Our own Josh is an avid bagpipe player and has a YouTube channel for that too: BapPipeBuzz!
It’s great 
I taught myself a few years ago (nearly 30 
) by listening to tapes and wood-shedding, I did go to visit the Qld Police Pipe Band a couple of times for a lesson or two but never played with them.
I was doing it mainly because I was heavily into re-enactment at the time. For Bazzbuzzers in Brisbane and the South-East; I was there at the beginning of the Abbey Medieval Festival.
One of the most fun times I had was at Armidale. Every second Easter we would go down and have a Dark Age event in the forest, all primitive camping with next to nothing modern. Big battles in the forest, we made forts to attack on the hill and a rock fort, all in a huge forest.
Some of the New England guys were arty hippie types, they built a Viking long house and slept in it and that was our drinking and music place at night, another of them went through the forest and carved the termite mounds into Lewis chess set figures.
One year I took down my pipes and decided to play while they were fighting (and sit out a couple of battles). So there I am playing behind them, Highland Laddie, To Be a Soldier, even 79ths Farewell to Gibraltar (my favourite), when for a lark I go into my version of Stairway to Heaven; there is a pause but the battle continues, when I am done, out of the press comes a mate of mine, a Scot who was also a heavy metal drummer, he comes up and says, “When ya played Stairway. I felt me scrotum shrink into my body”. I took that as a compliment
6 Likes
That sounds like one of those sites you need to click to say you are over 18
1 Like
Yeah, it’s even worse when you pronounce “pipe” in Dutch
Too many strings for a bag pipe
Hey, can you send me the link to the website
Cheers Brian
It’s invitation-only.
You have to send an email to @JoshFossgreen an aks him if you get a membership for BapPipeBuzz
What a great story!!! Now I want bagpipes too, and FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!
Do you have pics of that event? You & the bagpipes? The battles?
1 Like
No this was 20+ years ago, there may be pics somewhere by this was way before mobile phones were everywhere.
The thing about bagpipes, and this is similar to bass, is that you feel them.
Especially when walking, you are blowing into the bag which swells with your warm breath, and you are squeezing the air into the drones and chanter. the drones are vibrating and humming, the chanter is buzzing and the air is alive around you. You have chords and tassels holding the drones together and the tassels are weighted and as you walk you get into a swaying rhythm with your steps and music.
The bagpipes area wonderful thing, the crowd can feel them but the player really is part of a living thing.
3 Likes
It looks like big fun! Being Australian that knows no fear: I assume you fight with steel swords, no mercy?
2 Likes
Yeah we used steel and looked very similar to those pics.
Nothing like Bohurt but this could get a bit dangerous.
I got a Danish axehead at a market once and quickly put it on my quarterstaff-that was fun. I was running up walls and hitting people like the lovechild of Legolas and a mad ninja.
The SCA is something else- they use rattan and full plate and try to kill each other.
I didn’t do that but we provided archers- got armoured up and shot blunt arrows at them and each other, good times.
2 Likes
Hahaha! Yeah - that’s like Kendo for non-pussies! Love it!
1 Like
That looks fantastic, but some of the shield and weapon choices hurt my heart a little bit. Anglo Saxons used the ones that look like the blue ones, the green ones weren’t a thing until after William the bastard. The fyrd had spears and axes, swords were eye wateringly expensive. Long handled battle axes were really only wielded by housecarls, and were about 1.2 to 1.5m (4-5 feet). Most of the fyrd didn’t have helmets or chain mail, expensive and the maintenance of the chain mail put it out of reach for ceorls. Most people wore either leather jerkins or cloth armor maybe with a leather cap. Those helmets look like awesome reproductions of the Sutton Hoo helm that was buried with Raedwald though.
I’m sorry… really, it looks like a lot of fun and I truly don’t mean to be a Debby downer but the Anglo Saxon period in England is something I’ve geeked out over for years and years (I wear a reproduction of an Anglo Saxon mjolnir from around 600CE all the time).
1 Like
Maybe it was a scenario like the “Janakkala swords”, where they found a Viking-era era short sword as well as an uncommon long sword in a Crusade-era 12th century grave in Finland.
Maybe @Andrea_FI knows more about it?
There is a great documentary about it:
”Der Krieger von Janakkala” - maybe it exists in English too? Highly recommended!
I looked down on European swords for a long time (being a Samurai at heart :-)), but this documentary changed my mind. A scottish swordsmiths reproduced the shorter sword in that documentary - and the way he’s handling it, his glowing eyes and what he said about it changed my mind!
You should check out the Seax. It’s where Saxons got their name, it was a combo utility knife and short sword that men and women had.
2 Likes
I’m a 1000% Katana fan. I own two of them (one US tactical for stupid stuff and one for Iai-Do and Tameshigiri).
But I just looked Seax up, and it showed a short, dagger shape:
And that reminds me of Tutankhamun’s meteoric iron dagger, a fascinating knife:
I wished that swords and knifes would not fascinate me as much as it does!
3 Likes
Only available in Germany…and I don’t use a VPN. Schade. 