The Bending of the Pleats

Last week, while I was re-reading Hilde Thunem's essay-in-progress about Viking women's shifts yet another time, I had a revelation about the evidence. Specifically, my revelation was about the fragments of tightly pleated fabric, believed to be from shifts, that were found inside many tortoise brooches at Birka. 

Ms. Thunem notes in her essay that the pleated fragments usually bend in one direction or another. She regrets the fact that Hjalmar Stolpe, who originally excavated those graves, did not take note of which brooch was found on which side of the body:  "This means that there is no way of identifying the left-hand and right-hand brooches, and consequently no way to learn whether the bending of the pleats always pointed towards the shoulders, always towards the throat or differed from one serk to another."

When I first read the essay, I agreed with her sentiment.  But now I wonder whether the fact that the pleats show a bend is sufficient information to  allow us to deduce one more element about how those shifts were made. 

Neckband pleated shifts

Think of the problem this way.  How many different ways are there to pleat a shift? One approach, surely, is to pleat the entire width of the garment to the neckband, as the Pskov shift must have been made. Probably additional work would need to be done to ensure pleats as deep and tight as in the fragments found in the Birka brooches, but the direction of the pleats would at least be determined. As can be seen from the picture to the left from the Adamklissi monument, which depicts a shift pleated to the neckband (though with some puzzling pleats on the short sleeves), the pleats in the area of the upper chest where the tortoise brooches likely appeared would tend to bend toward the centerline of the body, away from the shoulders.

How else might the shifts have been pleated?  In theory they could have been pleated horizontally, with the pleats running across the torso, but it's clear that they were not pleated in that manner, because as Ms. Thunem notes, "there seems to be a tendency for the pleats to run in parallel with the needle in the brooch, and then bend towards one side of the brooch." If the shifts were horizontally pleated, that would not be the case--the pleats inside the brooches would be perpendicular to the needles in the brooches instead.  So it's clear that the pleats on the Birka shifts ran down the torso of the wearers, instead of across it, a pleating direction I'll refer to in the rest of this essay as "vertical" pleats.

What other ways could the shifts have been pleated, other than to a neckband, that would result in vertical pleats?  If those methods would not be likely to result in vertically pleated clumps inside the tortoise brooches, those methods cannot have been used.

I can think of three methods other than the neckband method of pleating a shift.  One is simply to pleat the shift, which is cut with a round or keyhole-style neckline, across its entire width.  This is the method the Historiska Museet used in its Viking women's costume reconstruction.  A variation of this approach would be to pleat the shift from the edges toward the center, starting at the shoulders. However, a tortoise brooch, placed on the relevant upper chest area, would not show any bending of the vertical pleats.

The second possibility is to permanently pleat the body of the shift, perhaps even stitching the pleats down, from a particular point on the torso, such as just above the nipples.  In that circumstance, whether any pleats at all would even show would depend upon the point at which the pleats started.  With this design, pleats would not appear in the brooches at all unless the line of pleats started at the armpit level; the neckline would make it challenging to start them higher.

Faltenklied tunic/shift

The third possibility is to pleat the shift from the shoulders, as above, but with the pleats running diagonally toward the shoulders and the centerline of the body, like the Faltenklied figure on the Adamklissi monument, shown on the right. Pleats based on this model would accordingly show a bend outward, toward the shoulders.

However, there are other factors that make the Faltenklied type of pleated garment unlikely to have been the model for the finds at Birka.  The Faltenklied figures are plainly men, not women; men from the Roman era, not the ninth and tenth centuries CE like the Birka women.  On the other hand, the neckline pleated shifts of the Adamklissi women are similar to the Pskov shift remains from the tenth century--remains that are linked by the appearance of tortoise brooches to the Viking world.  

So maybe the mere fact that the Birka brooches contain shift fragments with pleats that bend is sufficient evidence to get us a bit closer to a shift design for the Birka women.  Although we don't know, and will never know, whether the pleats any of the brooches pointed toward or away from the occupant's shoulders, the Pskov shift evidence makes it a little more likely that any shift with bending pleats was pleated to a neckband, with the pleats bending toward the shoulders.

By the way, the bending of the pleats is fairly strong evidence that Annika Larsson was wrong about Viking women wearing their brooches directly over their nipples.  If, for example, the Birka women had worn their brooches in such a manner, the pleated fabric remains would have been straight, and would not have bent in either direction, since in any of the shift models that come close to matching the brooch finds the pleats run straight up and down that far down on the body.  This is made clearer by the fact that Larsson uses a shift pleated to a neckband like the Pskov find in her reconstruction costume; the photograph clearly shows that the pleats lie straight over the near-waistline location where the brooches rest.

A Minor Mystery

In my few spare moments, I sometimes re-read sources on Viking costume in the hope of having an inspiration that will enlighten me about an issue, or that will motivate me to embark on a new area of research.   So far, I haven't had much in the way of inspiration, but I have stumbled across a question or two.
 

Tonight, my question involves Birka grave 597.  I can best explain it by recourse to pictures.  The first picture, taken from Inga Hägg's article in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe about the Birka finds, is a reproduction of Hjalmar Stolpe's sketch of Grave 597 when it was excavated.  Note that the iron scissors are shown, blade tips pointing downwards, between the two tortoise brooches.

The picture to the right, which is from the same article, shows "iron fragments from the scissors"  found in grave 597. They are covered by linen fragments. The pleats referenced in the caption appear to extend down the long axis of the fragment. However, it's difficult to tell how wide the large fragment shown in this picture is, or what part of the shears the fragment was associated with.  That makes it difficult to discern whether the pleats run in vertical rows, parallel to the length of the shears, as most people believe the shifts in the Birka graves were pleated.

The last picture, still from the same article, shows a textile fragment on iron scissors.  Again, the scale of the fragment is not given.  Hägg's article suggests that this fragment is also from Grave 597; indeed, it could be a larger picture of the fragment shown on the left in the photograph above. The pleats are clear, and run perpendicular to the long dimension of the fragment.

Here's where the mystery lies.  If the linen shift worn by the woman in Grave 597 was pleated so that the pleats ran parallel to her height, any fabric fragments caught on the iron scissors should run parallel with the length of the scissor blades, since the scissors were found with their tips pointing down toward the woman's feet, parallel to her torso.  Yet the fragments look as though they may have covered the entire length of the scissors--or at least their blades.  If that is the case, the pleats may have run perpendicular to the length of the scissors, which would mean the dress was pleated horizontally.

So is it too strange to consider that at least one of the Birka shifts may have been horizontally pleated?  Or is it more likely that the fragment shown in figure 17.35 from the Hägg article was small, only about as wide as the iron scissors?  In that case, the pleats really are running in the expected direction.

The Pleated Birka Shifts--Another Thought

I was going to add this observation onto my previous post about the evidence of pleated shifts found at Birka, but figured that if I did so, no one was likely to see it or comment upon it.

Shelagh Lewins's reconstructed apron dress based on the Køstrup find has given me another thought about the pleats found in the Birka brooches. Her dress uses loops in the back that are as short as the loops in the front. One practical consequence of this design feature is that the dress rises very high in back and is unlikely ever to shift significantly in wear. Another consequence of this feature, however is that her brooches rest very high on her chest--even closer to the neckline of her shift than mine are, as this photograph of her shows, and well within the area of the deepest and densest pleats on a full shift pleated into a close-fitting neckband.

I don't think all apron dresses were made this way, since it seems unlikely that an apron dress made in that manner would be unlikely to turn upside down on the body, as Bau noted some of the brooches found at Birka appear to have done. But some of them might well have used short loops and been worn just as Shelagh suggests.