Month: May 2019

By Steve White, President of Mystic Seaport Museum

At the Annual Meeting of the Members on May 18, we witnessed a significant leadership change for our Board of Trustees. J. Barclay Collins, II fulfilled his six-year term as Chairman of the Museum’s Board of Trustees and Michael S. Hudner was elected to be the next chairman.

Looking back on Barclay’s tenure as chairman, it is remarkable to see what we achieved during those years: We completed the restoration of the Charles W. Morgan and took the ship back to sea for her 38th Voyage—an unprecedented event in the maritime heritage community. The McGraw Gallery Quadrangle and its anchor, the Thompson Exhibition Building, re-envisioned the north end of our grounds with a new focus on indoor exhibitions, and we are leveraging that capability with the Era of Exhibitions and the display of ground-breaking shows such as The Vikings Begin; Science, Myth, and Mystery: The Vinland Map Saga; and Death in the Ice: The Mystery of the Franklin Expedition. That is quite a list. It is a testament to Barclay’s leadership, and we are grateful that he will continue to serve on the Board.

The Museum is also fortunate to have Mike Hudner ready to take over the gavel. Mike has been a trustee since 2004. As the leader of the team that oversaw the Gallery Quadrangle project, one needs only to look at the striking façade of the Thompson Building to know we are in good hands with Mike at the helm. Mike has also served the Museum well as chair of the Exhibitions Committee for many years. He is a maritime businessman and a lifelong sailor who cares passionately about the sea and our mission.

I ask the Mystic Seaport Museum Community to join me in thanking both men for all they have done — and will continue to do — for the institution. Both are striking examples of the Museum’s outstanding Board of Trustees who serve so generously.

 

Lynn Noel returns to Mystic Seaport Museum’s Viking Days in 2019, performing as both her alter ego, “Gudrid the Wanderer: First Viking Woman in the New World,” and also as herself, lecturing on Viking songs and their significance. She will appear both days of the festival, June 1 and 2.

In 2018, Lynn answered five questions for us in advance of her debut at our first Viking Days. We have updated this post for her return this weekend.

1.Tell us a little about your background – where you grew up and when your interest in Viking culture and history first started.

I am a “Daughter of Norumbega,” from Newton, MA. I grew up a mile from Norumbega Tower, built in 1889 by Eben Horsford, who believed that the Algonquin word “Norumbega” was a variant of “Norvega” or Norway, and that Leif Eiriksson had reached the Charles River in Boston. I used to ride my bike to Norumbega Park and climb the tower with a book of Norse myths and an apple, and dream of discovering new worlds.

I went to Dartmouth College, where my anthropology professor Elmer Harp and his wife Elaine introduced me to Newfoundland through their work excavating Port aux Choix Historic Site on the west coast. In 1986, I went to Newfoundland myself as a graduate student to work as an environmental educator in Gros Morne National Park, and wound up writing my master’s thesis on the Newfoundland  fishery and the national parks movement. L’Anse aux Meadows had been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, and I was at Gros Morne for its UNESO designation in 1987. When the Viking Trail tourism association connected the three parks on the west coast, a lot of my own life came together in that road from Gros Morne to Port aux Choix to to L’Anse aux Meadows as well.

2. How did you decide to create the character Gudrid the Wanderer?

In the 1990s, I was invited to return to Dartmouth as a Research Fellow of the Institute of Arctic Studies to write a book on Canada’s Heritage Rivers. My sponsor, the Atlantic Center for the Environment, arranged for me to lecture on a cruise to Newfoundland and Labrador, and Gudrid’s first appearance was the night before we arrived at L’Anse aux Meadows by sea. I wanted the passengers to understand the significance of two very particular artifacts that linked the site to Vikings. When archaeologist Anne Ingstad found the ring-headed pin at L’Anse aux Meadows, it meant that a European metal-working people had been there. When she found the spindle whorl, it meant that a woman had been there. The sagas tell us the names of two women in Vinland: Freydis and Gudrid. I wanted to put those artifacts in context. So I set the Vinland sagas to Scandinavian dance tunes, to tell the story of the woman who dropped them a thousand years ago.

When Dartmouth sponsored the International Arctic Archaeology Conference, I was invited to present Gudrid the Wanderer to the Greenland archaeology team that had just excavated the church where Gudrid was married. That thrilling exchange led to an invitation from the Canadian Museum of History to participate in the Smithsonian VIKINGS IN THE NEW WORLD exhibit by telling saga in their replica longhouse for a week, surrounded by original artifacts.

