New Viking Clothing Book

Apparently there is now available a new book that purports to be a genuine how-to guide about making Viking era costume (unlike Thor Ewing's book, which is a survey of the applicable scholarship, livened with his own speculations).  The Jelling Dragon, a web site that supplies items to Viking age reenactors, is selling it here. According to the Jelling Dragon site, it comes with sewing patterns. The author is a Norwegian woman named Nille Glaesel, and the text will be in both English and Norwegian.  Jelling Dragon includes a number of page shots that make the layout look wonderful, but there isn't enough information there to know what finds the author has used for her proposed reproductions, or whether Glaesel discusses any of the scholarship or archaeology in the text.

Jelling Dragon is selling the book for $93.13 USD (£60, €71.45) so I won't be able to afford it for awhile (the summer is the worst time of all for my personal finances). I am eager to read and critique it, but that's unlikely to happen before the end of the year at this rate. If any of my readers obtain a copy, please comment here!  I would really appreciate the advance information.

EDIT:  Here's a bit more about Ms. Glaesel's book, from her website.  Apparently Thor Ewing wrote the forward to her book. I look forward to getting a copy, but suspect I'll be buying the Lithuanian costume calendar first. 

MedCos--A Resource

Those of my readers with too much time on their hands may have noticed that one of the sites listed on my side bar in the "Costume Resources" section is MedCos. I think MedCos is a very useful site, and it occurred to me that many of my readers who don't know about it might benefit from exploring it.  (Disclaimer: I happen to know about MedCos because I'm one of the moderators for the site. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about my objectivity.)

MedCos is a browser-based mailing list primarily for people interested in the historic costume of the time periods covered by the Society for Creative Anachronism (i,e, from antiquity until 1600 C.E.). (There are forums for post-SCA period costume and fantasy costume and they have some interesting photographs and posts associated with them, but the main thrust is pre-1600 CE costuming.) It's free, though the software (based upon an old educational software package, as I understand it) requires you to log in to see the site. However, if you don't want to give even the minor amount of information necessary to start a login account, you can hit the button marked "login as a guest", and the software will allow you to read posts, and look at all the other resources on the site--the only thing  for which you need an account is to post messages in the forums.

The various forums are broken down by time period, and they are moderated. I am the MedCos moderator for the Early Period, 11th-12th century, and 13th century forums. People with accounts can choose to read as many of them as they wish, and can enter settings that will send messages from the forums they choose directly to their preferred mailbox.

If you do stop by to take a look, you'll notice that the forums are not terribly active. I think that's because a lot of the more experienced costumers, who drove most of the discussions, have gone on to other things, and that we have a lot of members who simply read and do not post. However,  even without active discussions there is still plenty of interesting and useful information on the site. Each forum has a photo gallery and one or more resource lists associated with it. The resource lists include things like URLs of websites with useful information and book lists. The photo gallery features recreation costumes by the members of MedCos. In addition, some of the older posts also contain photographs of members' costumes, since the software permits that--and some of those costumes are really awesome!

Even if no one ever adds any information or writes any posts for any of the MedCos forums ever again, there is a large amount of useful information there. If any of this sounds interesting to you, log in as a guest and look around. Who knows? If enough interested people do that and decide to get a regular account, the forums might come to life again!

Speculation on Apron Dress Decoration

Although there are several posts I mean to write about apron dresses, I have been seriously lacking in sufficient concentration to do so lately. Instead, I will simply make a few notes that occurred to me as I read Hilde Thunem's latest (July 15, 2010) revision of her essay on the evidence for Viking era apron dress design.  Many of the latest changes relate to evidence for how apron dresses were trimmed or decorated.  These notes are mostly to clarify my own thoughts about the information provided in Thunem's essay, which I commend to the attention of any interested readers; please feel free to stop reading here if the subject bores you.

