Midwest Viking Festival

The Midwest Viking Festival is a free, family-friendly living-history event hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay's Viking House, exploring Scandinavian history and daily life from a thousand years ago. Held on the Viking House grounds each fall, it gathers roughly 60 to 70 authentically dressed Viking-age interpreters from across the Midwest into an encampment of blacksmiths, silversmiths, weavers, woodworkers, glass-bead makers, and cooks working with period ingredients, alongside battle demonstrations, saga storytelling, rune-singing, Viking House tours, and hands-on activities for kids. It has grown into one of the Midwest's largest Viking festivals, drawing nearly 3,000 visitors.

Attendees highly recommend the festival and single out its authentic living-history demonstrations - especially the battle demonstrations, which one repeat visitor's child loves - and note that it gets a little bigger and better every year. Many credit Professor Sherman and the volunteers who put it on, and appreciate that it is free and welcoming to families.

The 2025 edition ran Friday and Saturday, September 19-20, 2025, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at UW-Green Bay, with living historians demonstrating skills, telling stories, and staging battle demonstrations; nearly 3,000 people attended.