The Völva Costume--A Few Thoughts About The Cloak

Slowly, (especially since my spouse has a regular income again), I have begun to think about reviving long dormant costume projects.

I have been thinking about the cloak that I need to make for the völva costume.  My assumption, based upon other surviving garments of the same period and upon the description in Eric the Red's Saga (e.g., the fact that the völva's cloak has "straps") is that this cloak should be a semicircular cloak.  However, my last attempt to make a semicircular cloak, the Byzantine mantion I made some years ago, fits poorly and is hard to keep in position in wear.

I suspect, on the basis of the shapes of the surviving semicircular cloaks from the Viking age, that the fact that my mantion fits poorly does not mean its design is anachronistic.  Far from it; I'd bet that most semicircular cloaks in the early Middle Ages fit poorly, because a simple semi-circular design fails to take the protuberance of the shoulders into consideration.  It occurred to me that, if I want the cloak to be secure when simply tied on with long straps, I must do something about the shoulder problem. I would like to experiment with techniques that might make this cloak fit better, even if such techniques are not documentable to the Viking age.

One possibility would be to shape the relevant area of the cloak to my form with seams, stitched on the inside of the garment.  That could be worked out by pinning the seams first to check for fit.  I'm thinking that a few seams, radiating outward from (roughly) the center of the neck notch and reaching downward about 6 inches may work.  In that case, it might be possible to achieve a decent fit with  a simple circular neck-notch.

The idea would be to cut the neck notch and sew the fitting seams first.  Finishing the neck could be simple.  I am thinking of cutting a long piece of silk, a bit more than twice as wide as I want the "straps" to be.  The idea would be to use the strip to bind the neckline by placing the center of the silk strip against the back center of the neck notch, fold the fabric over each side of the neck notch, and stitch it down around the neckline. (Yes this will take some folding and tweaking, but might be worth it.)  Then stitch down the rest of the length of each strap, fold the edges inward and stitch together along the folds.  In other words, the silk strip would be fastened to the cloak all around the neckline, and the rest would serve as long straps.  That way, the straps would be unlikely to rip away from the cloak.  The sketch to the left above should give a better idea of what I mean.  (N.B.:  The two different pieces are not drawn to the same scale.)

This concept assumes, of course, that my piece of fabric is large enough to cut the cloak as a semicircle; I don't recall exactly how big it is.  If the fabric is not wide or long enough, it may make better sense to try to cut the cloak as a series of pie-shaped wedges and stitch them together to create a better-fitting shape.

If anyone has comments or thoughts about these ideas, please let me know in the comments.

More Semicircular Cloaks

Tonight, on the Historical Needlework Resources Website, I found examples of three more extant 11th century semicircular cloaks that, because of their richness and provenance, have survived intact.

The "Star Mantle" of Henry II of the Holy Roman Empire is a semicircular cloak with a stretched neck notch like mine.  My last post on this subject featured a different cloak also attributed to Henry (Heinreich) II of Germany.

In contrast, the Mantle of St. Kunigunde, Henry's wife, also has an elongated neck notch, but that neck notch does not have rounded edges; it is a shallow rectangle, with perhaps a slight reverse curve.

Finally, the Coronation Mantle of St. Stephen has no notch at all; it is a simple, if not quite perfect, semicircle.

This confirms my belief that there was no one method for cutting semicircular cloaks in this period; each tailor appears to have done as experience, and (probably) his patron's body prompted. It reassures me that my mantion is of a plausibly period design.

EDIT (4/1/2017):  Added text noting that I'd previously featured a photograph of a different (black-and-white) semicircular cloak of Heinreich II.

In search of semicircular cloaks.

After my comment on how my mantion is significantly shorter in the back than on the sides, I started looking for images of people wearing semicircular cloaks in Middle Byzantine and Byzantine-influenced art.

I didn't find as many as I'd hoped. I did find several images where figures wearing similar-looking cloaks appear to have the sides hitched up over their hands, as does the Virgin Mary in this 12th-13th century Russian icon. The left-hand figure in this Crucifixion scene of similar date (which probably also is Mary) is doing the same thing. But wait; this Mary appears to have a rectangular garment wrapped about her like a Roman Imperial era palla, which wasn't a living fashion by the Middle Byzantine era. It's hard to tell what the saint on the right here is wearing--his cloak is so dark it is difficult to see where the folds are and how it is being worn.

This 10th century manuscript of the Gospel of Luke looks as though the figures are wearing more contemporary clothing, but again the one figure who might be wearing a semicircular cloak (lower right) cannot be clearly discerned. And contemporary art from north or east of Byzantium is of no help; all of the semicircular cloaks shown are too long and voluminious for any difference in length on the sides to be discernible. This page on medieval material culture has a collection of secular images, but aside from the fact that they are not from the Byzantine Empire most of them are too long to ascertain whether there is any difference in hem length at the sides. Most of them also date from the 14th century or later--significantly after the Middle Byzantine period.

To make things more confusing, this illumination from the Fecamp Psalter shows a semicircular cloak that is shorter on the sides. Some of the Russian icon images look shorter on the sides, but that appears to be because the wearer has them wound around his/her hands or is holding them in some way. The Fecamp image shows the cloak being caught up by the arms a bit, but even so, the cloak's sides look much too short for that factor to account for all of the difference in length.

Interestingly enough, there are a few actual surviving 12th century ceremonial cloaks (from Germany, so far as I know). Some of them are almost pure half-circles, without even the broad, slightly curved neck notch I eventually made. Here's another one; the edge that goes against the neck is perfectly straight, though the sides are chopped off a bit. But wait! The ceremonial mantle of the Holy Roman Emperor has both a neck notch *and* loops for a fastener, and the loops are at the corners of the notch, where I put mine! (And the lion applique on it is stunning, too.)

So although I can't say at this point that I've proven my design to be "period" for the Middle Byzantine era, the material I've found suggests that there may be a larger spectrum of designs for period semicircular cloaks than I'd thought. When I get a chance, I need to look more systematically for images of cloaked figures from the period.