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!

Some Interesting Articles about Viking Age Clothing

Within the past week, I discovered some articles on Academia.edu about projects in Viking clothing and textile manufacture.  They are less formal in style than traditional academic papers because they were written by SCA folk, but they have interesting and useful information all the same.  If you are interested in Viking age clothing, you may want to check them out.  

• Verborg, Rolf. Weaving broken diamond twill fabric to create a Viking age apron dress.    Describes the entire process, from making a warp-weighted loom to cutting and sewing the finished dress.  Assumes more knowledge of the actual warping process than non-weavers are likely to have, but gives interesting and different information than other accounts of Viking-style weaving than I have read.
• Verberg, Susan. Women’s Set of Viking Winter Clothes: Based on 10th Century Haithabu garment finds.  Describes the cutting and sewing of a complete winter outfit, based primarily, but not exclusively, upon Haithabu archaeological finds.
• Verberg, Susan. The Klappenrock: A Viking Warrior's Coat From 10th C. Haithabu,  Similar to her "winter clothes" paper but about the wrapped coat believed to have been worn by Viking men.
• Thunem, Hilde. With a Pleated Front - a Possible Reconstruction of the Hangerock (selekjole) in Grave ACQ from Køstrup, in Lyngstrøm, H, ed. Refashioning Viking Age Garments (SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen 2015).   Shortened account of the reasoning Hilde employed in designing her apron dress based upon the Køstrup find.

The Academia.edu pages may ask you to "connect" or log in to read or download the articles, but an account on the site is free.  Happy reading!

Anna Zariņa's Legacy

From Balticsmith's post on the Facebook group Viking Era Textiles and Fiber Arts, I learned tonight that archaeologist and costume historian Anna Zariņa passed away earlier this year.

I knew that Professor Zariņa was the authority on early Latvian costume, but Balticsmith's post includes a short obituary/biography that underscores the impressiveness of her achievements.  She was born into a farming family.  Her original degrees were in agriculture and home economics, but while she was at university she was exposed to Latvian folk costume and began to study it. Eventually, she learned archaeological field methods and began expanding her research into Latvian prehistory, as far back as the Bronze Age.

In short, if you know anything at all about Latvian costume, chances are you are recalling something Professor Zariņa wrote, or a summary of something Professor Zariņa wrote that was written by someone else.

Balticsmith's post includes a link to a PDF copy of a book by Professor Zariņa whose title means, in English, "Garments in Latvia from the 7th to 17th Centuries." That book can be downloaded from here.  It is written in Latvian, with a German language summary, but it is well-enough illustrated that it should be of use, and of interest, to costume scholars who don't read Latvian (or German).  I am passing the link on in the hope that it will be of use to researchers interested in clothing of the Baltic countries.  Professor Zariņa's legacy is the knowledge she researched and published, and I can think of no better way to honor her than to use and spread that knowledge.

More About The Hårby Valkyrie

About a month ago, I blogged about a new find in Denmark, a small metal Valkyrie figurine that appears to have been a pendant. Though the figure is broken off at about hip-level, it displays some wonderful details of hairstyle and costume. 

One of my readers, Jakob, pointed me to this article from the Odense Bys Museer's website that includes more details about the find and a number of additional clear photographs. Although the article is in Danish, Google Translate has enabled me to glean the following additional information:

• The figurine in its present broken condition is 3.4 cm tall.
• It is made from solid silver which was then gilded.
• The gilded figure was also treated with niello,"a black mixture of copper, silver and lead sulphides" (see this Wikipedia article).

Most interesting of all, one of the photographs shows a clear frontal view of the figure. This view appears to show (at least to me) that the figure is wearing a garment with narrow straps and a deep, v-shaped neckline. This garment does not greatly resemble any of the proposed apron dress reconstructions.  The straps are ornamented with little circles that resemble punch work, but the figurine does not show any beads, tortoise brooches or other brooches.  Perhaps this garment is meant to be some kind of breastplate or armor of some kind.

Perhaps the Valkyrie figurines cannot and should not be taken literally as depictions of Viking era women's clothing. Consider a work of art from much nearer to our own time--Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Guiding The People.

La liberté guidant le peuple (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Look at the figure of the woman in the foreground, the woman in yellow holding the French tricolor.  The way she is dressed carries obvious symbolism to people familiar with French history and the art of the period.  For example, she wears a red Phyrigian cap, a known symbol of liberty and freedom. But can Madam Liberty's attire be taken as depicting the ordinary clothing of French women in 1789, even in a stylized manner? No. We know it cannot, because we have other art showing actual French women of the period, as well as a number of surviving garments, that tell us that Liberty's clothing in the Delacroix painting is purely symbolic.

Now consider our Valkyrie.  We know that she is a figure from Norse mythology--a kind of warrior spirit sent by Odin to choose brave warriors slain on the field of battle for an afterlife of eternal glory in Valhalla.  What we don't know is whether Scandinavians of the Viking period had a set of symbolic garments or other conventions that told them "this figure is a figure of a Valkyrie."  We assume that a figure like the Hårby figure is a Valkyrie because she is armed with sword and shield. But maybe we should consider that the rest of her clothing may also be symbolic of her peculiar mission as a Chooser of the Slain, and not just of the fact that she is female.

Like the other Valkyrie figures that have been found, the Hårby Valkyrie so far provokes more questions than it provides answers. That's not a bad thing. Further study, and future finds, may help provide answers and expand the base of available information from which inferences about Viking era costume can be made.

EDIT: To eliminate my original comments about the article's statement that the figure is "polychrome"; see Jakob's comment below.

EDIT: (3/4/2013) Apparently the figurine is going to London to be exhibited at the British Museum with other Viking age finds. See this article. EDIT: (3/6/2013) Jakob has found an even better series of close-ups of the figurine, from all angles, including the bottom. Look here.

Indirect Evidence of Clothing

One of the reasons that I have become increasingly interested in archaeology is the amount of information it can provide to us about clothing during time periods where other information is virtually non-existent.  However, other disciplines can also assist the clothing historian when even archaeology fails.

Such as genetics.

I learned from David Beard's Archaeology in Europe blog that biologists have recently established that humans started to wear clothes on a regular basis about 170,000 years ago. They did so with the help of lice. How's that?

Beard's blog pointed to this article from Medical News Today, which described a University of Florida study of lice DNA. It appears that human body lice are extremely well-adapted, not just to living on humans, but to living on humans who are wearing clothing. By tracing when the DNA of body lice began to diverge from the DNA of head lice, researchers could tell when clothing had become well enough established that a different variety of lice had evolved to live in the conditions it created. Apparently clothing started to be worn on a regular basis when humans moved out of Africa and started crafting and wearing garments to survive in colder climates.

I really liked this article because it confirms what I have come to believe over the past 20 years, namely, that we will only be able to piece together a complete history of costume by using information gleaned from multiple disciplines. Archaeology is important, but the lice study shows that the sciences can provide necessary information too.