The latest updates to Thunem's draft include more information about the finds from the female graves at Birka than I'd previously had.  One theme is that, of the eight Birka grave finds that have significantly-sized apron dress fragments, all appear to feature some kind of trimming:  either an added silk band on a woolen or linen dress (graves 464, 834, 835); a woollen tablet-woven band (grave 1090); or a braided string of some kind (graves 954, 511, 973, 1083, 1084, 563, 838).  The Køstrup find also appears to include a tablet woven band (though this is not clear from the photograph of the find that appears in Ewing's Viking Clothing, and the Pskov dress definitely used rare, colorful, patterned bands of silk as trim.  Interestingly, Thunem notes that Anne Stine Ingstad has reported on a find from Kaupang that appears to show a piece of tablet-woven trim sewn to another piece of cloth, and that Ingstad mentions that a similar find that was associated with an apron dress was unearthed at Vaernes. 

It is possible, of course, that at least some of the silk-band and braided-string finds are remains of bands or strings used to hang tools from a brooch, and were never attached to the apron dress at all (and Thunem observes that Hägg raises this point).  Kirsten Petterson's article, which I referred to in this post, discusses a find from the cemetery at Barshalder that appeared to have used a "lucetted" string to hold beads, and strings were also found in connection with the Vaernes find (see my last post).  Much depends on the position in which the band or string was found, and the location of the bands or strings found in some of the Birka graves is ambiguous, as Thunem notes.  Still, there seems to be some support in the Birka finds for modest ornament of these types.

Of some interest in this regard is Thunem's observation that the apron dress finds appear to have been hemmed by turning down the edge of the fabric by about 4-5 mm and stitching it in place.  The edge was folded down on the inside surface of the dress, but Thunem reports an interesting comment by Hägg in this regard:  "Inga Hägg comments that the hemming stitches would usually be invisible on wool, but would show up clearly on linen, which may account for the positioning of the band."  So there may have been a reason to sew something down on top of the stitched area, at least on wool linen dresses.

Thunem also reports an interesting comment by Ingstad that may suggest evidence on an issue where little evidence has been found--namely, the length of apron dresses.  One of the fragments shows that a cord was sewn to the edge of a tablet-woven braid that in turn was sewn to a fragment.  Thunem reports that, according to Ingstad, the tablet-woven bands sewn to clothing "would have run along either the top or the bottom of the garment. Ingstad believes that the woollen string sewn to the edge of the band indicate that the band and string was placed at the bottom of the smokkr. She cites that similar strings have been used to protect against wear in Norwegian and Danish folk costumes."

If Ingstad's theory is correct, it would suggest that apron dresses were floor length, since the obvious reason to protect the bottom edge of a garment is to protect it from friction with the ground or with floors.  However, if the cord was sewn on to protect the hem from friction, it would likely show some kind of wear from brushing the ground.  Thunem does not report such an observation by Ingstad.*  (I guess Ingstad's report needs to get added to my list of reports to seek out.)**

*A contrarian might say that the cord would show no wear if the dress had been specially made for the funeral.  However, the fact that such a dress was made from wool and trimmed in wool, instead of even more luxurious fabrics, coupled with the fact that apron dress finds usually feature textile tools or personal items such as needlecases or earspoons, suggest, at least to me, that Viking women were buried in clothes they had worn in life, even if the clothes were their best outfits.

**No, pearl, that's not a request!

It Pays To Have Friends...

A few days ago, I wrote in a post that I would like to find Charlotte Blindheim's article about the Vaernes find, and Inga Hägg's article about the origins of the peplos.

Shortly thereafter, the wonderful pearl provided me with both!  Thanks again, pearl!

I have not had much time to digest either article, but I've already gleaned the following additional points that are giving me even more food for thought. 

• The Vaernes find, like some of the Birka apron dress finds, appears to have been a fine diamond-twill.  But....
• What may be a string loop also appears to have been found under the brooch that was part of the Vaernes find.  So perhaps the Vaernes find does not constitute an example of a "peplos" overdress where the pins were stuck directly through the cloth, after all.
• Hägg's article about the origins of the peplos, which I am still in the middle of reading, is fascinating.  It points out that the jewelry in the Bronze Age Danish finds has a lot in common with the early Hallstatt finds--as well as with ancient Greek finds, and Iron Age Baltic area jewelry (e.g., belts with large bronze bosses, headdresses made from fine bronze coils).  The implication is that the similarities in the jewelry finds indicate commonalities of costume--and that the peplos may well have found its way to northern Europe well before Rome.

