The Vikings Have Landed

Over a millennium ago the Vikings were exploring, raiding, trading, and invading their way around Europe and across the northern Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland and even on to touch Canada. They’ve been a little quiet in more recent times, but not so long ago a longship slipped quietly out to sea. Organised and equipped by Henrik of Kobenhavn, the Penol Expedition has sailed in record time from Dansk (Denmark) to the far-away lands of Udgaard. And so just a few days ago I returned home to be greeted “Heil ock sæl” the red Viking “Skjoldungen”, leader of the expedition.

Penol is a Danish writing instruments company. They (via their predecessors) were the Parker distributors in Scandinavia from 1905, and from the 1930’s they also manufactured Parkers themselves in their own Danish factory, but this ended in the 1960’s. Times change though, and these days their homepage states “The entire production of Penol products is now outsourced to leading manufacturers of writing instruments. The manufacturers are placed all over the world, primarily in South East Asia, and Europe.”

So, without further to-do, here is the Penol Party that arrived on my doorstep.

Vikings, fanning out across the world.

First the Penol P200. Obviously an economy model – hmmm, times have changed, a Viking dressed in fluorescent pink? Odin and Thor are probably rolling their eyes. I don’t know the price of these pencils but assuming the P200 is priced at an economy level then it looks fairly reasonable. Pictured with the P200 we have an unknown model. It is apparently Penol, but they do not put their name or anything on it. They are rightly ashamed of this nasty little side-clicker.The Penol Double-Click. A seemingly respectable vanishing point pencil. The rubber grip is a bit of a monstrosity though.

Another fluorescent one, this time the Penol Pastel with a long twist out eraser cartridge.

The Penol Elite. Again the rubber grip. Penol definitely seem to like their rubber grips.

The Penol Tyre. Grrrr, this is a shocker. Well, I kind of applaud the idea, but the execution is abysmal. It’s just a plain white barrelled pencil and they have glued on the tyre-tread decoration. But the tyre tread is quite raised, about 1mm thick rubber sheet, and it’s poorly glued, so that it’s starting to lift off. Surely a few hours or days of constant use would cause all sorts of skids and crashes as the tread lifted.

Keen eyed readers may have noted there is one more Penol in the original picture - . more on that one next time.

Whilst this was a Penol expedition, the ship captain was not Penol, and we finish this saga with expedition leader Skjoldungen (newly named Fafnersherre), a sturdy wooden fellow, like his longship.Henrik tells me that back in the good old days there was the Viking Pencil Co, and as he recalls things, they manufactured the Viking in three grades - No. 1 Soft, No. 2 HB and No. 3 Hard. There was an office pencil too, yellow in HB only. No ferules or erasers. Sometime in the 70’s they were discontinued and the Viking factory closed, the end of a piece of Danish cultural history. However in 2005, Esselte started to offer pencils under the Viking brandname. Apparently the demand for Viking pencils is rising and recently the yellow office version came back too.

So thanks Henrik, another saga for the annals of the people.