DARC at Althing 2009

Date: 26 - 27 Jun, 2009

Location: Orono, ON

Premise: In 1992, the Toronto chapter of the SCA held an event to recreate an Icelandic Althing. It was a pretty good event in which many people who would later go on to found DARC participated. In 2009 the SCA decided to do it again. This time DARC was there in full force. We set up a street based on the market arrangement of Viking era Ribe. Booths with tents were set up for each craftsman. Some new folks spent the day with us as a training session. For this reason many new names will be seen below. The booths included:

• bead production and sales
• ceramic pit firing
• blacksmith
• bone, antler carver
• textiles co-op including tablet weaving, spinning, sprang
• a pub
• wood turner
• pewter caster/coin minter

A look down the street

Pewter Caster / Coin Minter

The althing event staff made a good choice to create and encourage the use of event-specific money. Ketill spent part of his day minting coins and casting tokens while discussing the concepts of money and the technical methods involved.

Visitors	Striking a coin	Trade goods	More trade goods

Wood Turner

Rig had been working on a spring-pole lathe. This day saw it reach a level of working although there are several issues still to work out.

Visiting fighter	Rig's turn	Roughing out	Fun splitting
Splitting	Turning	Turning

Pub

Bera set up a pub where DARC could get lunch or visitors could also buy a bowl of soup as needed. Setup for this event lead to an excellent discussion on the foods available in Iceland during this time period. Hopefully we will be following up with a post or two on this topic.

Pub Setup	Social Time	Rest Break

Textiles Co-op

This booth included tablet weaving, raw rool processing, spinning, and sprang. Jorunn, Kaðlín, and Urraca helped the visitors understand the steps in the production of textiles.

Tablet weaving	Talking textiles	Wool	Drop spinning

Bone and Antler Carver

Thorgrimr spent the day in his booth working on his carvings in many materials and teaching visitors how to carve.

Carving space

Blacksmith

Grettir and Valdr set up a sand table forge, and with help from Max, spent the day working on a number of small projects.

Forge setup	Valdr working	Getting hot	Grettir working

Ceramic Pit Firing

This one will be getting its own page shortly. At our pottery workshop in April many of us learned to make pots on a wheel (yes we know the norse didn't use wheels but it was fun). Today Kadja set up a pit firing to cook them. It worked out really well and the colour variations on the pots were quite interesting.

Firing	Covering the fire	Baking in the pit	Opening
Breakage	Ketill searching	Picking out pots	Preserving Charcoal
Finished Pots

Bead Production and Sales

Two different activities occurred in this booth. Hróbjartr, Aislinne, Anneke, and Rachel spent the day working on experimental bead production. The experiments had three goals: practicing production in a furnace, figuring out desired changes in the furnace design for the next experiment, and production of a series of beads showing the various shapes of beads found.

The other activity was Ragnarr selling beads and explaining the experiments, as well as details of beads worn in various locations and times during the viking age.

Trade beads	Making beads	Trading beads	Weekend's work