You can't move in York for Vikings at the moment. Mini-Vikings doing battle drill, Mummy Vikings minding the mini-Vikings and Daddy Vikings doing roaring and fighting and being generally fierce, but not so much as to frighten away the half-term tourists.

Yes, it's Jorvik Viking Festival time again, and I love it. So much so that I've decided to adopt a Viking name. Having consulted a delightfully tongue-in-cheek website (www.thequarter.org/Media/ VikingName.php) I am, for one week only, to be known as Kadlin Sheeptipper.

Now, no tittering at the back there. I had to answer some very insightful questions to earn this title: how rare do I like my meat, what is my favourite animal, how tough am I, and what do I think of heralds. (Heralds? I don't, generally.)

The results make me out to be a pretty so-so Viking. Apparently my gregariousness means I would not strike sufficient fear into the hearts of victims and I would only be allowed on to a longship to add ballast. "Try to be more surly," the report advises.

I did this for my husband, too, who does surliness naturally, and his name emerged as Stafngrimr Madhorse. He quite likes it.

Neither of us make the grade as a 'berserker', which is probably just as well or sales time would be a bloodbath. Berkserkers were frontline warriors, coked up on hallucinogenic mushrooms, who rampaged into battle in bearskins not caring whether they lived or died.

I don't believe I've heard the fact about mushrooms during the wonderfully doomy narration to the annual clash of weapons at the Eye of York (which takes place next Saturday). But then I might not have been listening properly. I get confused by all the names and opposing forces. Eric Bloodaxe and Harald Hardraada seem to crop up fairly frequently, though not necessarily at the same time. But shouldn't Noggin the Nog and Nogbad the Bad be in there somewhere?

I know they do a different battle every year, but to the uninitiated they all end up with re-enactment society Regia Anglorum beating their shields and running around and writhing in simulated death throes. Still, it's a great crowd-pleaser, and the daughter loves it when they charge at us with their swords at the end. She is made of doughty stuff: her Viking name is Asa Foesmasher.

Miss Foesmasher and her friends actually composed a Viking saga at last year's festival, with the help of Adrinskald the Bard, aka performance poet Adrian Spendlow. I am shamelessly plugging the saga-spinner's booklet, Road To Ragnarok, because it features their unintentionally Pythonesque poem which includes the line, 'We sneak in for the kill like tiptoeing ballerinas'.

Perhaps Hardraada's men should try this as a diversionary tactic next time they re-enact the Battle of Fulford.

Talking of which, an old schoolfriend of mine, Sharon, currently residing in Tasmania, came over to the UK to research the battle. She took me and Little Miss Foesmasher on a delightful walk over Fulford Ings, a place I knew only by reputation from all the press coverage of the plans to build 720 new homes on Germany Beck.

The area, surprisingly close to the city, was hauntingly beautiful and the wildlife was stunning. Tramping the boggy ground, Sharon (who also calls herself Spit, and she isn't even a Viking) described how the Norwegians - aided by renegade earl Tostig - trapped the English army and drove them into the marsh.

We looked out over reeds and tried to imagine the morass of mangled bodies. The Battle of Fulford was pivotal, triggering a sequence of events that lead to the Norman Conquest of Britain. As far as I'm concerned, the butterflies and the ghosts of the ancient dead should be left in peace. I'm relieved that the Government has called the development in for a public enquiry.

Fulford Battlefield Society is describing these scenes in their very own Yorkshire preface to the Bayeux Tapestry. If you want to get involved there's a hands-on session at Fulford Social Hall this Saturday and next in which you can make your very own stitch in time.

I remember fondly the boat-burning finale to Viking Festivals of yesteryear, the dragon-prowed boat sailing majestically up the Ouse in a hail of flaming arrows (until health and safety concerns put paid to it). This year's festival climax, on February 25, rings the changes, finishing not with fighting and fireworks at Clifford's Tower - we've had that already on November 5 - but with a royal wedding in York Minster.

At the press launch this week, during which a snarling Viking face uncannily reminiscent of the Dark Mark was projected on to Clifford's Tower, a television interviewer asked Adrinskald (he gets everywhere) whether all this romantic wedding stuff meant that York's Vikings were going soft.

"Of course we're f***ing not," interrupted a hirsute Viking from behind him. "We're off to do some womanising after this."

Some traditions never die. Lock up your daughters.

Updated: 15:57 Friday, February 17, 2006