I’ve completely revised and reworked the GUDRID THE WANDERER program with new research and more songs, built a new website with interactive saga maps and lots of source materials on Viking music, and added a map talk on VISIT THE VIKINGS with the latest in Norse archaeological digs, heritage sites and museums, and Viking reenactment festivals from California to Russia.

3. Gudrid has traveled the world – tell us about some of your favorite spots that you have brought her to.

I’ll never forget lying down in a Viking era stone ship burial on the island of Gotland, or plucking a thorn to pin my cloak from the hawthorn bushes on the island of Birka in Sweden. The first sight of the timeless craftsmanship of the Oseberg ship in Oslo is breathtaking for anyone. I’ve been out in the North Atlantic off Greenland in a hurricane, and I did my best to imagine tossing on 30-foot seas in an open longship. Whoo!

The site of Gudrid’s home farm on Snaefellsness, in western Iceland, is off the beaten path and definitely worth the trip. But my heart belongs to L’Anse aux Meadows, and the broad flat bay you can see from the doorway of the turf-roofed house. The archaeological finds tie the place to the sagas, and a thousand years melts away into the moment where you stand there in Vinland.

4. What is your mission with Gudrid? What do you hope to achieve?

Gudrid is part of a program series on women’s history and geography that celebrates voyageurs, vikings, pirates, explorers, and other traditional women’s roles. A WOMAN’S WAY: The First Millennium of Adventurous Women asks the question: How did she do it? How can I do it? I hope that Gudrid’s story will inspire listeners to become explorers themselves, to experience far travels and past cultures directly in person, as well as through the amazing digital resources we have today for history, geography, and archaeology. To look at a grubby lump of rock or a corroded bit of metal from a thousand years ago, and to see a mother and her child boarding a ship to leave a beloved place: that’s the magic of archaeology and of storytelling. I hope visitors may learn to become their own storytellers and students of the past, and to see the Vikings less as violent raiders, and more as farmers and traders seeking new lands to settle.

5. What has been most surprising to you throughout the evolution of this character? What have you learned?

As a chantey singer, an outdoorswoman, and one of the earliest classes of women at Dartmouth, I’m well versed in being One Of the Boys. People sort of expected me to take on the character of Gudrid’s sister-in-law Freydis, who is closer to the Viking stereotype. Freydis is the fierce warrior who demands the best share of her brother Leif Eiriksson’s houses and kills five women with an axe to get her way. Freydis is the one who bares her breast and slaps it with a sword, and does all the macho stuff that even Disney warrior-princesses do these days. So as a tough cookie myself, I have learned from Gudrid to respect both women’s traditional work, and her spiritual practice.

Gudrid is a peaceful explorer, a trader, a wife and mother, and a Christian—the complete opposite of Freydis, or of Lagertha the shield-maiden from the History Channel Vikings. I have come to see her as a very strong and powerful woman in a more introverted mold, leading through moral courage, inner strength, and quiet grace. She’s extremely important in the sagas as a singer, and the search for what she sang has led me down some fascinating research paths on pagan sei∂r, a female practice of magical prophecy that connects to the Norse texts of the Poetic Edda. Most maritime singers collect work songs about boats, so I didn’t expect to find myself digging in to the history of 10th century Christianity, studying trance-inducing chants, practicing my hand spinning, or learning lullabies. I’ve learned how to find a deeper center for interpreting “women and the sea,” and to find “women’s work” woven into the fabric of seafaring, from spinning and weaving sailcloth to foretelling the fate of a voyage.

ABOUT GUDRID THE WANDERER

All events in this program are drawn from the Vinland Sagas, two independently written Icelandic manuscripts now in the Arní Magnússon Institute in Reykjavik. The Greenlanders’ Saga is probably earlier and was used in Erik the Red’s Saga, which features Gudrid more prominently.Current saga scholars place Gudrid’s journey to Vínland ca. 1009-1012 AD.

Gudrid the Wanderer was originally developed in 1991 for a cruise to L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. This UNESCO World Heritage site is still today the only verified Norse archaeological site in North America. Gudrid the Wanderer has been featured in the Smithsonian VIKINGS IN THE NEW WORLD exhibit at the Canadian Museum of History, the Dartmouth International Arctic Archaeology Conference, in Viking Heritage Magazine, on cruises from Iceland to Boston, at Scandinavian-American festivals and clubs, and at Gudrid’s homestead of Arnarstapi in Snaefellsness, Iceland.

• Learn more at www.lynnoel.com/gudridthewanderer
• Follow Gudrid at facebook.com/gudridthewanderer
• Contact Lynn Noel at lynnoel@me.com

At the 2018 Viking Days held at the Museum, William R. Short was scheduled for a one-hour lecture on Saturday morning, and again on Sunday morning. Seating capacity in the lecture room was about 65. It filled up 20 minutes before the lecture was scheduled to start and we had to turn away dozens of disappointed people.

