Is Jorvik Viking Centre underwhelming or fascinating? Or is it both?
Jorvik is the main reason I wanted to go to York and the fact that it flooded a couple of years ago is why it’s taken until late 2019 to get there. The Minster only came to my attention in April, as I said in that post.
I like Vikings. Multiple trips to Iceland will do that, and with my red and/or blonde plaits and my attempts to learn some basic mastery of Norwegian means I’m half-Viking myself. Are you kidding? I’m not a Viking, I’m a dwarf! But I like Vikings. I even like the way they strolled over to Wessex and casually dethroned Æthelred.
And York was a Viking town! It still possesses its Viking name, although the centuries have worn out one syllable and we’ve switched the Norse J for a modern English Y.
So off I went to the Jorvik Viking Centre. You get free return entry for a year with your ticket, which is just as well because I think it’s very overpriced. You go downstairs into a glass-floored room where I presume you can see Viking city remains but there’s nothing to say so. There are two touchscreens where you can take part in a virtual archaeological dig – I dug up & cleaned a knife and I saw a small child working on a bead but it’s not exactly riveting and I spent my time in that room wondering what was going on and where the rest of it was.
The rest of it is hiding. You get into a kind of pod suspended from a rail and you’re carried through an animatronic recreation of Viking-age Jorvik. They’re very keen to stress that this is a recreation, based on history and real artefacts rather than a work of imagination or fiction. Even the faces of the locals are based on real skulls dug up right there. This is as close as you can get to seeing it all for real unless you possess a time machine.
I mean… it’s interesting. These are ordinary Viking-age people going about their ordinary lives. No horned helmets or battle-axes or red plaited beards here. Viking was kind of a job – the people, mostly men, who put to sea and raided and pillaged around Northern Europe.
Jorvik shows ditch-diggers and beggars and women with damaged hips, market stallholders, people arguing over fish or lamb, cup makers with an early lathe. Today’s Coppergate, the street where all this is hiding, was probably Cup-gate, gate (gatteh) being the word across modern Scandinavia for street. Related is [language] gasse and German’s strasse, which is probably not unrelated to our street. Cup-makers’ street. Which got me wondering. If gate is a street, did our modern word gate come not from the city gates but from the streets that ran through them and after which they were named? Is Canterbury’s Westgate actually the street and not, as I’ve always assumed, the ancient stone doorway?
The third room – if this ride through history is just a room – is typical museum, lined with glass cases containing artefacts. It’s not in my nature to take much interest in things like that, I’m afraid. But one thing they found was a pair of coin presses and they reproduced them so a costumed student can make you your very own replica Viking coin. Place metal disc on top of die, place the other press on top inside a tube to hold it in place. Hit with 21st century B&Q sledgehammer and ta-dah! Your own Viking coin! Both sides are heads but you work with what you have when you’re using thousand-year-old templates.
And that’s it. The recreation is interesting and I liked it… but you emerge into the gift shop thinking “was that it?” You can buy a ticket for all the group’s attractions but this is the only one that interested me and for the price, you should get all of them. It’s overpriced but I kind of expect that and I don’t entirely begrudge it. I just wish it felt like there was more to it. York’s premier tourist attraction it really isn’t. The Minster is far more interesting. If you’re a budding cathedral nerd, maybe.