Viking hut offers present-day connection to the past

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This article was published 15/12/2020 (2111 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wendy Speary picked handfuls of prairie tall grass and set to work thatching a roof for the Viking hut that would draw international attention.

“A friend of ours who lives in Germany, she’s seen it,” said Speary’s partner, Pedro Bedard. Another friend in the United Kingdom told Bedard he’d read it in an online paper there, too.

“It’s bizarre. I can’t imagine that there aren’t other people doing far more interesting things than us. I guess not,” he said with a laugh.

The St. François Xavier couple and their children built the hut in their backyard using age-old techniques and hand tools.

“It was important to me not to use power tools,” said Bedard. He even went a step further and crafted his own saw and axe — but drew the line at forging the nails.

“Yes, I can make nails but, my God, it’s boring,” he said.

Bedard is a blacksmith. He cast and hammered the cauldron and poker, amongst other things, they use to cook meals over the fire pit.

Speary, who is writing a cookbook of early medieval recipes, put these tools to the test making a dish of salmon and leeks in a cream sauce.

The couple have a love for history that spurs them to dress in medieval garb at Gimli’s Icelandic festival, where Speary builds clay ovens to bake breads and other goods, or in the fur and leather of voyageurs at Festival du Voyageur.

While the features such as the hut’s customary A-frame shape pay homage to Viking life, it also has elements distinctly Manitoban, said Speary.

The straw originally used to make the roof was longer than the tall grass she foraged. So, her and her daughter sat together, weaving away hours, figuring out how to make it work.

The walls of the hut are made by wattle and daub, a method in which a wooden lattice is covered with a sticky substance often made of mud, clay and animal dung.

“Because we have so much clay,” said Speary, “I didn’t have to use poo — which is really nice.”

Speary said this muddy-fingernail method of studying the past teaches her much more than the rote places and dates once taught to her in schools. It puts her in the shoes of her ancestors and shows her bits and pieces of what life must have been like for them.

“You see an artifact and you say, ‘I think this is what it’s for,’” she said. “But when you actually use it, it doesn’t work that way. But it works fantastic in another way.”

The hut has provided more than a connection to the past. At a time when the world around them was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, working on it gave the family something to do together.

“My daughter was off school as well, so we’d go out, and we’d get the grass together and work on it together,” said Speary.

When restrictions were looser, the hut provided an excuse to have neighbours over for a meal or for Wiccan friends to come for a photo shoot — always socially distanced, Bedard was quick to add.

The couple even built a bed of straw in the hut and slept there a night or two while the weather was warm.

Bedard, an ex-military man, said he’d like to give a winter night a shot. “But maybe not at -25 C.”

city.desk@freepress.mb.ca