Well, don’t say you can’t teach an old Museum a new trick. For this year’s Viking Days (June 1-2), we have Dr. Short scheduled for TWO lectures on Saturday and TWO lectures on Sunday and we have moved the talks to the Greenmanville Church, which has a much larger capacity.

Short is an author, filmmaker, lecturer, and independent scholar specializing in Viking-age topics, notably medieval Icelandic literature, Viking-age material culture, Viking-age weapons, and Viking-age combat techniques. He is the manager of Hurstwic, LLC, an organization that researches, practices, teaches, and demonstrates the fighting moves of Viking-age warriors at their training and research facility in Millbury, MA. He took a few minutes to answer five questions for us.

1. Where did your interest in Viking history and culture first begin?

Short: It started when I discovered the Sagas of Icelanders, the stories of Viking-age Iceland, and the interest was firmly cemented when I took a summer course in the sagas at the University of Iceland.

2. How do explain the current modern-day fascination with Viking and Norse culture?

Short: I cannot. Popular entertainment paints a fantasy portrait of these people, but the actualities are far more adventuresome, bold, and exciting.

3. Your lecture topics this year are: “The Viking Belief in the Afterlife”; “The Making of Iron in the Viking Age”, and “Trolls and Zombies: The Paranormal Creatures that Inhabit the World of the Vikings.” Can you give me a bumper-sticker sized description of each talk?

Short: “Viking-Age Iron: Making and Trading, Using and Sacrificing”: Iron was difficult to make in the Viking age, and thus precious, yet it was essential for life. The evidence of Viking-age iron-making in Newfoundland is a sure sign that Vikings crossed the Atlantic to visit and to repair their ships there. How did Viking-age people make and use iron, and what special significance did this magical material have to these people?

“Ghosts, Zombies, and Trolls in the Viking Age”: The sagas tell tales of everyday people in the Viking age, but the saga
landscape is also populated by ghosts, zombies, trolls, and sorcerers. What did it mean to be a troll? These beliefs in zombies and magic shed new light on aspects of the ancient northern religion and Viking society, and they still reverberate today in modern-day Iceland.

“Viking-Age Beliefs in the Afterlife”: If you lived in the Viking age, and a loved one died, what did you expect would happen to him or her? To the body? And to the essence of the person, the part of them that lives on after death? This presentation discusses what is known about these Viking-age beliefs.

4. Whats the biggest misconception people have these days about Viking culture?

Short: Sorry, it’s hard to answer. Most people have no idea of the mindset of the Viking people: the unwritten rules carried in their hearts that guided their behavior. And so they have an expectation of how these people behaved
that probably differs from what really happened.

5. Whats your favorite aspect of Viking culture?

Short: They were fabulous story-tellers and poets, and their stories and poems continue to fascinate and entertain today.

On Saturday, June 1 and Sunday, June 2, the grounds of Mystic Seaport Museum will be transformed in a celebration of all things Viking for the second year in a row.

We are thrilled to welcome back a highlight of the 2018 Viking Days – Draugar Vinlands, a historical reenactment and living history group based out of Exeter, N.H., that is dedicated to the accurate portrayal of combat and culture during viking-age Scandinavia. We are re-posting our 2018 interview in advance of the 2019 Viking Days.

Bjorn Mroz, a member of the organization, took a few minutes to answer five questions.

1.       Tell us about Draugar Vinlands – how did the group form, and what is its main purpose?

Draugar Vinlands (translating roughly to the Ghosts of Vinland) first formed in 2012. Of Jarl, the founder of the group, had been reenacting for well over a decade, and he wanted to start his own group that explored a time period that he held a lot of interest in. he also had a personal connection, his family came from Lithuania and Sweden and he grew up hearing many old Scandinavian and Slavic tales and folk songs.

The main goal of the group started as a militaristic endeavor, working to understand the method of combat used during the Viking Age, a time before any of the treatises or written doctrines from the medieval era cover. As we gained more experience and welcomed more people into the group, our interests evolved and we had the ability to view the Viking Age as a whole, and uncover what life was like for the Norse men and women away from the raiding that was well known; the life that existed behind the sword.

 

2.       Now tell us about yourself – how did you get involved? What’s your connection to Viking culture?

I got involved with Draugar Vinlands in 2013. I was going to college in Lowell, and was studying Viking history as I had a long-standing interest in the age well beforehand. I met two of the members at a concert by chance who were dressed in kit, and I immediately began talking to them, and the following weekend after I had made contact with the Jarl and had thrown myself into the fire, so to speak. I’ve been going regularly ever since.

