In search of the Vikings

By Charles Emmerson

In an unheated school hall, on a damp winter’s evening, a group of men are strapping on riot gear, unsheathing blunt steel swords, taking out long-handled Dane axes, and going at each other hammer and tongs.

This is the London chapter of the Brotherhood of Jomsborg — “the world’s leading Viking organisation”, according to its slick website. To call it a re-enactment society would be to sell it short. To its most devoted members, the Brotherhood is nothing less than the modern reincarnation of the Jomsborg Vikings, a heavily romanced band of “bachelor bandits”, as one historian called them. They are said to have stalked the Baltic 1,000 years ago from their island base of Wolin in today’s Poland, though how much of their saga is history, and how much epic fiction, is uncertain.