It turns out that to purchase a copy of the National Museum of Iceland's 70-page exhibition volume about the "Woman in Blue" would cost approximately $78 USD. That's about $24 USD for the book's price, about $31 USD for postage to the US, and about $23 USD for customs charges! So I won't be buying the book any time soon, alas.
For those of my readers who can't arrange a quick trip to Iceland to buy the book there, I figured I'd end the month of May, and my series of "Woman in Blue" posts, with a shout out to the blog of Marled Mader. Marled and Marianne Guckelsberger worked together to make a reproduction of the apron dress worn by the Woman in Blue, based upon information available in the National Museum's book. They recorded their progress step by step on Marled's blog, Archäotechnik - textile Fläche. If you want to read each entry starting with the first one (there are 12 of them), go to this page and start with the link for "Teil 1" under the heading "Island-Projekt". The last installment includes some marvelous pictures of the finished recreated dress.
As the title indicates, Archäotechnik - textile Fläche is written in German, but using Google Translate on each entry results in a translation that is mostly intelligible to an English speaker. I think it's a very worthwhile read for those interested in the Viking apron dress and how it may have been made, and worn.
Three pieces of tablet weaving showing the "ramshorn" pattern
which is NOT PERIOD for the Viking era or any pre-modern cultures.
Photo by Cynthia M. Parkhill depicting her own work (found on Wikipedia).
Early Iron Age tablet woven band from
Hallstatt salt mine (found on Wikipedia)
When I first became interested in early period costuming, I wanted to learn period techniques for ornamenting the clothes I was making. That's why I taught myself the rudiments of tablet weaving in the first place.
As is also true for many people who attempted to learn about tablet weaving in the early 1990s, the first book I encountered that purported to teach the basic technique was Candace Crockett's book Card Weaving (The link is to Amazon, but the book is available both new and used from other places). The pattern shown in the photograph to the right, called the "ramshorn" pattern, though attractive, dates to 20th century CE Anatolia and is not even remotely plausible for earlier periods. Early period designs tend to be based on diamonds or triangles, like the Hallstatt band shown to the right.
The disconnect between the information I could obtain about tablet weaving (very modern) and the information I could obtain about period tablet-woven bands (very sparse, and concentrated on brocaded designs that still intimidate me to contemplate, two decades later), led me to shy away from further experimentation with tablet weaving.
But things are different now. Now it is possible to obtain many articles, and even some books, that I could not afford during the 1990s as free downloads on the Internet. And now there are more costumers who publish the fruits of their own research, much of it of excellent quality.
Some of those costumers who are making information about how to tablet-weave reproductions of accurate, early period designs. For example, Shelagh Lewins has recently posted a page containing PDFs with directions for recreating specific tablet woven bands that have been found by archaeologists, including the narrow Oseberg band (early 9th century CE Norway), the Laceby band (7th century CE Anglo-Saxon), the Snartnemo II band (6th century CE Norway). The relevant page on Shelagh's website is here.
In addition, Susanna Broomé, of Viking Age Clothing, has recently published a booklet of instructions and information about four Viking Age tablet woven bands that can be recreated with basic tablet weaving technique. Susanna also sells patterns, instructions for making good quality well-researched reconstructions of Viking Age clothing from her website. The page about Susanna's booklet on tablet-woven bands may be found here. Interested readers can order Susanna's booklet from the resellers she links to here, or order it from her directly through her Facebook page, as I am planning to do.
I have some excellent fine yarn, and a good sturdy table-sized tablet weaving loom that would be perfect for weaving some of the bands that Susanna and Shelagh discuss. After I finally complete my sprang hair net, I intend to experiment with some of those designs. I encourage interested readers to do likewise.
In my last post, I drew my readers' attention to a Viking age burial in Iceland that was discovered in 1938 but has only recently been analyzed.
A reader of my blog, Marled, who with a colleague has been experimenting with weaving and then sewing a reproduction of the woman's apron dress (see the comments on my last post), mentioned to me that the National Museum of Iceland has, in conjunction with a related exhibition, published a book about the analysis of the woman's remains and grave goods. So I started looking on the Internet for a way to obtain the book.
