ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, my wife and I took a tour of Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and parts of Russia. With my longtime interest in Vikings, I was looking forward to visiting some Viking sites and museums…

Denmark was a total bust! The "French of the North", as the rest of their fellow Scandanavians call them, were all out on strike - to a man (or to be more PC, to a "person"). The celebrated reconstructed Viking outpost of Rotheskilde (sp?) just north of Copenhagen was shut down, and ditto all the museums where meteorites were once classified as iron artifacts and thunderbolts in the long ago pre-archeology days. On to Sweden. Here in the famous "old quarter" of Stockholm I think it was or near by, I stumbled across a very interesting and not often visited anthropology museum. Inside were spectacular exhibits including among others, mummified (ie., dessicated) heads of Middle Ages warriors still inside their iron helmets (! ) which bore the fatal battleaxe and sword cuts which had spelled their demise! Their twisted grinning skulls looking out through the jagged slashes were a graphic reminder of the days when war was a matter of "slash and dash" between individuals… Can you imagine the furor that would ensue in the US were such an exhibit to be offered to the public?

However, nowhere yet had we seen any Viking sites! They either were not on the route of our tour bus, or they were down "for repairs", or no one - including our guide - knew anything about them or their whereabouts! To my persistent queries, I only got one afternoon a direction to the downtown window of a department store where a mannikin Viking tapped on the window with his stick to attract passersby!

What a bust!

On to Norway. By now I was generally acclaimed "bus pest and enfant terrible'" for the whole tour with my incessant queries of why can't we find any Vikings in all of Scandahoovia? …and "There are more Norskis in Wisconsin by yumpin yimminy than in all of Norwege" and other such endearments as you who know me can well imagine, I am under no illusion …

Well we were going down the highway one day in some beautiful rural region of Norway and the tour guide was studying his guide book intently behind the drivers seat when he suddenly "yumped" up and spoke to the driver (in Norski of course) "Turn here!" and the bus swerved off the road and bounced down a little dirt farm lane. With glee he fixed my eye and said "I have found a Viking ruins site here on my map and we are going to detour our trip just so our esteemed fellow traveller, Mr. Powell from the United States of America, can see them!" Cheers all around and hand clapping…

Shortly thereafter we skidded to a halt almost it seemed at the road's end just at the edge of one of those spectacular, unbelievably high cliff edges along some nameless fjord far below. On our left was a fallow farm field of many acres and it ran right up to the edge of the cliff drop off…

A short distance back from the edge was an elongated ring of upright and very ancient stones… a Viking Age "boat grave" our guide informed us. (Rather, I informed the group (ahem!) as he, though Norski to the bone, seemed never to have seen Kurt Douglas, Errol Flynn, or Douglas Faribanks cavorting about the silver screen and playing Odin, Wodin or whatnot…). At one end of the boat grave alignments, stood a tall flat rock maybe ten feet high and up to two foot thick and maybe six or eight feet wide. The face of this stone was covered with little , weathered but plainly discernible figures, pictographs, and masses of runic writing. The whole stone was fronted with a great sheet of thick glass in a weathered wood frame. Some kind of historian had once studied this place was obvious… Here and there on the stick figures were tiny faint daubs of reddish paint… whether traces of the original art (ocher maybe?) or not or whether perhaps left by some student unraveling sequences at a later date, I never found out.

The stick figures were a delight to behold. There were two types of figures and but one action. One set of figures had clearly seen helmets on (sometimes with crescent horns shown) and usually with raised arms upright and a sword in one hand. They were always shown with very erect phallus, and were busy chasing another set of figures in all cases. This latter set were distinguished by nothing so much as just outstretched arms in front of them and the whole implication of headlong flight. Some of them too, had helmets on and sometimes they had pigtail braids hanging down their backs...

By now most of our busload of fat, rich, indolent and sedentary American tourists was overtaken with common ennui and sensing another tiresome tirade either by their fellow traveller (me!) or the Norse guide - or (worse!) both of us in concert - they had all climbed back aboard the bus (including Millie, my wife). I was left alone with three hardies however: old maid school teachers from some nameless midwestern hamlet who were not about to miss the chance to learn something. Our guide seemed perturbed a bit and rather reluctant to read further to us but with my newfound supporters in things Viking, we urged him on. (He did not read runes but his guidebook translated the whole affair for him, so he began). You will have to excuse me now for I must paraphrase and rely much on memory here, but I will try to be as true to the original and its "flavor" as I can get:

"I, Ragnar-the-Indifferent, have raised this stone to my father, Bjarolfson the Viking, he as was lost in the raid on England. I, Ragnar, have taken Gudrid his third wife who was my stepmother into my house to live with my wives and my half-sister and all will share my bed. It was her sister who was begat with child by her brother, Sigurd, him as who was drunk and also lost in the raid on England. Sigurd's man-son, whom I have sworn to kill, had besides him two issue from his half-sister as were known in that ship. Karl who was a bastard from the Lower Fjiord helped Ragnar raise the stones that day. Then they fought like men and Karl could not see for his eye was plucked which was a good omen so they drank together. Kristen was with child by unknown Berserkers, so she is to live with Ragnar and Karl hereafter, and she too will warm their beds…..This I have done to honor my father."

It went on and on in this vein something wonderful! Lol. The old maids were transfixed and never uttered a word; I watched them sideways with my eyes.

When the guide was finished, he snapped shut his guidebook and looking sheepishly about led the way back to the bus. The three old maids climbed in after him. I took one last look at the silent stones standing in the farmer's field, rarely visted now and mostly unknown… I remembered far off Cape Cod across the "Western Sea" and long ago, and wondered if I had been altogether as diligent in my onetime searches as I might have been? Perhaps such a stone with little stick men (and women!) once stood in the sandy soil of Cape Cod, and had only been plowed under by the mindless American developers who rend our landscape…

Bernie