How Much Fur Did the Vikings Wear?

To my readers: Happy New Year, and a wonderful 2025! Number 66 of the Archaeological Textiles Review is now available on the ATN Friends website. A table of contents for this issue, and a download link, can be found here.

I have just begun looking through that issue, and already have found an interesting article about a newly-commenced study seeking to establish a critical fact: was fur commonly used in Viking age clothing? It turns out that no comprehensive review of Viking age finds containing evidence of fur on clothing has been done to date. The few finds that document survival of fur on clothing are problematic as evidence, in part because it is very difficult to identify the species from which a fur specimen came using microscopy.

A project has recently been initiated to examine extant Viking age clothing finds in Denmark for fur and evidence about fur. The article in ATR No. 66 that discusses the project and the reasons such a study is important and necessary is: Luise Ørsted Scharff Brandt, Imported fur in Viking Age Denmark and its importance as a visual marker, Archaeological Textiles Review, No. 66, page 111.

Happy reading!

New Viking Clothing Web Exhibit

Recently, the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, reconstructed two complete outfits, a man's outfit and a woman's.  The man's outfit is based upon a grave in Bjerringhøj, in Jutland, Denmark.  The woman's outfit is based upon a grave at Hvilehøj, also in Jutland.  Both are dated to the 10th century CE.  

The University of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History has created a virtual web exhibition based on these costumes, which may be read and viewed here. Further discussion may be read on the reconstruction project's Instagram, which can be accessed here. This post is based upon the information that appears in the web exhibition. 

Left: reconstruction of the costume of the man buried 
at Mammen, Denmark. Photo via Wikimedia Commons*

As has almost always been the case with Viking age grave finds, the textiles recovered from the grave are sufficiently small that ascertaining what scraps came from which garments or items of grave furniture is a matter of interpretation.  The results of the interpretation by the Danish archaeologists may be seen in the photographs of the exhibition.  However, to whet my readers' appetites for viewing the web exhibition, I will provide a brief summary here.

Both the man and the woman are depicted as wearing outer garments made from fur; a cloak in the case of the woman and a coat in the case of the man.  Both wear goatskin shoes, in styles copied from shoes found in Hedeby.  The man's clothes also drew upon the textile finds in the man's grave at Mammen (also in Jutland), which has also been dated to the 10th century. 

The man's clothes feature a belt that ends in large triangular pendants.  The insides of these pendants are decorated with nalbinded fabric fashioned of silver and gold threads, rather like the large bands (believed to have been cloak ends) of the Mammen costume.  His undyed wool shirt is decorated with colored embroidery of a number of different motifs, including motifs found on the man's tunic at Mammen.  The reconstruction includes tablet woven bands trimming the edges of the shirt sleeves and pants, but the grave find appears to indicate that the Bjerringhøj man's shirt was trimmed with red silk fabric in a samite weave, decorated with a gold-thread heart motif.  That fabric was reproduced separately, and a photograph of the reconstructed samite also appears in the web exhibition.

The woman's gown is made from wool, with woven-in geometric designs in the chest area (because all of the geometrically decorated wool in her grave was found in the chest area). Remains of tablet woven bands with metal threads were found in her grave, and appear as part of the edging on her fur cloak.  No brooches, either tortoise-shaped or otherwise, were found in the grave, and therefore none appear in the reconstruction, but some glass beads were found, which are reproduced as a necklace.  A Frankish coin from the middle of the 10th century appears to have been the centerpiece of this necklace.

Without more specific information about the actual textile scraps recovered, it is impossible to deduce all of the reasons supporting these costume interpretations (e.g., why was the man's costume reproduced with yellow pants?).  I will be looking out for a report of the reconstructions, and reviewing the Instagram account of the project very closely!

EDIT:  (1/17/2021)  I recommend checking out the project's Instagram (link above).  It contains a number of pictures not featured in the web exhibition, including a back view of the man's reconstructed coat.

* Nationalmuseet - The National Museum of Denmark from Denmark, CC BY-SA 2.0

Question about Birka Find

A friend on one of the mailing lists I read pointed me to this web page which contains the following description of a textile find from grave 619 at Birka:

An early 9th century woman’s grave (619) yielded a beaver fur lined with hempcloth, and a mid-10th century woman’s grave (837) yielded the remains of a caftan lined with hempcloth. The texture of these two finds were similar in fineness to high quality linen.

The Historiska Museet contains an indexed database of the Birka finds, and I soon located the finds associated with grave 619 here. I assume that the find referred to as a "komposit fragment" is the one I'm looking for. However, I can't decipher much else about the entry, and I'm having trouble figuring out where it was found in the grave, or anything that would give a clue as to what type of item it might have been part of.

If any of my readers know anything more about the beaver fur lined with "hempcloth", please comment! I'd really appreciate it.