Boggs and the Viking Curse
By Harald Frost
A Short Story. Copyright 2025.
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My friend Boggs has been working for months to remove a curse that has been hurting the Minnesota Vikings football team. He called me last night with an update. “I’m mostly done,” he said. “One more ceremony. Can you come over right away?”
I said “Sure thing!” and hiked a few blocks to his house.
It was a chilly evening in April. Boggs and his wife Bronwyn live in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a big house on Carter Avenue. As I walked up to their door, I was reminded of the football ritual that happens in their front yard several times a year. Boggs, Bronwyn, and a few of their friends, me included, gather in a circle around an oak tree, drink home-made mead, and chant Old Norse incantations, calling for support from ancient gods. The point of these chants is to help the Vikings achieve gridiron success. Everyone in the circle is a major fan of the team.
Some time ago, Boggs became aware of “occasional blockages in the energy of the chanting.” From this evidence, and other pieces of data, he concluded “the team seems to be cursed.” He investigated. He made several trips to northern Europe to “examine energy vortexes” and poke around in archives looking for historical records. Six months ago he said “the team is definitely cursed” and set out to remove the spell using ceremonies, chants, and runic inscriptions. Now he was ready to finish the job.
Boggs employs me as his chronicler, his Boswell and Dr. Watson. I listen to his stories and accompany him on some of his adventures. I write up the material for a biography and a screenplay. It’s a lucrative part-time job. I would do the work for free, frankly. Boggs is fun to hang out with.
I pushed lightly on the front door and it opened creakily. Boggs enjoys the creakiness, redolent of old movies. The living room was mostly dark. He was sitting at his desk surrounded by books, his face illuminated by two large candles. He was writing. He was not to be disturbed when writing, not even for a hello, “not even,” he says, “if the missiles are coming in. As they eventually will be.”
I walked down a hallway and poked my head in the kitchen where Bronwyn sat in front of the stove stirring in a pot. Beatles music played from a vinyl record on vintage Advent speakers. Every week she makes a big batch of soup, bakes several loaves of bread, and brings most of the food downtown to homeless folks. She looked up and smiled. “Hi Harald.”
“Hi darlin’. Smells great.” Juniper berries, thyme, fennel, bread just out of the oven—heavenly.
“Soup will be waiting for you boys when you're finished. Assuming you survive the dark vortexes.” We laughed. “Remember to breathe,” she said.
Back in the living room, I sat on one of the couches, flipped on a small lamp, and leafed through that day’s Financial Times. Boggs makes a substantial income with investments and sports betting. He bases his money decisions on planetary alignments and “certain other obscure factors.” In 1997 he bought a big block of Amazon stock at eighteen dollars per share after studying the position of Mercury and Mars in January, 1964, the month of birth for Jeff Bezos. “Amazon paid for this house,” he says.
One of the family cats, Natasha, jumped down from her perch on the writing table, glided over, and rubbed against my leg. She’s a spunky tortie rescued by Boggs and Bronwyn from the street and named for the buoyant character in “War and Peace.” I sneezed a couple of times. Boggs looked up. “The saddest allergy,” he said, “is to cats.”
“As you’ve mentioned many times.”
“There must be an herb for it.” He studied the ceiling for a moment. “Well, I’ll keep looking.” He resumed writing and kept at it for another minute. He then propped his reading glasses on top of his head, stood up, stretched, and said “OK! We’re almost ready to rock.”
On this chilly evening he wore a thick Norwegian sweater and well-worn jeans. He’s in his 60s. He’s of medium height with a tangle of gray hair. He has a professorial vibe—a calm detached mien—he taught cultural history at UC Berkeley, Brown, and Carleton College.
“What were you working on?” I asked.
“Pinpointing a few things, including the hour this curse started.”
“Which was?”
“One hour after sunrise on the thirteenth day of September in AD 795. Also known as 795 of the Common Era.”
Boggs is an expert on the Dark Ages and Medieval Period in Europe, the years 500 to 1500. He has written a number of academic papers about the era. One of his particular interests is folk curses. Years ago we had a conversation about this. “One thing I’ve never mentioned to any scholar,” he told me, “is that I believe curses are sometimes real. If I said such a thing in the halls of academia, my God, I’d never be able to publish another paper.”
