Well I feel I should share with you all the sights I beheld at the Jorvik Valhalla: In search of the Viking Dead exhibition which opened at the end of July and will stay open until the 4th November. It is a combination with York Minster and the Ilse of Man, Manx Museum. It is a display of elaborately carved gravestones, grave markers and covers and features the bodies of a man and woman discovered buried at Hungate in York during the excavations there. Whilst I was looking at one on of the guides on hand told me the woman was of noble birth due to her arms place across her chest but in particular the fine condition of her teeth. The man was of lower standing as his teeth had a lot of a damage. Apparently if you can afford liquorice sticks to brush with you will have finer teeth than those who don't.
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| Woman discovered buried in the Hungate excavation at York. |
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| My favourite peice of stonework at the Valhalla exhibition - look at the craftsmanship and the detail in the deisgn! Amazing! |
I also had the pleasure of meeting author Terry Deary (yep the guy behind the Horrible Histories books and tv series) at the event. He was signing any and all books and selling his Tales story series with several set in different eras of history, Roman, Celt, Knights and VIKINGS! So I bought myself all four of his Viking Tales books and got them signed with my Vicious Vikings books.
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| Me and author Terry Deary. |
He was very charming and funny and commented 'my you have a lot of reading to do' when I passed him all five books to sign. I told him I love to read anything to do with Vikings even though I'm a bit too old for these. He replied 'well you know these aren't meant to be read till you're 85? So you have another, say, three decades before you can even open them?' I just laughed and said that's fine, I'm sure they will be worth the wait.
If anyone has yet to see the exhibition or is even more interested you might like to meet the woman who wrote the words behind all the displays (as well as a great book The Bone Thief) VM Whitworth will be giving a talk on the scultpure of Anglian and Viking York on Monday 24th September, 7pm at Jorvik Centre. Keep checking on her website for more details nearer the time as I don't know if it's ticketed yet or not but I know I will be definitely tagging along.
To end this experience of all things Valhalla like I discovered this fantastic animated short made by a York animation company on the Jorvik website and it is really good and displays a great vision of Valhalla. Just click play and enjoy!
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