Where's the Aberration?

I've been doing more thinking about the information from Nørre Sandegård Vest, particularly the information suggesting that the Scandinavian apron dress of the Vendel and Viking period may have been a kind of uniform reflecting the woman's status and affiliation with a particular "tribe"  and not an individual fashion choice.

The picture that is emerging of relative uniformity of apron dress colors and and accompanying jewelry over time reminds me of is late (e.g., 18th through early 20th century) period European folk costume. Dresses and overdresses in this era, such as the bunad, tended to be limited to particular styles and colors among people living in a particular region, and tended to differentiate between married and unmarried marital status.  Perhaps the Vendel/Viking apron dress was a garment reflective of married women's status, that varied in style primarily depending upon the region in Scandinavia in which the woman was living. (Tortoise brooches, in contrast, seem to have evolved into standardized patterns that appeared wherever "Viking" women settled.)

The suggestion that Scandinavian women's costume changed little from the Vendel period through to the end of the Viking era raises another question. I've read scholars (names are not coming to mind right now) who suggest that fashion, as we know it--i.e., short-term social trends affecting the appearance of individualized outfits--did not appear in Europe until the 15th century and is not typically found in other parts of the world until after their first contact with Europeans. In other words, what we think of as "folk costume" is typical of clothing changes before the age of "fashion", and the invention of "fashion" is an abrupt aberration from the pattern of slow, status-oriented clothing style change that was the norm for most of recorded history.

All of this idle speculation will be knocked into a cocked hat, of course, if it turns out that the apron dress finds that have been analyzed so far are not  "typical." But right now it is easier to assemble a picture of apron-dress wearing Viking women as flaunting a "tribal" affiliation as their descendants would do with later-period folk dress than to match the existing finds to an image of Viking fashion as based primarily upon individual expression, in the manner of Renaissance European clothing.   I suspect that we eventually will have enough finds to be able to say, with as much confidence as is possible about the distant past, that Viking women likely wore similar dark blue or brown apron dresses with stylistic differences characteristic of the region in which they lived, or something similar. When that happens, I guess I will have to find another use, or another home, for all of the red, orange, green, and pastel apron dresses I have made.

Christmas Greetings

Today's Father Christmas

It occurred to me today that I've defined the subject matter of this blog so stringently that technically even a simple "Merry Christmas!" post would be off-topic.

Today's Santa

Then I thought of a way around the problem.  If I could come up with a post about costume that relates to Christmas, it would be appropriate to end that post  with a Christmas greeting.

What better way to do that with a few words about...Santa Claus! I figured that if I dug up a few public domain pictures showing a bit of the evolution of Santa Claus's costume, I could make a little Christmas costume display that would be a suitably on-topic platform for a Christmas greeting. Who knows, maybe I can do a Christmas costume post each year as a regular feature!   (All of the photographs in this post are from Wikimedia Commons; clicking on most of them will give you bigger versions.)

As you may know, the idea of Santa Claus is loosely based on a medieval saint, St. Nicholas, a bishop whose charity in supplying poor virgins with gold for dowries made him a by-word for selfless generosity. (Wikipedia gives a surprisingly detailed version of the Santa Claus origin story.) So it is not surprising to see that depictions of St. Nicholas show him in the miter and robes of a bishop and carrying a crozier, as shown in the modern Dutch image to the left.

Dutch image of St. Nick

Father Christmas from 1686

Voyageur reenactor

The 17th century British image I found shows a "Father Christmas" who looks kind of like a bishop in a cassock of the period.  He bears a stronger resemblance to the modern British Father Christmas than he does to "Santa Claus." It occurred to me in looking at the pictures that the British Father Christmas bears more than a little resemblance to the Ghost of Christmas Past from Dickens's A Christmas Carol:  "It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust."  Our modern Father Christmas isn't wearing a bathrobe-like garment that bares his breast, but the resemblance to Dickens's description is obvious.

Nast Santa of 1881

Canadian "Pere Noel" from 1875

Meanwhile, in the New World, the Father Christmas/Santa figure was coming to look more like a man of action than a saintly prelate.  This Canadian image from the mid-1870s looks more like a voyageur, a roving fur trader common in what is now the U.S. and Canada during the 17th and 18th centuries.  What persuades me that this is the source of the American-style Santa is the long, floppy hat, as shown by this reenactor.  Despite having acquired a silly hat, the Canadian Pere Noel has somehow retained Father Christmas's holly wreath on his head.  Thomas Nast's more commercial (and more famous) image features a similar hat-and-wreath combo, showing that voyageur and Father Christmas features are still present.