Curses, he continued, can bounce around for centuries in the collective unconscious. “If enough people believe in a curse, that curse is real. And if a lot of people read a piece about removal of a curse, it’s more likely to dissipate. That’s why I want this story on the web.”
“Do you have definite proof curses are sometimes real?”
“I do not. It’s merely my theory. It gets filed under ‘I Believe It To Be True But I Can’t Prove It.’ Along with a lot of other stuff: ‘Telepathy is a Real Thing.’ ‘Fifty Minutes of Walking Equals Fifty Milligrams of Prozac.’ ‘There are More Things in Heaven and Earth Than Are Dreamt of In Our Philosophy.’ I like what Marvin Minsky said in 1974—‘There is room in the anatomy and genetics of the brain for much more mechanism than anyone today is prepared to propose.’ You remember we talked about so-called ‘junk DNA’ in human beings?”
“Yeah. The non-coding regions of the genome, right? You said ‘not really junk at all.’”
“Lots of acreage there. Unexplored. Mysterious. Lots of possibilities for big connections with things like curses. That’s also true of the collective human mind. The richness and power of which we have no clue about. Well, Jung knew.”
One area of expertise for Boggs is the Viking Era from the late 700s to the 1150s, which he can talk about for hours: “The Vikings of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden carved a domain that stretched from the market towns of Ukraine to the pastures of Greenland” and “They were bold and adventurous when essentially everyone else in the world was timid or insular.” In his basement he keeps a diorama of what he describes as a “typical Norse raid circa the late 700s.” He has been building it for years. It’s on a table about ten feet by ten feet in size. It includes a scale model of a monastery, six inches tall, which he carved from a piece of ash. It has dozens of figurines, a couple of inches tall, representing Vikings, monks, and commonfolk, which he made from modeling clay and painted with great precision on an adjacent worktable. It has four Viking ship models, a few inches long, museum-quality, and it has several well-carved trolls lurking off to the side—Norse trolls with scraggly hair and angry expressions on their faces. These figures are larger than his human beings. “Trolls aren’t small, they’re big,” Boggs says, “and they’re the essence of bad luck.” According to Bronwyn, when Boggs started chipping away at the Viking Curse six months ago, he began sitting in front of the diorama for several minutes every morning at sunrise “poking trolls with a stick and whispering something.”
“It’s not a ‘stick,’ said Boggs to me later. “It’s a runic staff with power.”
The Boggs basement also has a meditation room with big cushions, ambient music, a couple of hand-made drums from Japan, three gorgeous pieces of amber from Scandinavia, and a little stone fountain with a gentle trickle of water. In that room he keeps his new collection of bobbleheads—twenty bobbling dolls arranged on a table, several of them wearing Minnesota Viking uniforms. I first saw this group a couple of months ago. “Bobbleheads?” I said. “Really?”
“I love bobbleheads!” Boggs said. “They’re interesting. They have significant potential in terms of power. Any item as popular as a bobblehead is gonna have considerable power if it’s used properly.”
He customized the dolls. He glued new faces on them. He cut out magazine photos of the faces of three figures from Viking franchise history and glued them to the dolls with rubber cement. I knew their stories already; Boggs reminded me:
Max Winter, Viking president and co-owner back in the day. In early 1974 he was approached by Jim Finks, the team’s general manager and vice president, who asked to be paid what he was worth, a little slice of equity in the team. Winter said no. Finks quit in a huff. The best GM in the league walked out the door. One of the bleakest days in Minnesota football history.
Mike Lynn, Viking general manager in 1989. Hired by Winter. Supremely glib. Utterly confident in his expertise. He made the worst trade in NFL history, obtaining the services of running back Herschel Walker in exchange for a ridiculously generous parcel of players and draft picks.
Norm Van Brocklin, Viking head coach from 1961-66. A great athlete and an extremely bright football mind, he was also “an arrogant lout with precisely zero emotional intelligence,” said Boggs, “unless he had a camera on him.” The Dutchman, as he was known, imploded when the team kept losing, refusing, among other idiocies, to fully support Fran Tarkenton’s bold effort to re-invent the quarterback position in order to stay upright and physically intact.
Also part of the bobblehead collection are head coaches of the teams that beat the Vikings in Super Bowls in the 1970s: a Hank Stram doll wearing a bright red Kansas City Chiefs uniform, Don Shula of the Miami Dolphins, Chuck Noll of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and John Madden of the Oakland Raiders. The doll group also has several opposing players from the Super Bowls, Jack Tatum and so on. Boggs said, “Twenty bobbleheads that will soon meet their fate.”