What all of this might say about the provenance of the Viking age apron dress is hard to discern (and Hägg only hints at it in the article), but the possibilities are tantalizing.

A Few Random Thoughts About Apron Dress Origins

Hilde Thunem has continued to draft her article on the extant research into Viking apron dress design. As of the date and time of this post, she has added material about the Kostrup and Pskov finds, and mentions a number of less-discussed finds that provide less specific evidence, such as Adwick-le-Street, Kaupang, and Værnes.

One of the issues Thunem's new material touches upon is the murky question of the apron dress's origin.  I suspect that most reenactors assume that the apron dress descended from the Greek peplos--but I have yet to see a discussion of the evidence, if any, for this hypothesis. There is plenty of artistic evidence for women in Germania wearing the peplos from late antiquity into the Migration Period, and ample evidence that it was worn in Great Britain during those periods.  But those areas also demonstrably had ample trade and other contacts with Rome, and those contacts could have transmitted the peplos idea (which seems to have inspired the stola worn by early Roman matrons) to northern Europe.  Other than the Huldremose garment, which dates to the heyday of the Roman Empire, I know of no evidence that the peplos was worn (or, more exactly, continued to be worn given the existence of the Huldremose peplos) in Scandinavia until displaced by what is now often called the Viking apron dress.  

Thunem does not explicitly discuss whether the peplos is the ancestor of the apron dress, but she does mention a Viking age Scandinavian find, in Vaernes, Norway, where a tortoise brooch appears to have been pinned, not through a loop as is typical, but directly into fabric as would have been done with a peplos overdress.  Similar peplos finds in period have turned up in Finland (such as at Eura) and in parts of Latvia.

There are two possible reasons why there might be Viking era sites, such as Vaernes, that show evidence of the wearing of a peplos overdress instead of an apron dress with loops.  One is that the peplos sites involve coarser fabrics than the apron dresses do, and that apron dresses with loops were devised to avoid having to stick heavy pins into fine woolens and linens. Thunem repeats this theory in her draft. Unfortunately, I don't know whether the Eura "peplos" is coarse compared, say, to the fine lozenge twills of Birka or the apron dress remains of other sites.

The second reason may be that the finds involving peplos-style overdresses during the Viking age are in locations that were simply too far in the hinterlands to have become exposed to the apron-dress-with loops style.  It seems to be true that these finds seem to be in the far corners of the Viking world.  Vaernes is  far north of the active Viking trade centers such as Birka and Hedeby, while   Finland and Latvia are both east and north of those trade centers.  On the other hand, the Pskov dress definitely had loops, and Pskov is even farther east than Finland and about as far north.

It is also unclear what the existence of peplos-style dresses in these regions says about the origins of the apron dress.  The Imperial Roman era stola had straps, and Alexandra Croom states that the Greek garment from which it derived also had straps.  Does this mean that the Vaernes, Latvian and Finnish peploses descended from garments brought to those regions before Roman Imperial times?  Or did this fashion arise there, independently of any Roman or Greek trading activity?

I shall have to see whether I can locate the Blindheim writeup on the Vaernes find that Dr. Owen-Crocker references (and that Hilde Thunem cites in her article); that may indicate whether the Vaernes find, at least, is of a coarser fabric than the Birka and Hedeby fragments.

It's also worth noting that the stola--an overdress with straps, like the apron dress--fell out of fashion quite early in the Empire.  Croom states that by the second century CE, the surviving statues and artwork showing it appear to be of historical or mythological characters.  [A. Croom, Roman Clothing and Fashion,  at 74 (Tempus Publishing 2000)].  It seems odd, though far from impossible, that such a garment, which became unfashionable early in Rome's imperial career, might have evolved into a flourishing new fashion more than half a millennium later.

I also need to get my hands on the article by Inga Hägg where she discusses the possible origins of the apron dress.  

Missing Comments on this Blog

If you recently commented on an entry in this blog and the entry still appears to reflect "0 comments", please be assured that that doesn't mean I removed your comment. Blogger appears to have a bug which causes the number of comments on a post to be rendered incorrectly--but only if you're looking at the blog page as a whole. I've found that all the comments show if you're just looking at an individual post. See also this link.