 

3.       Why are Vikings so popular right now?

The dark age has long been an area of fascination, there’s always some form of popularity from that age since it was such a formative age in history, so many nations existed and a wide variety of cultures were exchanged. Before the last few years, the Vikings hadn’t been showcased as a part of this interest, and they’ve only really come under the mainstream spotlight relatively recently. Before this time, general knowledge of the Vikings only dictated them as raiding berserkers at best and dirty, godless barbarians at worst. I think a lot of people are excited and fascinated to know that there is far more to them than what they’ve been told, to see the culture and lifestyle explained, and to learn that in many ways the Vikings were more civilized than most of their contemporary societies at the time.

 

4.       What are the biggest misconceptions people have about Vikings and Viking culture?

The one I hear the most is ‘Did Vikings have horns on their helmets?‘ The answer is simply no. As I mentioned, common knowledge says Vikings were raiding barbarians. But most commonly they were craftsmen, tradesmen, and merchants. Raiding was only common for younger sons who received no inheritance and therefore had to raid to make a living and be able to gain their own wealth.

They also had an amazingly advanced culture that lays huge importance on one’s given word and sworn oaths. To break these oaths would damn the individual to Hel, and they had a very progressive society that allowed for a lot of social freedom. They granted women the rights to own land and property as well as divorce their husbands, something that wouldn’t be seen in neighboring countries for hundreds of years. Their native religion was also immensely rich and complex, full of cautionary tales as well as stories that can bring out tears of laughter or sorrow.

 

5.       What’s the most fun about being part of Draugar Vinlands?

While I enjoy so many things about Draugar Vinlands, the best thing about it is the camaraderie among all of us. We can spar, craft, cook, and anything else that we can think of but when you boil it down we’re always together doing it all, sharing common interests and indulging not only ourselves but one another, making lifelong friendships and stories to share. Draugar Vinlands is a family, brought together by our shared passion for history but united by the friendships that we forge together.

The Mystic Seaport Museum Sailing Center has launched an initiative to gather together examples of classic sailing dinghies to augment its Dyer Dhows and FJ15s.

“These boats will be part of a working fleet,” said Ben Ellcome, supervisor of sailing programs at the Museum. “The boats will be used as a hands-on experience in our sailing classes to develop an understanding of the impact of design on sailing.”

The first boat to be added to the fleet was Blue Jay #5677, which was donated in the fall of 2018 by Peter and Diane Rothman of Old Saybrook  in honor of Peter’s late father, Edward A. Rothman. Ed volunteered at Mystic Seaport Museum in the John Gardner Small Boat Shop for more than a decade, until his death in February 2017. The boat has been named Ed in his memory.

Since it was first designed in 1947, the Blue Jay continues to be one of the leading one-design, sloop-rigged sailboats in existence today.  It was created by Drake H. Sparkman, head of the New York designing firm of Sparkman and Stephens, Inc., after he chaired a yacht club junior sailing program. Designed as a “ baby Lightning” it became an all-around junior training boat and now has numbers over 7,200. Originally constructed of wood, the International Blue Jay Class Association  voted in the early 1960s to allow fiberglass, however, wooden boats are still being made today.

The Rothmans’ boat was built by McNair Marine Inc. in 1971 for Robert Gehlmeyer of Roslyn Heights, NY. Ownership may have changed hands between 1971 and 1998 but the next known owner is Charles Wenderoth of West Mystic, CT.  More recently, Brian Carey of Waterford, CT, had ownership, and in the early 2000s, Carey hired Guck Inc. of Bristol, RI to structurally restore the boat. The Rothmans bought the boat from Carey in 2008, and customized the boat and trailer to its current state both cosmetically and in regards to equipment/design.

“For my 13^th birthday, my dad got me a Blue Jay,” said Diane Rothman. “We love them. Some kids just don’t want to sail by themselves. For kids who aren’t really gung ho, sailing is more of a social thing. So if you stick them in a boat by themselves, it’s not fun. They might be scared. It’s a lot more fun in a Blue Jay – you can put three kids in a Blue Jay and they will have a ball. They’ll go out there and laugh and sing, but they are still learning. So the Blue Jays have a place, and I still believe that.”

If you have a classic sailing dinghy you would consider donating to the Museum, please contact Chris Gasiorek, Vice President for Watercraft Preservation and Programs for further information: chris.gasiorek@mysticseaport.org or 860.572.5344.