On this April night, he petted Natasha and walked over to a wall, winding his way through stacks of papers. He pulled on a hook and unfurled a document that was several feet wide. At first I thought this was a map. He switched on a couple of spotlights and I saw it was a diagram with a dozen small photographs and arrows connecting the photos. He said, “I want to give you more background on how the Viking Curse manifested.”
“Sounds good.”
“One of the biggest ways was steroid cheating by their opponents in Super Bowls.”
The American Football League, he explained, was where steroids took hold in U.S. pro sports, starting with the San Diego Chargers in 1963 when head coach Sid Gillman encouraged his players use the steroid Dianabol. The drug’s mainstream function was to treat hypogonadism. Gillman saw that it also contributed to muscle building. He persuaded most of his guys to take one pill with every meal, five milligrams three times a day. They got bigger. They won the AFL championship that season. News about juice spread.
In football, Boggs said, muscle mass resulting from steroids can make a decisive difference in the trenches. “Juice is not gonna help your quickness or reaction times. But it will help you increase your muscle poundage and strength. If a team has three or four linemen on ’roids, and the other team doesn’t, the juicers are gonna win seven out of ten games if all other factors are equal.”
The key evangelist for steroids in those early days was a strength coach named Alvin Roy. “He worked for the Chargers during the Gillman regime,” said Boggs. “He moved to the Chiefs in 1968 and stayed there for a while. In the ’70s he moved on to the Cowboys and Saints in the NFC and then the Raiders in the AFC. He was the Johnny Appleseed of steroids.”
“So the NFC did some juicing too? The old NFL?”
“Some. Not nearly as much. The NFL was established and cautious. The AFL was bold and renegade and desperate to catch up so they could get the big TV bucks. The Minnesota Vikings were literally the last team in pro football to use steroids.”
He handed me a photocopy of a column written by Sid Hartman of the Minneapolis Tribune published in 1975. Boggs had hired a researcher to comb through library microfilm looking for the column “because I remembered reading it back then and I wanted to be sure my memory was correct.” Hartman wrote that the Vikes were regarded by players on other teams as the “bad body specialists of pro football.”
“I puzzled about that sentence,” said Boggs. “What the heck does ‘bad body specialist’ mean? A guy with a bad body is not going to be a pro football player. I will tell you what it means. It means the Vikings didn’t do steroids. They had regular athletic bodies. Other teams used steroids and had much bigger bodies. Hartman felt he couldn’t refer directly to steroids so he hinted.”
He unfurled a film screen, turned on a projector, and played a compilation of Super Bowl video that he got from YouTube. One sequence showed Jim Marshall, Viking defensive end, a guy who weighed maybe 220 pounds after a long hard season, getting destroyed, basically, by offensive tackles who were much larger. Shocking stuff. Another sequence focused on Viking center Mick Tingelhoff, a Pro Bowl caliber player who “weighed 230 pounds soaking wet,” Boggs said. He played nose-to-nose in Super Bowl IX against Steeler defensive tackle Ernie Holmes, 300-plus pounds. “Big Ernie kicked Little Mick’s ass,” said Boggs. The Vikings gained 17 yards on the ground that day.
Ernie’s destruction of Mick is a smoking gun for steroid use, Boggs said, along with the Hartman column and “plenty of other stuff.” He recited a list:
Jim Haslett, a Steeler in the ’70s, came clean, years later, about his team’s juicing obsession. For daring to tell the truth, he got slapped down hard by the game’s poobahs. He can’t show his face in Pittsburgh to this day. Ex-Steeler Steve Courson also ’fessed up and was similarly shunned before his death.
An inordinate number of health problems beset ex-AFL/AFC linemen (Ernie Holmes, etc.) including premature death from heart attacks. “Steroids do a number on brain tissue and the heart,” Boggs said. Alvin Roy, he added, died of a heart attack at age 58.
At Super Bowl XVI, during player introductions, Vikings stood in a stadium corridor looking over at the Raiders and were stunned at how big they were. The Vikings looked flat-out frightened, according to Raider recollections.
Sports Illustrated knew the truth about steroids. The magazine published major drug pieces including ones in 1969 and 1985. Its great football writer Paul Zimmerman spoke out often, including an interview in the San Jose Mercury News in 1994.