EDIT: 7/7/2010 9:50 a.m. EDT--The problem may have been fixed. The post where I noticed it now shows the correct number of comments.

Mary Eirwen Jones's Embroidery Book

Periodically, when the opportunity presents itself, I purchase inexpensively priced, used books on costume-related subjects about which I know little or nothing.  My latest acquisition of this type is the following book:

Jones, Mary Eirwen.  A History of Western Embroidery. Littlehampton Book Services Ltd. (August 1969).  ISBN-10: 0289796555.

Often, such early survey-type histories are frustrating in that they contain much less useful information than the title or length implies.  A History of Western Embroidery is such a survey.   I would like to describe its limitations in the event any of my readers may be considering adding it to their libraries.

Ms. Jones purports to address the subject of embroidery in Europe  (and, briefly, America), from earliest times up to the period that was the "present" at the time her book was written.  With the exception of several introductory chapters about embroidery generally and about "Embroidery in Antiquity", and a final chapter about modern embroidery, the book is organized by region, with each chapter  being a miniature history of embroidery in that region.   England, France, Italy, Germany, Flanders, Switzerland and the Iberian peninsula are singled out for full-chapter treatment.

Unfortunately, (perhaps because her bibliography shows that she relied upon a limited number of secondary sources to inform her examination of  primary examples), Ms. Jones's history is annoyingly vague and general.  The following passage about embroidery in the time of Charlemagne illustrates both Ms. Jones's writing style and her unfortunate lack of specificity:

Charlemagne (768-814) did much by his strong and enlightened rule to extend civilization and develop the arts among his people.  Commerce and manufactures flourished in his reign and he fostered industries in Flanders, Brabant and other regions and maintained a high standard of culture at his court.  It is recorded that his mother, Bertha (nicknamed 'of the Big Feet') taught the art of embroidery to Charlemagne's daughters while the emperor's aunt, St. Giselle, fostered skill in needlework in the many convents which she established in Aquitaine and Provence.

Valuable information concerning the life of Charlemagne and the manners and customs of his times have been bequeathed to us in the writings of a monk, Eginhard, who lived at St. Gall in the time of the great emperor.  In the Vita Karolis Imperatoris one may learn of Charlemagne's state dress comprising 'a close fitting vest or jacket of gold embroidery, sandals or slippers set with precious stones; also a cloak or mantle fastened by a golden brooch or fibula aand a crown of gold, glistening with gems.'

That is all Ms. Jones has to say about embroidery in France at the court of Charlemagne, and precious little it is.  In her chapter on German embroidery she mentions in passing that a cope presented by Charlemagne survives at Metz Cathedral, but her description of it is  vague:  "Embroidered on it are great eagles with outstretched wings, their claws being bitten by legendary creatures.  Threads of yellow, blue and green are used for the representation."

Even sadder, the number of pictures is few (because of cost?  because of inability to obtain permission to use photographs? It's impossible to tell.  However, there is a substantial list of museums containing suitable specimens at the back of the book).

My greatest frustration with the text, unsurprisingly, is with the lack of material about early period embroidery work.  Although Ms. Jones takes pains to emphasize that the art of embroidery dates back to antiquity, she provides little information from which to form a idea of what the earliest embroideries must have been like.  For example, she describes an extant artifact from ancient Egypt, the funeral tent of Queen Isi-em-Kebs, apparently dated to the 10th century B.C.E., only as being "worked on a ground made of hundreds of pieces of gazelle hide adorned with twisted pink leather cord."  This artifact, which by its very antiquity and survival is more remarkable than the modern pieces that take up three full pages of the photograph section, does not even rate a small photograph.

Although I have not yet read very far in the text, the illustrations suggest that Ms. Jones is primarily interested in later works.  Most of the photographs she has selected are of embroideries that date from the 16th century or later, and with the exception of a too-small, black-and-white photograph of St. Cuthbert's stole (a 10th century Anglo-Saxon work), there are no photographs of embroideries from before the high Middle Ages. 

