City resident to bring Viking festival back to Manassas in May

MANASSAS — Vikings will return again to the most unlikely city: Manassas.

“I’ve just always wanted to do something Nordic,” said Erna Pomrenke, a city resident and founder of the Manassas Viking Festival.

Downtown Manassas will be visited by Vikings once again this May. Last year, close to 4,000 people attended last year’s inaugural event. The number of attendees “really took all of us by surprise,” Pomrenke said.

She expects more people to come out to the Downtown Manassas festival this year.

“I’d always had this Viking thing in the back of my head,” Pomrenke said. “We have all the Nordic countries represented.”

Born and raised in Iceland and now a board member of the Icelandic Association of Washington D.C., Pomrenke chose Vikings as the festival theme in appreciation of her Nordic culture.

This year, they’ll have all the same 50 vendors as last year – plus some new ones. The vendors hail from all over the U.S.

“It really is quite amazing,” Pomrenke said. Pomrenke added that all of the vendors did well last year.

“It makes you feel really good that people are not going home broke,” Pomrenke said. Some of the vendors from last year doubled the size of their booths.

Pomrenke said that while there are some Viking Festivals in the Midwest and the West Coast, and some of the Viking re-enactment groups have small reenactment festivals. The next closest festival is VikingCon in Charles County, Md., a place for fans of the Discovery Channel show “Vikings” to congregate.

Some of this year’s attractions will include:

• Nordic dancers of Washington D.C.
• Icelandic Horse Riding Club for the Mid-Atlantic States
• Hawks and owls
• The Phoenix Irish Dance Academy
• Swordsmen

A new attraction this year will be a Nordic dog breed show called “Val-howl-a Hall”, which will feature Norwegian puffin dogs and Icelandic sheepdogs, among others.

Perhaps the biggest star of the show is the Norseman, a 40- foot Viking Ship replica that comes from Leif Erickson Viking Ship, Inc. in Philadelphia.

There will also be re-enactors and battles on the Manassas Museum Lawn.

Manassas Police will provide security for the event. “This is a family-oriented, educational event,” Pomrenke said.

Twenty four Icelandic folk dancers won’t be coming back this year. Unfortunately, it is just too expensive, and Pomrenke can’t hire them because they would need to have work visas, she said

The budget for the festival is tight Pomrenke estimated that all the costs total at least $6,000 and while some of that is paid for by vendor fees, she has also had to reach into her own pocket for funding.

Originally when planning the festival, Pomrenke had looked at Fairfax but they were expensive and unaccommodating. Manassas, on the other hand, was extremely helpful from the get-go, Pomrenke said.

The festival is free to the public and goes from 10 am to 5 pm on May 11.