Viking head coach Bud Grant knew all about steroids, Boggs continued, but was “imbued with a variant of ‘Minnesota Nice’—‘Minnesota Silent and Stoical.’” On a couple of occasions Bud mentioned the mess to friends including Sid Hartman “but that was the extent of his interest in speaking the truth.”
Hank Stram and Chuck Noll knew the full steroid story and failed to speak up. “Hank Stram”—Boggs shook his head— “he hired this sleazy juiced-up strength coach, Alvin Roy, as soon as he could get his oily little hands on him.” Stram not only cheated in the Super Bowl, he “stood there on the sideline gloating about it for NFL Films for all the world to see and hear.”
Boggs spoke about Stram with a sense of contempt I rarely heard from him. This reaffirmed my feeling that dealing with this curse wasn’t a game for him, as many things are, it was a down-and-dirty battle against something bad.
“So teams cheated,” I said.
“Flagrantly.”
“And got away with it.”
“Got away with it, won Super Bowls, became legendary. All based on lies. I’ll add one thing. In the regular season, the Vikings competed a lot better with those guys. In September of ’70 the Vikes easily beat the Chiefs eight months after losing to them in the Super Bowl. In ’72 they came within one play of beating Miami during the Dolphins unbeaten season. ’73 against the Raiders. ’76 against the Steelers. And so on.”
“And?”
“The AFL/AFC guys avoided juice during the regular season. They knew all about steroid cycling. With juice, less is more. You save it for special occasions like the playoffs and get more bang for your buck.”
“Why didn’t the Vikings do steroids in those days?”
“They liked being old school. Frozen tundra, real grass, North Woods toughness, ‘We’re gonna win the old-fashioned way, we’re gonna earn it.’ This team culture was created by Marshall, Bill Brown, Joe Kapp, a couple of other guys. There’s an interview with Kapp on YouTube. This is a man with credibility. It oozes out of him. He talks about core Viking values. He describes his teammates as ‘honest’ and puts so much emphasis on the word. He’s implying something there—‘We’re honest and those guys aren’t. We’re clean, they’re dirty. We’re legal, they’re illegal.’”
“But steroids weren’t illegal in the ’60s and ’70s, were they?”
“You're right, they weren’t. The league didn’t take action until the ’80s. Pete Rozelle stuck his head in the sand for years. Technically speaking, steroids were legal, but they created an unfair advantage for the users. The juiceheads were aware they had an unfair advantage, went ahead with it, and covered up. That’s cheating, wouldn’t you say?”
“No question.”
“Y’know, there's value in telling the truth, fair play, transparency, accountability. This quaint thing called 'a sense of conscience' has meaning.”
“Absolutely, Boggs. But didn't the Vikes eventually come around to steroids? By the ’80s?”
“Definitely by the ’80s. Every team in the NFL had juicers by then, sad to say. But you and I are focusing on four Super Bowls in the ’70s that are fundamental to the Minnesota Viking narrative.”
“What about steroids today in the NFL?”
“I have no idea.”
“OK, so, steroids are a manifestation of the curse,” I said. “What’s the source of the curse? Where did it come from?”
“Ah.” Boggs walked over to a marble pedestal, his place of honor for special books and artworks he wants to discuss. On this platform was a very large book. He flipped on a spotlight to illuminate it. I walked over to look.
“It’s a Bible,” said Boggs. “I found it eighteen months ago. It was sitting on a bottom shelf in a church basement in Northumbria. Took me years to track it down.” This, he continued, was a “significant new primary source about the historical Vikings. And it’s the missing piece in the curse puzzle. It pinpoints the exact origin. Once I knew that, I could start thinking about how to get rid of the damn thing.”
He opened the book. The text was in Latin, beautiful penmanship, “inscribed by hand more than a thousand years ago.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“I wrote a big check. It’s a rental. I need to return it in a year.”
He leafed through the volume and arrived at the Book of Revelation, where the margins of one page were filled with tiny handwriting, the work, said Boggs, of a monk novitiate named William of Covenham, who witnessed a Viking attack on the Scottish island of Iona on September 13, 795. He hid in the rafters, eluded detection, inscribed his observations for posterity, and signed his name.