If so much of my brain wasn't eaten up with early period costume, I might do some serious research into the evolution of Santa's costume--what little I found in putting together this quickie essay suggests that there are some very interesting connections waiting to be explored.  

Anyway, I think that I've spent enough time talking about costume to justify some Christmas greetings.  Enjoy your Christmas (or other) holiday, everyone!

A Period Wedding Gown

Since The Dreamstress featured a number of historical wedding gowns lately, I felt that I should respond with one of my own. Sadly, what Viking women wore for their weddings remains a matter for passionate debate (it may even be possible that something like a savanion was involved). So my photograph is of something rather more modern.

  My parents' formal wedding photograph--June 13, 1944          

The photograph shown with this post (click on it to see it larger) is my parents' formal wedding photograph. Yes, my parents had a military wedding--because my father had just volunteered for the Armed Forces (he had to work at getting into the Army, being a bit too short and too old at the time to be drafted). The time was June 1944. This website describes the characteristics of wedding gowns of the 1940s, and the gown my mother is wearing has a number of them, including a very  modest neckline, long sleeves, and a substantial train.

I can't provide you with more information, unfortunately, because I don't have the dress. The reason for that is that it wasn't *her* dress--it was borrowed! Dad was being shipped out so quickly that she didn't have time to get her own gown (even if they had had the money). Instead, she borrowed a gown from one of her future sisters-in-law. The sister-in-law had a more developed bosom than Mom did, so Mom had to wear the dress with a well-stuffed bra in a larger size than she normally wore to make it look as though the gown fit! But she was still a beautiful bride. Don't you agree?

Useful Knowledge From Nørre Sandegård Vest

In my last post on the problems of researching Vendel costume, I mentioned a book about certain grave finds at a place called Nørre Sandegård Vest. Here is the citation (courtesy of pearl's LiveJournal):

Jørgensen, L. & Nørgård Jørgensen, A. 1997. Nørre Sandegård Vest: a cemetery from the 6th-8th centuries on Bornholm. Det Kongelige Nordiska Oldskriftselskab. Köpenhamn.

Equally piqued by the possibility of  obtaining more information, but possessing access to university libraries that is far superior to mine, the plucky pearl located a copy of this book and, like the good friend she is, sent me copies of the sections on jewelry and textile finds.  In that 25-page excerpt, there was a gold mine's worth of facts that have completely changed my way of thinking about the subject of women's costume in Scandinavia during the Vendel period.  

The disc-on-bow brooches of which I was previously aware were 5th or 6th century finds, mostly from Gotland (an island off the coast of Sweden) and Anglo-Saxon England of the same period. Nørre Sandegård Vest is located on Bornholm, an island in the Baltic Sea that is considered part of Denmark but located quite close to southern Sweden (though still west of Gotland).  What makes Nørre Sandegård Vest ("NSV", for the rest of this post) fascinating, and useful, from a costume history perspective is that it contains a number of different women's graves, from different time periods, and the graves contained enough jewelry to preserve a number of textile fragments--approximately 300 of them. In fact, if Ulla Mannering, the author of the section on textiles in the Jørgensen book cited above is correct (and I have no reason to believe that she is not), the lion's share of known textile finds from the Vendel period came from the graves at NSV.

There are a number of conclusions Ms. Mannering and the author of the jewelry section drew from the NSV grave finds, particularly from Ms. Mannering's study of the NSV textiles.  Some of these conclusions have stunning implications, not just for Vendel period women's costume, but for Viking era women's costume as well. Let me summarize some of them briefly (not necessarily in order in importance):

1. Apron dresses mostly *were* dark blue or brown. Ms. Mannering found a number of wool diamond twill fragments in the graves, which have characteristics substantially like the wool diamond twill fragments found at Birka--in fact, she refers to them as the "Birka type". Some graves had a different of fine diamond twill  than the Birka type, while a third type had a fine wool tabby in the apron dress layer.  Ms. Mannering had these diamond twill fragments tested for indigotin and other substances indicative of period dyes, and discovered that virtually all of them contained indigotin--indicating that they once had been dyed blue. Moreover, the tests confirmed that a number of them had been overdyed with brown dyes, which likely was a way of making them a much darker blue--navy, or close to black. One interesting specimen had been overdyed in orange, which Ms. Mannering believes would have made it look purple.  The few specimens that were not blue apparently had been dyed brown. This suggests, at least to me, that blue or brown apron dresses were traditional and had been traditional for hundreds of years before the Viking era.   A few of the tested textile samples showed traces of other dye colors, but none of the diamond twills did so.

