilyn Meyers, Lawrence resident and coordinator of the festival, it started when she and some friends were getting together to share recipes.
“A couple of us got together and we were going to do some baking,” Meyers said. “We talked to the Kansas City Scandinavian Dancers. They suggested having a dance party, and out of that developed this festival.”
Activities such as spinning wool was one of the demonstrations at Saturday's festival. Other Nordic activities were swordplay demonstrations and traditional food.
Aside from native music and dance, such cultural hallmarks as thread spinning and the construction of miniature decorative sleighs were featured at these booths.
There were free samples of Scandinavian confections, like lefse, a thin crepe-like product, and krumkake, a dessert that resembles an ice cream cone minus the ice cream.
Margot Howard, Lawrence junior, came to the festival to share her Nordic heritage with her son.
“There’s not a lot of chances to experience Nordic Heritage in the United States,” Howard said.
Some students came for reasons other than heritage. Thomas Overly, Louisburg graduate student, spent a year in Denmark and said he came to appreciate the ways of life there.
“They think of others,” Overly said. “They’re very communally oriented. It’s just a really laid back culture, at least in Denmark.”
Steven Holdeman and Caleb May, the festival’s costumed Viking experts, came to this festival three years ago to see the Viking re-enactors. When the re-enactors didn’t show up, Holdmen and May, sporting beards and locks from their work at the Renaissance Festival, were mistaken for them. They gave a presentation that year, and are now the Nordic Heritage Festival’s resident Viking combat experts.
Afterward they sat clad in furs in their booths, brandishing blades and sharing violent epic poems. They left the festival early, though — the foam swords they make at the Renaissance Festival weren’t going to sell themselves.
Vern Knutsen of the Sons of Norway, a Norwegian heritage group founded in Minnesota in the 1800s, explained the prevalence of Nordic cultures in the Midwest.
“They all came over in the late 1800s,” Knutsen said. “The farms got broken down so small that they sent their oldest sons over here to America to make his own way.”
The festival wrapped up with an accordion-fueled potluck dinner before switching to the fiddle for fiddle jam closing dance.
— Edited by Betsy Cutcliff
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