Boggs read, translating from William's Latin: “Men landed in boats. They were forty in number. They rampaged and killed. Eleven of my brothers died. People were taken as slaves. The raiders killed and laughed. Their lust was for blood. They lit fires. They ran in and out of the flames screaming like wildcats in the forest.’”
William gives details on Viking vessels, clothing, and weaponry. One of the Vikings had a helmet with small sharp horns, which, according to Boggs, overturns the standard archaeological belief that Norse helmets didn’t have horns.
“William says the attack lasted an hour,” said Boggs. “He climbed down from his hiding place and walked through the smoking devastation. He gave last rites to the dead. He comforted a dog. He walked down to the beach where the men had landed. He could see grooves made in the rocky sand by ships. He looked out to sea and sank to his knees in prayer. And at that moment, he writes, ‘The pagan arrived on the beach and stood next to me.’”
Boggs said, “I believe this ‘pagan’ was a local shaman. I believe Iona had a skilled shaman in residence in 795. I’ve seen such a person mentioned in a chronicle. He was a healer. The monks consulted with him when one of them got sick. He lived well apart from the monastery. Nobody knew his name. This mystery was an aspect of his power.”
The shaman spoke to William, saying that a pagan curse should be placed upon the invaders. This was an odd suggestion to make to a monk-in-training, but William agreed, perhaps, said Boggs, because he was in shock. Boggs read from William's writing: “‘The pagan and I spoke the curse. We spoke it again and again. For three days and three nights we spoke the curse and we did not rest. We cursed the Norse and we cursed their progeny.’”
The shaman knew his stuff, said Boggs—“He knew what would hurt. The curse called upon the power of trolls, runes, and Loki the Trickster to inflict suffering upon the Vikings. Maybe this shaman was an ex-Viking. Maybe he got kicked out of a Viking village for some reason. Cast adrift in a rowboat on the North Sea. Maybe he wanted revenge.”
The curse took hold. “Not every curse does,” Boggs continued, “but if you get a shaman and a monk on the holy island of Iona pouring their souls into a spell, you’ve got some oomph behind it. And, very importantly, if you have people getting carted off as slaves, you’ve got a bunch of unhappy folks contributing.”
When the Vikings returned to their base of operations near Stavanger, things went south, according to documents Boggs found in a private library. The village was hit by smallpox. A fair number died. Many people in the region came to realize, or believe, a curse had been issued. They passed their belief on to their children and grandchildren.
“What's interesting is, the warriors weren't scared away from Iona. They were never scared by anything. They raided the island several times in subsequent years. They doubled down, their later raids were like ‘You're not gonna stop us.’ Anyway, the curse has been lurking in a corner of the human psyche ever since.”
The curse was shaped for small-scale work, he said. “It may have contributed to some Viking battle losses. In the 1600s it may have been involved in some nasty witch hunts. Eventually it hit the football team.”
“How did it cross the ocean?”
“Somebody named Larsen or Olsen or Haugsrud probably carried it over.”
“What happened to William and the shaman?”
“Dunno. They disappeared from history.”
Even though the curse damaged the Minnesota Vikings in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, Boggs “didn’t know enough about deep forces” to grasp the problem. He didn’t see anything exotic in Viking Super Bowl losses nor in the loss in January of 1988 to the Washington Redskins in the National Football Conference championship game.
By the late ’90s, Boggs was a curse expert. In January of ’99, the Vikings played the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC championship game. “The Vikings were the best team in the league,” he said. “They may have been the best team in the history of the league.” But in that game, star Viking defensive lineman John Randle, who had been injury-free for years, was banged up. And the infallible kicker Gary Anderson suddenly became fallible, missing a field goal by inches in the fourth quarter. The team lost in overtime. “And I lost thirty grand,” said Boggs. “I was curious about what might have happened. I found a few useful texts”—he waved his hand in the direction of a bookshelf—“but nothing definite.”
In 2009-10, the Vikings again had the league’s best team, according to Boggs. They played the New Orleans Saints in the NFC championship game and narrowly lost. “The officiating was horrible. The Saints built their game around deliberately trying to injure Vikings. The whole thing stank to high heaven.” He began to ponder the situation more seriously. At some point, he realized that our chanting in his front yard occasionally had blockages—not enough to keep us from doing the ceremonies, but enough to investigate. Suspecting a curse, he dug deeper: reading, traveling, interviewing, unearthing documents, watching old videos. Six months ago, as I say, he began conducting curse-removal rituals.
