June 2015 - Medieval Festival at Upper Canada Village

Each year Upper Canada Village in Morrisburg, Ontario takes a step to the side from its Canadian Settlement timeline to host a Medieval festival. We were asked to provide a viking element for this three day festival including their education day for the students on Monday. DARC was asked to provide our usual style of floating between first and third person interpretation in stations that demonstrated textiles, blacksmithing, bead making, and domestic activities.

"That same night there came such a dreadful thunderstorm that they could not stir." [Heimskringla, XXXIV]

A succession of powerful thunderstorms on the Friday before the Medieval Festival slowed setup and changed some of our plans for presentation, but the weather broke and we had a sunny weekend. Unfortunately, the wet weather returned on the Monday which limited the attention span of many of the hundreds of school kids that came through, but there were still many who became engrossed with our presentations and had to be literally dragged away.

Þorgeir gamely worked his pole lathe despite a broken foot.
Jorunn and Kaðlín worked on weaving
Ragnar and Hróbjartr (with help from young apprentices) ran the bead smelter
Ketill, joined by Aelfwyn on Monday, had the forge going
Rig did wood carving and played music
Aesa entertained the children (both ours and others) with games
and Bera kept us all fed

Photos

Emundr	Ragnarr and the bead furnace	Bera cooking	Þorgeir complains
Blacksmithing area	Overview	Cooking area	Making a bead
Wash up time	Woodworking	Jorunn weaves	Emundr milks