Stayed up way too late reading last night, but managed to get up early enough to shape bread rolls from the dough which had been in the fridge overnight, do my morning pilates as they rose a little, and bake them before it was time to get ready for work.
Today Keldor ran the Children’s forge activity at the Viking Festival at Lofotr. He helped them make tiny swords out of nails.
I made progress on my soapstone pot and talked to people. One conversation that was particularly fun was with Zoe and Barbara, viditing from France, who have spent a couple of days exploring the museum. They started with the standard what are you doing questions, but kept following up with more and more interesting questions, and Zoe took lots of notes as I explained about the Viking Age soapstone industry. Eventually, I gave them the link to my masters thesis https://zenodo.org/communities/la-icp-msmaps/ , and told them to contact me with questions. I also told them about the SCA, and where to find us. I hope they do.
On one of my walks over towatds the toilet I saw a guy in a leather tunic and hood, and paused to compliment him on it. This lead to a conversation in which it was mentioned that he was performing with his Viking Age instruments in the boathouse that afternoon, so I set my alarm and went down there when it went off. It was a delightful show. He sang and played three different types of lyres, each patterened after a specific find, and a horn flute, and a bone flute.
After work Keldor still had energy, so we went over to the Archery range and played a bit. We tested the three sided arrowhead Keldor forged against a bit of the medieval style rivited mail that Jeno made. First we used the standard archery range arrows, and they simply bounced off the mail. Keldor’s arrowhead went through it several cm. We assume that were there a decent linen gambeson behind the maile the person wearing it wouldn’t have been seriously injured to have been shot at that range, with that bow. However, it wasn’t exactly a heavy poundage bow.
After shooting and chatting for a bit we walked back to the car, checked the local store, which had closed at 18:00, and Keldor dropped me off at home, were I happily curled up with my book, and he went to the museum’s workshop to polish and put an edge on some of the knives he has made here. He even found a bit of wood to put a handle on one.
I did my yoga a bit ago, so now we shall shower and sleep.