“You’re up for a walk?” he asked.
“Sure. Where to?”
“The fairgrounds. We'll do the ceremony there.” The grounds of the Minnesota State Fair are a mile east of his house.
“Whenever you're ready.”
He went to the kitchen to see Bronwyn. I looked again at the Bible sitting on the pedestal. It seemed to radiate some kind of energy—I felt something in my hands when I touched the cover—or was that my imagination? I reminded myself of a favorite Boggsian credo. He believes the phrase “my imagination” needs to be respected, it’s another way of saying “my deep intuition” and “the body poetic.”
We headed out the door. Boggs handed me a piece of warm buttered bread and we munched as we walked east on Carter. Boggs set a fast pace as usual. He was silent other than a comment about the chilly weather. We crossed Cleveland Avenue, cut across a parking lot to Commonwealth Avenue, and soon came to a fair entrance. The grounds were dark and deserted. We hiked along a main thoroughfare toward Snelling Avenue and arrived at our destination: Ye Old Mill, the famous amusement ride where boats float in a canal through a dark winding tunnel. The place was boarded-up for the off-season.
“I’ve rented it,” said Boggs.
“You rented the Old Mill?”
“Full access for thirty days in exchange for a large piece of change.”
“Paid to who?”
“The fair. They own it.”
I glanced in the direction of the fair administration building up the block near Snelling. “The fair rents stuff to people in the off-season?”
“They rent a few buildings. A few parking lots. Never the Old Mill ’til now. Money talks. They need a new roof for the Coliseum. I signed enough liability releases to choke a horse. Let’s go in.”
He unlocked a side door and we entered a dark space. He flipped a switch. Bright light filled the room. Boats were stacked up in the corners.
“The canal has water in it!” I exclaimed.
“Sixty thousand gallons.”
“How deep is it?”
“Just a couple of feet. I’ve been filling it for a few days. Earlier today I checked it out and got some other stuff ready.”
“All we need now is for the paddlewheel to work.”
“Yup.” He reached behind a partition, pushed a button, and the wheel commenced turning, creating a bubbly churn.
“Very cool,” I said.
A couple of industrial-sized fans stood near the canal, six feet tall, not running. I asked about their purpose but got no answer. Boggs was preoccupied with something in the canal, a white plastic sheet covering a large object. He grasped a sheet corner and said, “Give me a hand here.” We lifted. And there it was: a Viking boat.
“Whoa,” I said. Boggs smiled proudly.
It was a miniature version of a Viking vessel of the type that might be displayed in an Oslo museum after archaeological extraction from a peat marsh. “Nine feet, stem to stern,” said Boggs. “Built in Wabasha by a boatsmith named Inglesrud with a lot of help from me. I hauled it up here yesterday.”
It was sleek and streamlined, with a bold prow and of course a dragon’s head. I’ve assessed many a boat in my day; this was the most beautiful vessel I had ever seen. I pulled out my phone and shot a quick photo.
“We used walnut for the gunnels and sides,” said Boggs. “Maple for the benches. The dragon’s head is pine from Norway’s coast.”
“Nice. But it doesn’t have one of those Viking striped sails.”
“It has one. Folded-up and stored. We won’t need it. The paddlewheel and canal will propel us very nicely.” He jumped into the boat’s stern. The vessel barely rocked; it was wide, beamy, and stable, with a fairly deep draft. He reached under a bench, pulled out a parcel, removed the wrapping paper, and revealed the contents—a tool that looked somewhat like a hammer, very stocky and heavy-looking. He held it up and said “Thor’s hammer.”
“Thor’s hammer!” I exclaimed. I think my eyes boggled in amazement.
“A modern-day version of Mjollnir in all its might and main.” He held the hammer with reverence, as if it carried knowledge he needed.
“Where do you go to find Thor’s hammer?”
“Denmark. Custom-made for me. Made of iron mostly. I buried it in the sand at Iona for nine days and nights to give it strength. And I placed it overnight in a stone ring under a full moon.”
I hefted the thing. It weighed a good ten pounds or more. Inscribed on the barrel were half-a-dozen runic symbols. I have a decent working knowledge of runestones; these particular symbols focused on power and destruction.
