Event: Iceland - Hafnarfjørdur

International Viking Festival

When:	12 - 18 Jun 2008 (annual)
Where:	Viking Village

The Vikings started to settle Iceland around 874 AD. The specially-built Viking Village near Reykjavík stages an annual Viking Festival, where modern-day Icelanders and visiting Vikings from abroad celebrate their heritage with appropriate vigour.

The Vikings' wild and adventurous spirit lives on today in the people who live in this unique country. The event is a lot of fun and is attended by a large international contingent. There are displays of ancient arts and crafts, stalls where you can take home a piece of Viking memorabilia and large gruff men in full Viking attire demonstrate their ancient battle skills to anyone brave enough to challenge them.

There is, of course, a traditional Viking feast and if you find that you've overdone it on the schnapps, you can always bed down for the night in the Viking hotel.

It was the Viking king Ingolfur Arnarson who was the first to settle in Iceland in the year 847 and legend has it that as he approached land he took two pillars that he had brought from his throne in Norway and threw them overboard, asking the gods to wash them ashore where they wanted him to live. Landing in the south-east, he and his men spent three years searching the shore until they found the pillars in a place he named Reykjavik, or Smoky Bay, after the geothermal steam he saw rising there.