Overall, there are interesting nuggets of information about historic embroideries in Ms. Jones's work, but it requires frustrating amounts of effort to tease them out.  I have found much more information more conveniently organized on the Internet--and that is something that cannot truthfully be said for many costume-related topics.  In particular, I recommend the Historical Needlework Resources website for well organized information, with pictures, about embroidery in Europe and the Middle East from the 7th through 16th centuries.  This source is also limited, but for the scope of information it contains it is, in my opinion, more useful than Ms. Jones's book.  If I had not obtained this book for a low price ($8.29 USD, plus about $4 shipping), I would be disappointed indeed.

The Versatile Blogger Award

Esther, of the wonderful blog Costume Diaries, has passed on to me the Versatile Blogger award.  See?

I gather from her links that this is a peer-given award. Each awardee chooses five (5) new awardees and announces them, along with telling seven (7) facts about themselves.  The new awardees then respond in kind.

Yes, this is more than a bit like a chain letter.  (And like chain letters, no one seems to know who originated the award.)  But unlike a chain letter, the Versatile Blogger Award extorts no inappropriate monetary payment, makes no threats, and imposes no burdens.  It is simply a means to draw attention to, and praise, good work and good writing, so I'm more than willing to play.

There are many fine blogs, costume-related and otherwise, on the Internet.  I follow a number of them, and several of the costume-related ones are listed in the sidebar of this blog. In order to select a reasonable number of awardees from even the small subset of excellent blogs that I know about, I will choose blogs that are not only good, but that are demonstrably versatile, either in subject matter or otherwise.

FACTS: It's hard to know what facts about myself to select, but here goes nothing.

1.    Like most of the costumers I know, my day job has nothing to do with my interest in historic costume.  I am a member of a medium-sized law firm in Philadelphia, where I concentrate my practice in insurance-related law.

2.    Also like most of the costumers I know, I have a cat.  Her name is Sugar.  She likes to participate in my efforts by lying on top of my fabrics (she prefers wools and synthetics with "crunchy" textures) and carefully shredding the edges of my paper patterns.  You can see a picture of her here.

3.    Unlike many of the costumers I know, I am not a reenactor.  I am not even a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, though I have friends in the SCA and have attended a few events.

4.    Because my law practice doesn't give me sufficient leisure to do historic reenactment in the manner I consider appropriate, I mostly wear my creations at science-fiction conventions.  I have worn costumes at science-fiction conventions for almost as long as I have been a costumer.

5.    As my blog profile says, I've been costuming since I was 15 years old.  I'm now 51, which means that I've been costuming for 36 years.  You'd think I'd be a champion seamstress based on that fact, but the raw truth is that I'm not that fond of sewing.  Learning about costume, testing costume theories, and admiring costumes in action is what I truly enjoy.

6.   I've had so much fun writing this blog, that I started another blog recently, Food Through Time.  As you might expect, it's about historic food.

7.   My husband and I study western European swordsmanship techniques at a school in southeastern Michigan; that is where I spent the vacation trip from which I have just returned.

AWARDEES:  Now for the fun part--choosing new awardees.  I wanted to select primarily costume-related blogs, but the most versatile blogs I know of are not costume-related, so these choices are a mixed but highly interesting bag.

1. Pearl's LJ blog, ...ars sine scientia nihil est... This is truly one of the most versatile blogs I know. Along with many thought-provoking essays on costume-related topics it includes wonderful links and discussions of items as different as medieval monastic sign languages, unusual musical instruments, and 6,000 year-old incised eggshells. And that's just some examples from the past few months!

2. Martin Rundkvist's blog, Aardvarchaeology. Aardvarchaeology (formerly known as Salto Sobrius) often discusses archaeology (including the archaeology of artifacts that bear upon costume), but goes off onto other interesting areas, including politics and travel.

3.   My husband's blog, Armed and Dangerous. Unlike the other blogs above, this one is text only; it consists of original essays on subjects as diverse as technology, politics, science, and cooking.

4.    My friend Molly's blog, Signal Boost. Molly lives a versatile life, and writes interesting and thought-provoking essays about it.

5.     Teffania's Garb.  Cleverly disguised as a blog about Teffania's 12th century costuming interests, it branches out into other areas of early medieval material culture, including jewelry, seals on important documents, and calligraphy.  My only regret is that she cannot update it more often. 

Thanks again, Esther, for honoring me.