“We’ll have some fun with it,” Boggs said, “along with a few other items I’ve got here.” He reached under the sheet and brought out what looked like a telescoping fishing rod about 18 inches long. He pulled on it, extending it to six or seven feet. “The exact right tool for the job,” he said, “as we shall see shortly.”
He again reached under the sheet, this time bringing out two shot glasses and a Thermos. “Let’s offer a toast to success,” he said. He poured liquid from the container into the glasses. “Aquavit mixed with birch sap,” he said. “Made it myself. Pretty good stuff.”
We clinked glasses, said “Skål!”, and drank, Boggs saying, “Vi søker ydmykt hjelp”—“We humbly seek assistance.” He was fluent in Norwegian and I had picked up a fair bit of the language. I climbed into the boat’s bow. Boggs poured a dollop of aquavit into the water “as a libation.” He shoved the vessel in motion and jumped into the stern. The tunnel entrance was twenty feet away. A sign over the entry said ‘Keep Your Hands INSIDE the Boat.” This directive was about to be ignored.
We entered another world, pitch black, blessedly quiet after the churn of the paddlewheel. We went around a curve and approached a light. The Old Mill, I recalled, has several dioramas embedded in its walls—well-lit grottoes holding little scenes, tableaus, vignettes of rural life, so far as I remembered from my youth. We floated past a couple of these on our left—generic plastic farmhouses, little cows, goats, trees. “Coastal Norway,” said Boggs. “I revamped the dioramas to suit our purposes.”
Continuing on, we came to a large diorama space on our right, a frame six feet wide and four feet high, brightly lit. The boat stopped. Boggs had dropped a small anchor. The scene consisted of a creek made of blue plastic that looked somewhat like water. A bridge crossed the creek, six feet long with an arch to it, vaguely medieval and stone-like in appearance, also plastic. Boggs yanked the fishing pole to its full length. He thrust it into the diorama, inserting the hooked tip under the bridge. There was something in there he wanted to retrieve. He felt around for a few seconds and cried “Gotcha!” He pulled out….a troll carved from wood. It was a foot tall, much larger than the ones in his home diorama. This creature now stood in front of the bridge, beautifully ugly, holding in its arms a little tablet. I recognized this as a runestone. I couldn’t quite make out the rune symbol.
“Forbannelsen må dø!” Boggs cried—“The curse must die!” There was silence for a moment. Then a click—a very distinctive click—the cocking of a pistol. Boggs was leaning out of the boat pointing his Korth .357 Magnum at the troll. He was smiling. He shouted “Dø!”—“Die!” And damned if he didn’t pull the trigger. The tunnel seemed to explode, a flash of light, thunderous noise, an acrid smell of gunpowder. The troll and runestone crumbled and a hole got punched into the back of the diorama. Boggs admired the scene. “One eighty grain, hollow point,” he said, referring to the bullet. He lifted the anchor and said “Part One completed.”
My ears were ringing and I was quite unsettled but I had to know: “What rune was the troll holding?”
“Haegl. The rune of hailstorms. Bad luck.”
“Why was the troll hiding under the bridge?”
“That’s where they often hide. They need to be captured. Capturing a troll imparts great power.”
“Why didn’t you have Loki the Trickster in there and shoot him too?”
“Oh my God no. We want Loki alive. We want him on our side in this thing. He’s flexible. Anyway, I’m not sure he’s killable.”
We floated onward. We came to a diorama on our left and stopped. A white sheet inside this frame covered something. Boggs cried “Behold!” and pulled the sheet away, revealing a football, an ordinary regulation-size NFL ball. It sat in a large glass serving tray that held maybe a pint of liquid and a bunch of wood shavings. I smelled turpentine.
“It’s the Sixty-Five Toss Power Trap ball,” said Boggs. “The actual ball.”
Sixty-Five Toss Power Trap was a key scoring play for the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl IV against the Vikes. Hank Stram chirruped about the play like a rabid chipmunk: “Sixty-Five Power Trap! Yahhhh!” His yammerings can be seen on YouTube to this day.
Boggs lit a long wooden match and ignited a fuse that led into the diorama. A few seconds later the tray erupted in flames, engulfing the football. “Forbannelsen er døende,” he said: “The curse is dying.” We watched the fire for half a minute. There was a fair bit of smoke. I was grateful for the tunnel’s good ventilation.
Boggs lifted the anchor and said, “Part Two completed.” As we floated away, the tray and ball continued to burn.
