Pirate jokes part of the voyage for these Vikings

Published 11:22 pm Thursday, June 19, 2008

One of the hardest things about pretending to be a Viking, it seems, is that people tend to mistake you for a pirate.

Just ask the crew of the Sae Hrafn, a reproduction Viking ship based in southern Maryland. On a recent afternoon, passing boaters on the Potomac River cried out, “Avast ye, mateys!” and “Show me your swords!”

“Wrong fantasy,” muttered Viking enthusiast David Tristan.

Tristan, 55, and his shipmates were acting out the fantasy of their choosing, as they do on regular outings. As they sailed the 38-foot longship, its bow adorned with a carved dragon head, they verbally accosted other boaters.

“I give you three sheep for the woman!” captain Bruce Blackistone roared at a passing sailboat, its white-haired female passenger waving and smiling nervously.

Of course, the 60 members of what is formally known as the Longship Company are anything but pillagers and plunderers. More than a few are government employees. One is a logistics analyst and another is a retired aviation safety inspector. There is a surveyor and even a rocket scientist; Tristan is a television reporter.

What unites them is an unusual interest in all things Viking. Aboard Sae Hrafn, or Sea Raven, early this month, any sense of modern decorum seemed to melt away.

They sang, nearly in unison, to the tune of “Oh! Susanna”: “I’m a Viking! That’s the thing to be. There’s no greater joy than fighting for a berserker like me.”

Blackistone, who is in charge of leased space for the National Park Service, and others passed around a horn filled with mead, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey and water.

The Longship Company is organized as a nonprofit group with an educational mission. Its members want to teach people that the 8th-to-11th-century seafaring people “were more than plunderers and raiders,” said Marc Blaydoe, 52, of Waldorf, Md., a naval engineer. “They were explorers and settlers” whose “secret” was their ships.

These days, in the world of re-enactment, Vikings seem to be increasingly popular, Blackistone said. But don’t tell that to the other boaters on the Potomac River.

See a wooden ship powered by oars? Must be pirates.

“Yarr,” yelled one man on a motorboat, taking off his baseball cap to acknowledge the crew of the Longship Company.

“Sometimes you just embrace the stereotype,” Blaydoe said. “The Vikings were the pirates of their day, so we’re just a bunch of Captain Jack Sparrows from a few centuries earlier.”

Blackistone is the kind of guy who dresses up in chain mail and wields an ax at medieval festivals. He cracks corny jokes about the 10th century — most of which only he and his Viking counterparts get.

Blackistone said when he was a child he watched the 1958 movie “The Vikings,” starring Kirk Douglas. It inspired an interest in Viking culture that stuck more than 40 years later.

“I thought running around, swinging swords, that was sort of cool,” Blackistone said. “You get all interested in all the swashbuckling and all, but then you start looking at how the society worked and how the ships worked and how it all had to integrate itself.”

But the members of the Longship Company are not all the re-enactor type, nor is their group an exclusive one. Anyone is welcome to come with them on a voyage, Blackistone said.

Although the Longship Company is full of people who will debate Viking culture for hours, “we try very hard not to take ourselves seriously,” Tristan said.

After a full day on the water, some aspects of the Viking experience are indisputably real.

“After eight hours of rowing, you’re going to feel authentic,” Blackistone said. “You’re even going to smell authentic.”