I did not find any sites selling the book (yet), but I did find something else of value: a YouTube video recording, made in August 2015, of a symposium where members of the study team delivered oral presentations about their findings. I've embedded it below. The first presentation is delivered in Icelandic, but the rest are in English; the English language presentations begin at approximately 23:45.
Unfortunately, the video is not of the highest quality. The filmed images are somewhat blurry, making the slides used by the presenters hard to read and making it nearly impossible to see details in any of the photographs. The audio portion of the presentation, though clear, is marred by a distracting shushing sound that persists from beginning to end. But the information in the symposium video makes it worth viewing despite these technical flaws.
Two of the English language presentations summarize: 1) the conclusions reached upon the basis of analysis of the woman's teeth and skeleton, and 2) conservation of the woman's jaw remains for future analysis. Those topics, though interesting, are outside the scope of this blog.
However, the last English presentation is solidly within the scope of this blog. That is Michele Hayeur Smith's presentation, which starts at about 1:08:46. Ms. Smith's topic was the analysis of surviving textiles and jewelry of the woman. Because readers can watch the video for themselves, a detailed summary of Hayeur Smith's talk would be superfluous, but a brief summary of the points of historical costuming interest may be useful. That is especially true because Hayeur Smith, aware that most of her audience wasn't expert in the details of textile archaeology, spent a lot of time relating basic information (like weave types) and skimmed over some details of the finds.
A pair of tortoise brooches and a trefoil brooch were found in the grave. The tortoise brooches are type P-52 and the trefoil is P-91.
Four different types of fabrics were found in the woman's grave: a scrap (believed by Hayeur Smith to have been a patch) in tabby weave identified by microscopy as linen; a 2/2 twill in wool, which Hayeur Smith believes to be an apron dress strap; a piece of tablet weaving; and a "wadmal" piece. However, one of the presentation photographs looks as though it depicts diamond twill, not wadmal.
Traces of the linen were also found inside one of the brooches, so Hayeur Smith believes that the woman's underdress was linen.
The 2/2 twill and the diamond twill were found to contain indigotin, the dye substance in woad (and indigo) that produces blue.
The tablet woven band appears to have been a starting border; it is an integral part of the fabric fragment of which it is now a part, and was not sewn on.
The tablet woven band was not dyed; it appears to have been a natural cream color and brown.
The thread from which the linen and twill were woven was Z-spun in both the warp and the weft.
Having listened to Hayeur Smith's talk, I am even more interested in the exhibition volume. I also plan to listen more closely to the talk to see whether I can tease out more details that I missed, or pinpoint ambiguities to resolve. If any of my readers obtain more information, please feel free to raise it in the comments.
Recently, I stumbled across some articles about a new exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland. The exhibit relates to a grave, excavated in 1938, whose finds have recently been subjected to study using modern scientific methods. The exhibition is called "The Woman in Blue" is called that because textile finds from the grave show that the woman was wearing a blue apron dress when she was interred. The best news article I've found discussing the study and its conclusions may be read on the Science News website, here.
I am reporting on this study because it includes costume textile finds, though the news coverage gives very little information about them. There is more discussion of the woman's jawbone and teeth, which were tested and have yielded interesting information about their owner. According to the Science News article:
The woman was between 17 and 25 years of age when she died;
She was born around the year 900 CE;
She was not born in Iceland, but came there either from southern Scandinavia or the British Isles (unsurprising, since Iceland was originally settled sometime between 871 and 930 CE, according to the article);
The weaving techniques used to make her apron dress are consistent with those used in 9th-10th century CE Norway or (presumably contemporaneous) Celtic (Irish?) techniques.
The multi-national team that performed the study delivered a poster presentation on it at the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists on April 14, 2016. A full citation of the presentation, listing the members and the institutions involved, may be seen here.
According to Science News, there were tortoise brooches in the grave; one of them ended up pressed against the woman's face, preserving bits of her skin. That development that will greatly enhance analysis (DNA analysis is being performed on the remains now) to learn more about the woman and her origins, though it is not relevant to the costume aspects of the find.
I am hoping that the study members will eventually publish a research paper with more information about the textile finds. Any information that might permit a tentative reconstruction of the woman's apron dress would greatly add to our knowledge of Viking age women's costume.