2. Underdresses were of undyed or brown linen, with keyhole necklines. As Erika Svensson reported in her thesis, Ms. Mannering concludes that the diamond twill apron dresses at NSV were worn over linen underdresses. However, this hypothesis is not based solely on brooch-pin size, as I had assumed from the  comment in Ms. Svensson's thesis. Ms. Mannering found quite a number of linen textile fragments in the graves also, and they turned out to be either undyed or, if dyed, had been dyed with a brown pigment.

 Jørgensen et al., Fig. 46 (beginning of chronology)

 Jørgensen  et al., p. 59, Fig. 46 (end of chronology)

3. Disc-on-bow brooches were in use only during part of the Vendel Period. Most of the NSV graves are from the Vendel period, but few of them contain disc-on-bow brooches. Many of the graves contain pairs of stickpins, and there are a variety of other brooch combinations and types. When considered together with some of the other Vendel period Danish finds, it is possible to group the brooch collections by approximate time period--suggesting that different assortments were fashionable during different parts of the Vendel and late Roman periods. Granted, a relatively small number of graves have been involved in the authors' assembly of this chronology (about 20 or so I believe), but it at least represents a hypothetical chronology against with future finds can be compared.

The chart to the left, taken from the Jørgensen book, summarizes the authors' conclusions as to this chronological analysis. I have rearranged the chart as it appears in the book so that the brooch phases fall into chronological order, starting at the far left and proceeding forward in time as one reads rightwards. (All dates given on the chart, are years C.E.). The chart indicates that the disc-on-bow brooch fashion is found in an approximately 200-year time span and was proceeded and followed by different combinations of brooches.The type of brooch in favor after the disc-on-bow brooches recede from the archaeological record is a kind of rectangular plate brooch, which comes in small and large sizes. Some finds have three of them, a large one, positioned at the neck, that held a multi-strand loop of beads as well as fastening a neckline, and two smaller ones holding up the overdress--the job that would eventually be relegated to tortoise brooches. The chronologically last finds, like the grave Ms. Svensson mentions in her thesis, features three tortoise brooches--one at the neck, and two holding up the overdress. The chart (as well as a second chart showing the graves of NSV and what jewelry was found in each) suggests that most of the evolutionary phases of the brooch set included at least one pair of stickpins.

So a new possibility for my costume may be to select a slightly later time period and create a three-rectangular-plate brooch costume instead of a disc-on-bow brooch costume. Although I don't know what any of the rectangular plate brooches look like, there is a largish brooch sold by Raymond's Quiet Press and small ones sold by a seller on Etsy that might do until I find out more about the actual brooches found. I'm still thinking about what kind of Vendel costume I want to construct, and whether I want to learn more about the design of the rectangular plate brooches found at NSV before I go ahead and buy even more brooches than I have now. 

4. More support for pearl's theory of how shawls really were worn. As I mentioned above, quite a few of the NSV graves contained long stickpins. Like Erika Svensson, Ms. Mannering believes that these stickpins were used to fasten shawls to the woman's other clothing. As they above chart indicates, they appear in graves together with the disc-on-bow brooches, as well as part of ensembles involving different brooch types.

This supports, after a fashion, pearl's theory as to how triangular shawls could match, when worn, the perfectly triangular appearance shown in pendants, guldgubbar figures and other forms of Vendel and Viking era art. pearl's suggestion was that the long points of the triangle were folded over and perhaps sewn down in wear. However, if shawls were pinned to the shoulders with stickpins, instead of being held entirely by a disc-on-bow brooch, it would be simple to fold the corners under and pin the shawl through the folds and onto the rest of the costume, without needing to permanently sew anything.

Fig. 106, Viking Age Ringed Pins from Dublin

One may wonder just how well skinny stickpins would hold a substantial shawl. Ms. Mannering has a suggested answer to this question. She notes that small iron rings also appear in the graves. Accordingly, she suggests that each stickpin may have had one of these loops tied to it with a thong or cord.  The pin would be stuck through the cloth, and then the ring would be looped over the end of the pin, securing it. This would work a bit like the ring-headed pins that turn up in male Viking graves, mostly in Dublin near the end of the Viking age--the sketch to the right, from Thomas Fanning's book on Viking ring-headed pins (Fanning, Thomas. Viking Age Ringed Pins From Dublin p. 125 (Royal Irish Academy 1984), illustrates the principle nicely.