“You’re not worried about burning the place down?”
“Nah,” he replied. “I put a lot of fireproofing in there. We’ll extinguish the fire in a few minutes. I want that football burned to a crisp.”
The next and final diorama came up to our right. I braced myself for something weird. Something weird came forth. When the boat stopped, Boggs reached into the space and removed another white sheet, revealing—oh my God—there in all its glory was his bobblehead collection, twenty dolls lined up on a wooden platform, apparently glued to the wood, standing at attention as if waiting for further instruction, heads wiggling from the sheet removal.
Boggs stood. He said, quietly and fervently, “Fra dette oyeblikket er forbannelsen over Minnesota Vikings slukket! Kraften til Odin tvinger forbannelsen til a vaere borte! Hjelp oss Loki! Hjelp oss Thor!” All of which basically meant, “Begone curse! Assist us, gods!”
He lifted Thor’s hammer with both hands, extended his arms all the way upward, and with a bellow—“ArrrrRAH!!”—brought the hammer down onto the wooden platform, splintering it into chunks. He climbed out of the boat and into the diorama and continued swinging, shouting “ALL of it!” repeatedly—“ALL OF IT!!”—enemy bobbleheads destroyed—cheaters consigned to nether regions—Viking screw-ups wiped off the books—Max Winter’s wacky decision-making—Mike Lynn’s arrogance—Norm Van Brocklin’s lunacy—all Viking humiliations and bad memories fully acknowledged in this super-heated moment and then crushed by mighty blows: fullbacks crashing through Viking lines in Super Bowls—Hank Stram strutting on the sideline—Jack Tatum of the Raiders cheap-shotting Sammy White almost into two pieces and no Viking lineman sprinting out on the next play and taking out Tatum at his knees—Steelers helping a dazed Fran Tarkenton up to his feet, Steelers helping up the Viking quarterback, and no Viking, nary a one, rushing over to smack those Steelers in their mouths and scream “Get your goddamn paws off my quarterback” because if they had done so, golly gee whiz, they might have gotten a penalty and Bud Grant might have become perturbed—Alan Page blowing off his fourth Super Bowl loss in 1977 with, basically, “Eh, who cares, nobody.” Boggs shouted “THIS HAMMER is who we are!” and “WE are the warriors with honor!” and “FUCK Minnesota Nice!”—he found his righteous Minnesota Fury—I had no idea there was so much of it. He swung and smashed and turned the scene into rubble. The Hank Stram doll lay in pieces but the head was intact. Boggs saw this and WHOMP came the hammer upon the face.
He got back in the boat, breathing hard. He sat there for a while. “Any questions?” he asked.
“No questions.”
He lifted the anchor and we floated on in silence. After a minute we arrived back at our starting point. I assumed the ceremony was done. My basic feeling was “Wow.” I also thought, “This will make a good chapter in the bio and do some good for the football team.”
“We’re not done yet,” said Boggs. He emptied out the contents of the boat and placed the stuff on the deck—hammer, pistol, and so on, also a fire extinguisher I hadn’t noticed before. The only thing left in the vessel was a small bale of straw I also hadn’t seen. He spread out the straw in the boat, unscrewed the top of a plastic one-gallon bottle, and poured the contents onto the straw. Turpentine again.
“What the hell?” I said.
“We’re gonna burn the boat.”
I resolved years ago never to be surprised by anything Boggs did but this one flummoxed me. My impulse was to embrace that beautiful boat and protect it with my life. Boggs proceeded with his plan. He switched on the big fans. He switched off the room’s main light. He tossed a lit wooden match into the straw. Flames whooshed. In a minute the whole boat was burning and a lot of smoke billowed. I was speechless. Almost. I said, rather weakly, “Isn’t that bad for the Vikings, to burn their boat?”
“It’s good for the Vikings. Fire and smoke represent profound cleansing for the Norse. It’s connecting to Valhalla and the spirit world. It’s starting over on a higher and stronger plane.” He tossed something in the water. “The rune for birch,” he said. “Beorc. Renewal.”
We watched the flames. Boggs poured out another round of aquavit. We drank to the end of a thousand-year curse and he said, “Let’s clean up around here and go have some soup. And place a few bets on the Minnesota Vikings kicking ass.”
The End
Harald Frost is a writer who lives in Minnesota and California.
