Alan commented that from its initial settlement to the present day the history of Iceland was that of the Vikings and their descendants.  He went on to display Icelandic stamps beginning with the first issues of the 1870s, the skilling values followed by those denominated in aurar.  The í gildi overprints at the start of the next century and the various provisional overprints from the 1920s. That decade also saw the first commemoratives issued.  1930 the millennium of the Alting issue.  From the end of that decade the New York World Fair issue and the stamps overprinted the following year; Alan’s display concluding with the independence issue of 1944.

Bo Terling

The first of our two true Vikings present (based on being born in Scandinavia), Bo had not brought a philatelic display but several interesting books for our perusal.  Bo spoke about the history of the Vikings and their sea-faring skills but also reminded us that they were highly successful traders.  Their trading centre of Birkja which flourished for several hundred has only in relatively recent times shown to have been located on the island of Björkö.  Despite excavations, the reasons are unknown for this entrepôt’s sudden abandonment in the second half of the 10th century.

Roger Partridge

A display of GB material with a Viking connection.  Specifically the various attractive annual cachets produced for the Up Helly AA celebrations held in Shetland each January.  One cachet featuring Viking period battle-axes had the punning slogan “For what we want we axe”.

Eric Keefe

Eric began by commenting that, unlike other Scandinavian areas, Finland had less of a Viking history and had celebrated it less in stamp issues.  However the Åland islands were a centre of Viking settlement and this was reflected on stamp issued in both 1986 and 2000.  Rurik, the Viking prince who had founded Novgorod, had featured in the issue by Russia of a war charity stamp in 1914 (this of course had also been valid for use in Finland).
Eric then went on to display various postcards and cacheted covers from various ships used by the Viking line.

Tony Davis

More Iceland; Tony confining his display to the millennium set of 1930.  As Tony remarked, this was an issue with plenty of interest and history.  The various internal rates were illustrated with stamps on cover.  An airmail cover to the UK on the first day of issue, franked with four copies of the 10 aurar triangular airmail stamp and the 25 aurar brown.  Overprints for official use (together with an imperforate proof of the 40 aurar with overprint), essays, a specimen set from the Portuguese post office archives and various errors including one of perforation.

Brian Hague

If the Vikings got their name because they lived in “vik”s then I argued that modern-day Vikings make up a large proportion of the present population of the Faroes.  There are 19 Faroese towns or villages that have “vík” as an element of their name.  From the several thousand inhabitants resident in Klaksvík down to the two living in Víkarbyrgi, together these “Vík”-ing settlements total almost 25% of the present population of the islands.
Fifteen of the nineteen settlements were illustrated using stamps, covers or postcards.  A somewhat quirky item was a Paquebot cacheted cover franked with a Netherlands stamp, cancelled Doncaster M.L.O.; on arrival in Kvívík it had been re-addressed to Denmark receiving a strike of that village’s office cancel.

Pat Adams

Pat had been fortunate in having an already prepared thematic display on the topic of Vikings.  This illustrated the Viking homelands, ships, armour and art.  The pagan gods were displayed as “stamp leaves” on the world-tree Yggdrasil.  The Vikings’ travels, both to eastwards and to the west to North America via the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland were fully illustrated.  A further Up Helly AA item was a pictorial PO air letter from 1983 and another item from GB, this time closer to home for Pat, commemorated the battle of Maldon’s millennium in 1991.

Birthe King

Birthe’s display illustrated how opposing factions in Denmark during World War II had used the same Viking and later Medieval period heroes to appeal to their supporters.  Niels Ebbesen, a 14th century freedom-fighter against the Holsteiners, had featured alongside Frits Clautsen, the leader of the DNSAP, on one of that organisation’s propaganda labels issued in 1940.  Ebbesen, together with another Danish hero from the Middle Ages, Skipper Clement, had also appeared on a label issued by the Danish Communist party’s newspaper.
Other DNSAP propaganda labels included one depicting a Viking longship with a swastika on its sail and a label issued in March 1942 by the Bjorup office on a cover from an SS training camp in Alsace to Køge.  Two DNSAP money orders and an application form for volunteers to join the Waffen SS or Frikorps Danmark were also shown.