If stickpins-plus-rings were stable enough to hold a shawl, that fact addresses my main problem with the idea that shawls were pinned on solely with a large disc-on-bow brooch, namely, how did women avoid being strangled by their own brooches? Folding the shawl into the correct shape and then pinning the fold in place, even if the disc-on-bow brooch also partly supported the shawl, may answer this question; the re-contouring of the shawl with the stick pins into a shape that would make it look more triangular in wear may also have made it possible to support the shawl on the body more comfortably at the neck with the disc-on-bow or other neckline brooch. (I thought that Ms. Mannering said the stickpins fastened the shawl to the rest of the costume, but the jewelry section expressly says otherwise; see quote below.) I think I will obtain a suitable pair of stickpins and experiment.

5. No tablet weaving. This was a surprise to me, and possibly was to Ms. Mannering as well. What does appear in the graves is cord, and it appears in quantities great enough to indicate that it was used as fringe on some of the garments worn by the women in the graves--perhaps on shawls, for example.  So much for my idea of using my Norwegian Snartnemo band to decorate a Vendel find based on the graves at NSV!  The absence of evidence of tablet-woven bands at NSV, however, is interesting in its own right, even if it throws a monkey-wrench into my planned costume design. :-)

6.  Were Vendel and Viking era costume so different?  So what do the authors of the Jørgensen book think Vendel women's costume looked like? This quotation from the jewelry section suggests that it did not look that different from Viking era costume, except for the jewelry:

Nørre Sandegård Vest shows that through the course of the Late Germanic Iron Age [i.e., I think this term is equivalent to "Vendel"  or perhaps "Migration Period"] "there is a continuous replacement of the female brooch-types. It is clear, however, that the basic set of a neck brooch and 2 breast brooches emerges in this period that that this is manifestly linked to Viking period costume. Only the widespread use of dress pins in the Late Germanic Iron Age distinguishes the combinations of dress accessories of the two periods. .... There is much that indicates that the forerunner of the Viking-period pinafore dress was introduced at this date, as Mannering's textiles studies also imply. (pp. 58-59)

The text proceeds to describe a costume with three basic elements that is very like the elements proposed to be represented by the finds at Birka, though the possibility of additional items being present in the richer graves is expressly emphasized:

Colour analyses show that an often blue twill pinafore dress was fastened below the arms with the aid of the two brooches that sat upon the chest straps of the dress. ...The underdress was of linen and had a slit at the neck to which a de luxe brooch was fastened. The third element of costume was a woollen shawl or cape. The large number of dress pins in the graves, which were not fastened to the pinafore dress or the underdress, were probably used to fasten this shawl. ... This three-part costume is the basic model at Nørre Sandegård Vest. Several of the rich graves, however, contain more types of textile; grave 9, for instance, had no less than 7 different types. ... It is clear that the costumes could consist of more than the three basic elements just described, although the small size of the textile fragments unfortunately prevents any closer identification of these and their function.(p. 59)

This summary ignores Ms. Mannering's suggestion that, in at least some of the graves, the third garment might be an open-fronted robe or caftan. Although the fragments of textiles found in graves throughout Scandinavia for both the Vendel and Viking periods are very small and there is no definitive evidence of such caftans, there is better evidence that they were worn by high-born Frankish women--and the Franks were the dominant power of northern Europe at the time. Moreover, the caftan was also adopted during the Migration Period in the Kentish section of England. Perhaps Inga Hägg was correct in concluding that some of the Birka women wore caftans.  Maybe those caftans were the last manifestations of a very old European fashion. As more information about northern European burials between 500 and 1000 C.E. becomes available, it may become possible to confirm this theory.  I hope so. 

Finally, none of this precludes the possibility that some women wore shawls *over* caftans (the way some wealthy older women wear big shawls or ruanas over winter coats even today). The Frankish Queen Bathilde wore both a caftan AND a shawl to her grave--and the shawl still bears the remains of fringe--reminiscent of the NSV graves.

EDIT: Please note the following correction to my remarks about what garments Queen Bathilde was buried in, courtesy of pearl: "The Frankish finds aren't all from the same person (only that particular source says so)- the coat belonged to Bathilde, but the cloak is associated with Abbess Bertille." e.g., http://www.baladeenpaysbriard.com/article-2801271.html

My Vendel Costume--Barking Up The Wrong Tree?

