12th Annual Winternights Viking Festival
2023 - 12th Winternights Viking Festival
Sunday Oct 22th, 2023
Thanks to All!
$618 raised for Northern NJ Veterans Memorial Cemetery
Thank you to all those that were vendors and/or presenters/educators at this year's 12th Winternights Viking Festival! Thank you to all attendees for coming out on a cold autumn day and of course for your donations. The trustees and our volunteers appreciated your warmth on such a cold day. Will post more of an update soon but have clean up and a little more rest (lol).. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
A working iron forge, furnace, and cooking fire pit will return this year along with additional Viking Village expansion
Great news! We have been talking with members of and now can confirm members of Smelt Team 6 will be attending the festival.. They are skilled iron ore smelters as well as craftsman blacksmiths.. They will be doing a Viking age smelt ending with producing an iron ore bloom near end of festival day.. They also will be demonstrating iron forging. In addition to doing they will be available to discuss and answer questions. Last they have several replica pieces of a famous traveling Viking blacksmiths tools.. Hail Smelt Team 6 .. More info and pics to come.
Work is beginning in earnest now on preparing grounds and events for this years festival.. We are modifying the way we build the Viking furnace.. Instead of using a large multifaceted /sides soapstone, which we believe led to cracking of last years, we have high temperature ceramic tubes on order.. Another Viking culture learning event for this year will be navigation on open seas before compasses. Check out the WNF facebook page for updates on all activities - fb.com/winternightsfestival
We have some other surprises to make this an all age fun educational event .. we'll share them in coming weeks.
Different grades (ages / safety) of axe throwing for the festival and for future outdoor/indoor activities.. None of them are real axes but some are for bigger kids/adults and some are for 5ish to 10ish?
THANK YOU! 2022- attendees/vendors/organizations
A total of $314 was given to NNJVC
Total donations from attendees came to $69
As in the past the Vernon Nordic House donated sales from food adding another $205 to that plus $40 from vendor fees
While the attendance was far less than anticipated, no doubt due to less than hospitable weather, the event itself was still a good one. Unfortunately but understandably Sons of Odin and Olaf (Slavic Invasion) were not present due to last minute health concerns. We wish them speedy and full recoveries.
We’ll be posting more here, on FB, and on the Lars & Sven Foundation site in the coming weeks including photos and videos. The final donation amount will be given to the Northern NJ Veterans cemetery on Veterans Day next month..
One thing we did expand (add) this year is our Viking Village area. The plan is to show what foods and how they might have been (were) prepared.. It of course would vary from village to village let alone from country to country (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, etc). We are limited to some extent by todays regulations but with a bit of creativity we hope to combine todays technologies with Viking methods..
Winternights Festival is now a 501c
It took a while but this event is now part of the “Lars & Sven Foundation” events and activities.
We finally received our exemption from IRS and are now a bona fide – 501c3
Thank you to everyone that attended our last event. We were busy so not able to really notice but others said it seemed like a good turn out. Thanks to those that donated extra for the Veterans. Thank you to all the great vendors, educators, participants, performers, et ALL. We heard a lot of nice feed back during the event about the quality of vendors we had and the craftsmanship of them. Thanks to the hard working volunteers some which prefer not to have their name on FB etc. Safe journey to all.
Hail Facebook – Hail Vetrnaetr on it!
Build a Viking Longship Project
Each year we work on adding something new to the grounds that honors our Viking ancestors in a way that is informative, educational, and respectful. We usually unveil it at our Winternights Festival in October. This year we are working on several projects that we believe Odin and the Norns will approve of. The resumption and continuation of our ‘build a viking longship’ is still on hold unfortunately. We have several restoration projects going on as well.
* Would like to thank Jan Bill, professor & curator of the Viking Ship Collection, at Oslo Universitet for responding immediately with helpful info along with wishing us well on the reconstruct. During our kickoff meeting and in the video we showed at it we acknowledged Thomas Finderup for his expertise on riving and viking ship construction. We recently contacted him for further information on techniques. He responded immediately including providing us a photo to help. We want to thank him for doing that and to subsequently acknowledge him for his guidance and continued help. Thank you!!!