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

Tablets at Work

Tonight, I was trying to find a page on EXARC.net that was referenced in someone's Instagram about a new book on the use of bows and arrows by the Vikings.  The link given on Instagram was dead, so I started looking through all the book reviews  I could find on EXARC. 

I still haven't found out anything about the bow-and-arrow book, but I did find a review of a book which is indisputably relevant to this blog:  

Wollny, Claudia. Tablets At Work. (Claudia Wollny Edition 2017).

Tablets At Work, which is written in both English and German, is a 704-page, self-published tome that includes over 900 tablet weaving patterns.  The EXARC reviewer noted that these patterns "can be followed without having to understand in depth weaving techniques." From the review, it's clear that Ms. Wollny intends this book to be a one-stop education on how to perform every possible tablet weaving technique, including how to design one's own patterns.  The book is proof of the success of her pattern design methods, as the EXARC reviewer states that all of the patterns are new and can't be found elsewhere.*  And there are lots of photographs of bands made from Ms. Wollny's 900 patterns, too!  Like EXARC, TWIST (Tablet Weavers International Studies and Techniques) also gave this book a glowing review, which you can find and download here.

If you have 49,50 Euros to spend and this book sounds interesting or useful to you, you can buy a copy from Ms. Wollny's website, here.  (She even takes Paypal.)  I have looked a bit for other places to find it, and her website appears to be the only place from which one can presently obtain this book.  Although 49.50 Euros strikes me as an amazingly reasonable price for this much information (to say nothing of the photographs!) I am sad that I can't justify spending that much money right now, given how little tablet weaving I have done or even tried to do in the past decade, and even though Ms. Wollny's book may well supersede Peter Collingwood's classic work on the subject.

If historical tablet weaving is closer to your heart than even the best manual of techniques, Ms. Wollny is also selling another book of hers, also written in English and German, which is her publication and translation of a notebook found in a 15th century Poor Clares convent in Nuremberg that contains hundreds of brocaded tablet weaving pattern. Ms. Wollny's book publishes the nuns' notebook but does not stop there; she also includes, according to her website, "a basic course for brocading, web pages in a modern form (?), a motif overview and a dictionary."**  That book, roslein und wecklein, may be purchased for 29,90 Euros here.  According to the webpage Ms. Wollny only has a few copies of this book left, so act quickly if you are interested!

EDIT: (11/7/2019) Ms. Wollny also sells her books and other things on Etsy, here.

*    Though it's unclear whether this claim is based on the author's statement, or on some other information.
**  The quotation is what Google Translate made of Ms. Wollny's German.  I have so little knowledge of German that I have no basis on which to render an opinion concerning its accuracy.

Re-creation vs. Reproduction?

The old saying that "there are two different schools of X" seems to hold for historical costuming.

One school, which consists mainly, but not entirely, of living history enthusiasts and historical reenactors, tries to craft historical clothing that comes as close to being the real thing as possible. They do not merely attempt to cut their cloth in an appropriate period style. They also seek to use fabrics that are as authentic in fiber type, weight, color and weave as possible, and often hand sew the garments with period-style tools using period stitches. Sometimes, they even spin the thread, weave the cloth, and dye it themselves, as this woman did to make an Anglo-Saxon cyrtel. (Sadly, her site is now defunct. I obtained the link I've provided via the Wayback Machine, and it does not seem to reliably show all the photographs, though the links to the archived copy of all of her subpages appear to work).

The other school of thought goes for the emulation of appearances. This is how I started out in historic costuming. I figured that I didn't have much money, and I didn't have the skills of the ancients in leatherworking, metalwork, weaving, or even sewing, so that I'd be lucky if I could achieve an approximately period effect with whatever modern artifices I could scrounge. So I cheerfully used polyesters with plausible-looking (to me) weaves, velcro fasteners, plastic buttons, and trims with vaguely period designs in my crude little costume reproductions.

I still don't have the patience or time to do museum-quality recreations (no matter what my husband might say if you broach him on the subject), but over time my standards have risen. Now, I make all my historical clothing out of natural fibers, preferably the fibers and weave-types actually used, and I employ designs that we know, from archaeology, were used in period. I've even begun hand sewing entire garments within the last few years.

But sometimes a bit of modern artifice will work wonders--especially if you are not working on clothing that must meet the standards of a living history society or similar body. That brings me to the observation that inspired this post.

Today, thanks to Katrin Kania's blog, A Stitch in Time, I learned about the revamped web site of the National Museum of Denmark. The National Museum houses a number of famous Viking artifacts, including the Mammen embroideries. Katrin's site pointed out that the web site now has excellent photographs of those textiles and others found in the same grave, in a format that makes them nearly infinitely zoomable.

Among the textile photographs was an excellent shot of one of the pair of fabric bracelets from the grave that are ornamented with metal brocaded tablet weaving. (It's the second photograph from the bottom on the above page). The photo shows an impressive amount of detail if you zoom in several times.

Go on, try it. I'll wait.

What the brocaded band reminded me of was a piece of commercial trim I bought from an EBay vendor for a costume I made for my husband two years ago. A picture of it appears with this post. As you can see it is very metallic silver--so much so it was hard to photograph it in such a way that you would be able to see the detail.

Does it remind you of anything? It reminds me of the brocade on the armlets. Though the brocaded band on the armlets is clearly woven with both silver and gold thread, and like most tablet weaving of the period, is much narrower than my commercially made trim, which is three inches (about 7.5 cm) wide.

But if you ignore the borders on my commercial trim, the pattern is very similar to the Mammen band. The band even looks and feels as though it's woven of metal thread, though I don't have the expertise to ascertain whether it really is or not. I wish I was good enough with a camera to take a photograph of this trim of the same quality as the National Museum's photograph of the Mammen wristlet, so you could see the metallic threads in it. I knew, when I originally bought the trim, that the design was similar to period motifs, but I didn't realize how impressive the resemblance was until I saw the photograph of the Mammen wristlet band today.

The moral I'm inclined to draw from my impromptu comparison test is that some modern improvisations may produce a costume that is more in the spirit of the original, even if it is not crafted using only period techniques. Others are, of course, free to disagree.