Thanks to pearl's research-fu, I have obtained some additional information about Vendel period costume.  Unfortunately, the end result of that increase in information is to increase my doubts about how I should proceed and, specifically, what items of costume I should make, and how they should look.  I apologize in advance if this post sounds a bit disjointed, but I'm writing it, in part, to clarify my thoughts, as well as to get feedback from you, my readers, as to what I should do next.

Reconstruction sketch from Erika Svensson's thesis

One of the new pieces of information I have obtained is the following thesis:

Svensson, Erika. 2005. "Spännande djur i vendeltida Uppåkra: En komparativ kontextuell analys av ovala och djurformade skålfibulor från Uppåkra" (Lund University).

Among other information, Ms. Svensson's thesis contains the sketch on the left, which is a reconstruction of a woman's costume from the Vendel era based upon finds from a grave in Norway located at Nørre Sandegård Vest.

What is the problem? you may ask. It's this. My original conception of Vendel costume was based upon the many finds of disc-on-bow brooches, which all date to the Vendel period. But many of those finds are from Gotland or other parts of Sweden, while the Snartemo band that inspired my costume in the first place is a Norwegian find. I had assumed that the disc-on-bow brooch was generally common throughout Scandinavia during the Vendel period, but this may well not be the case, and it appears that there was no such brooch in the Nørre Sandegård Vest find.

In addition, there are other reasons why the Nørre Sandegård Vest find would be a more appealing one for me to replicate. For one thing, I would not need to sew an underdress.  Ms. Svensson claims that, in this find, the brooch pins were inserted into the dress, and the fineness of the brooch pins found shows that the underdress had to have been made from linen, not wool. I already have several linen underdresses, one with a keyhole neckline, that I could use for such a costume. 

A second reason is that I would not need a large disc-on-bow brooch for a Nørre Sandegård Vest costume either! A small round tortoise (?) brooch and a pair of slightly larger tortoise-shaped brooches would be all I would need. Absent detailed information on the brooch designs, I could make do with plain bronze brooches with added bosses from The Treasury. Although period brooches were cast, not hammered, there were some plain ones found during the Vendel Period, and I could get the hammered ones cheaply. I would also need a few short strands of suitable beads with spreaders, but again spreaders are easy to come by--much easier than disc-on-bow brooches.

As for the shawl, the above sketch indicates that it was pinned to the straps of an apron dress with straight pins. I'm not sure that I believe that to be credible, but then I know almost nothing about the Nørre Sandegård Vest. In any event, finding suitable straight pins (The Treasury sells some of these, also) and pinning a shawl in this manner would be simple and relatively cheap to do.

Lastly, the sketch above assumes a slightly fitted apron dress. However, I greatly doubt that the find supports anything other than a dress with straps, somewhat like my blue tube-shaped dress.

So now I am now interesting in finding more information about the Nørre Sandegård Vest find, in order to decide exactly what sort of costume I want to make, and ornament with the Snartnemo band I've been given. At pearl's suggestion I've tracked down and read the following article:

Malmius, Anita.  "Cremation grave textiles: Examples from Vendel upper class in the Vendel and Viking Periods" Jonas 13 (October 2002).

Unfortunately for me, the finds Ms. Malmius discusses in her Jonas article are male graves.  Interestingly, these finds are of wool, mostly 2/2 twill, not linen.  But that could be due to a number of factors--including the possibility that cremation may destroy linen fabric while preserving traces of wool.

So it seems to me that coming up with a plausibly Vendel costume would require a greater level of research intensity.  I'm still wrestling with whether I'm prepared for that as yet, though it still looks as though my white wool and blue wool (both 2/2 twill) are good choices for the project.

Spotted!

I was pleased to learn this afternoon that Wychwood Warriors just cited this blog on their wiki in the section on the Viking woman's apron dress. Thank you! It's great to be appreciated.

In other minor news, I've just obtained a copy of Margareta Gleba's book, Textile Production in Pre-Roman Italy, and am eagerly reading it. I have a number of topics I want to write on but have had little time or energy. However, I have a number of vacation days around Christmas and New Year's, so hopefully I'll be able to do something about that.

Opportunity!

Good news! I will be doing a guest post for The Dreamstress! She is planning to do a continuing series of posts on definitions of costume/sewing terms from various eras, and she is asking a number of bloggers whose work she enjoys to contribute. My post (unsurprisingly) will be on the Viking "apron dress" and the various names applied to it.   Most likely my post will appear on her blog sometime in January; I'll post here when I know the date and will provide a link to it after it's published.

Stay tuned!