"You're dead!" shouts the man with the mohawk braid to his opponent, a huge guy in a flowing white shirt. "Nah, nah!" he replies, pulling his lance to the side, jerking his 20 kilogram chain mail and pointing to his shield: "You didn't really hit anything!"
The crowd of spectators, who have gathered in large numbers around the 50 or so men fighting on the beach in Gießen, can easily hear this witty exchange of words and laugh out loud.
These Vikings here, who have just gone at each other with loud roars, swords, spears, bows and arrows, don't seem to take fighting morals terribly seriously. After all, this weekend in August 2022 in Göhren is first and foremost just a lot of fun, which is now happening for the fifth time.
Albeit with a historical background. For the men who have gathered here in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in striking garments and individually designed weapons, an authentic depiction of the Viking Age is important. Just like Jaromir and Norde, in real life forester Sascha and administrative assistant Mario.
Here in Göhren at the „Viking Festival“, however, they are a Slav (Jaromir) and a Viking (Norde). The difference is hardly recognizable for laymen, but for professionals like Michael Rietschel it is obvious: "You can easily distinguish the Slavs, whose origins may have been in what is now Ukraine, and the Vikings, who came from Scandinavia, by their weapons and the symbols on their clothing," he says.
The Vikings, for example, carry a Thor's hammer, a kind of miniature hammer that stands for courage, luck and fertility. The Slavs, on the other hand, carry the so-called Axe of Perun, a pendant in the shape of a battle axe, to name just one example.
Michael Rietschel is known in the relevant scene as "Der Germane" (The German) and knows the subject matter so well because he has been running a store of the same name for 22 years, first in Berlin and since 2016 in Gießen. It is not least thanks to him as co-organizer together with the spa administration that everything in Göhren has revolved around the time of the Vikings one weekend a year since 2018.
