Historical re-enactments: The production and design of viking festival experiences

Abstract

Viking Age is a fascinating story, history – it’s international and everybody knows about it. The Viking tourism has grown since the 70’s and has its origins in the wider development of heritage tourism in Europe. This thesis takes focus on Viking Age re-enactments, since most of them are situated in Scandinavian countries. The main idea behind this study is to look into Viking festivals’ contents, characteristics and its concept development. Together with that we test out the Experience design model effectiveness for using in the event studies. In this paper we took the qualitative approach by interviewing different festival organizers and going on a field trip. We selected the referral sampling technique (snowball) to collect the data from the target population. Achieved sample was three semi-structured and one unstructured interviews. The findings identify nine key elements of the Viking festival production, explain the role of content in the concept development and explore the success factors of these events. The creation of experiences can be analyzed using the Shedroff’s Experience Design model, which is discussed in more detail later in the paper. In conclusions the recommendations are given to the festivals and the future research, as well as an explanation of the limitations of this study.