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.

Rome and Feminine Adornment--Some Things Never Change

Me, dressed up (aged 10 months)

Recently, I read the following book by Kelly Olson, a scholar of women's and girls' clothing in ancient Rome:

Olson, Kelly. Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-presentation and Society. (Routledge 2008).

Unsurprisingly, Olson's book contains much of the same information I commented upon in my last post about Roman prostitutes and the toga, but there were a few extra nuggets that are interesting enough to be shared.

My bracelet

One of those nuggets (which also turns up in Olson's essay in Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture) is Olson's discussion of whether jewels and makeup were solely the province of adult women or whether they were also worn, at least on occasion, by girls.  Olson appears to be a bit surprised by the evidence that at least some very young girls wore gold jewelry and were buried with makeup cases and the like:

In 1889 there was excavated in Rome the tomb of a young girl named Crepereia Tryphaena who had died unmarried at 17-19 years old. The burial was dated to the late second century CE, and contained haircombs, a beryl necklace, pearl necklace, pearl earrings, mirrors and finger rings (as well as a beautiful jointed ivory doll). The burial chamber of a baby girl in the Hadrianic era in Rome was found to contain a doll, makeup cases, and a gold ring. The contents of Crepereia's tomb may indicate that young or unmarried girls adorned; or perhaps the items in both burials were meant to make the girls' deaths all the more poignant by alluding to a stage of life they would never attain. (p. 116)

Perhaps Olson is right about the makeup cases, but the apparent oddity of real gold jewelry for very little girls may be only a few generations old.

Portrait of a Saxon Princess (1517)

Portinari triptych (1478)

I was born to working-class parents of Eastern European ancestry in 1959.  The picture on the top left shows me at about 10 months of age, dressed up for a formal portrait (that was later reproduced in a larger size to look like an oil painting, and hung on the wall of my family's home until I sold the home after my mother's and stepfather's death).  A quick trip through WikiPortraits also shows no lack of well-born children, at least, wearing jewelry at young ages (see below).
  

The other photograph near the top of this post shows the gold-filled bracelet I am wearing in the portrait.  I was able to capture the delicate engraving on the front, though my initials "CCO" are  mostly lost in the glare of my camera's flash.  There were also two little gold rings, like wedding rings, and I think I was wearing one of them (on my right hand, though it's not at all clear from this photograph) for the portrait.  I can't find them now for some reason.  

I suspect (though I can't prove it, of course) was that the parents of the Roman baby who buried their daughter with a little gold ring, like my parents, simply felt that to be female is to be adorned, to as great an extent as the family's budget (and, by implication, social class) allows, and that they wanted their baby daughter to be properly adorned in death.

 Children of Edward Hollen Cruttenden (18th c)

Another tidbit I got from Olson's book is the observation that "Men naturally wore a natural wool toga, white if they were canvassing, black or gray if they were in mourning...  but, as in nineteenth-century France and England, 'black, white and grey, the very negation of colour, were the paradigm of dignity, control, and morality' and thus were the everyday color of male garments; the greater part of the rainbow was left to women." (pp. 13-14) 

Finally, and amusingly, Olson cites Pliny as support for the proposition that "the toga was at some point in Rome's history a mark of status or honor for a woman."  (p.127-128 n. 125) Olson's citation to Pliny's Natural History (Plin. Nat. 34.28) is clearly incorrect (the chapter is about how to make a kind of verdigris called "scolex").  However, the following passage from Bostock and Riley's (1855) translation of the Natural History contains the following relevant passage at 34.13:

Pedestrian statues have been, undoubtedly, for a long time in estimation at Rome: equestrian statues are, however, of considerable antiquity, and females even have participated in this honour; for the statue of Clælia is equestrian, as if it had not been thought sufficient to have her clad in the toga; and this, although statues were not decreed to Lucretia, or to Brutus, who had expelled the kings, and through both of whom Clælia had been given as a hostage.  I should have thought that this statue, and that of Cocles, were the first that were erected at the public expense—for it is most likely that the statues of Attus and the Sibyl were erected by Tarquinius, and those of each of the other kings by themselves respectively —had not Piso stated that the statue of Clælia was erected by those who had been hostages with her, when they were given up by Porsena, as a mark of honour.

(emphasis mine).  Not having seen the original Latin, or having sufficient knowledge of Latin to judge the quality of this translation if I had, I will simply leave the matter rest with this quote.

Roman Beauty?

In my last post, I wrote about what Kelly Olson said about the wearing of the toga praetexta by girls too young to marry. Olson's essay had other interesting tidbits, not just about what Roman women and girls wore, but to some extent on their outlook on female beauty. 

Hans Memling's Eve

One of these tidbits involved the strophium, the breastband Roman women and girls wore, instead of our brassiere or the early modern corset.  The strophium, a band of linen or fine wool wound over the breasts to support and compress them, makes pretty good sense for mature women, since when properly worn a strophium gives good breast support, as this SCA member found.

Roman nude (in Musée Saint-Raymond)

But support, it turns out, was not the only thing the Roman ladies had in mind in binding their breasts with the strophium, and what they actually had in mind makes sense of why their young daughters' breasts were bound too.

What they wanted from this breast-binding was smaller breasts.  Ms. Olson reports that the Roman ideal of beauty featured small breasts and generous hips, and the hope was to keep a girl's breasts small by introducing her to the strophium at a very young age:

On an examination of the evidence it is clear that the ideal shape of a woman was different in antiquity:   the modern erotic ideal of full breasts, small waist, and rounded hips has not in fact been a cultural constant.   An alluring Roman woman possessed small breasts and wide hips, an ideal that is borne out by artistic as well as literary evidence.  Thus Soranus directed nurses to swaddle a female infant tightly in the breasts and more loosely at the hips, 'to take on the shape that in women is more becoming.' (Sor. Gyn. 2.15 [84])

[Olson, Kelly, "The Appearance of the Young Roman Girl," in Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture, page 143 (University of Toronto Press 2008).

I was able to find on Wikimedia Commons an example of a Roman nude female sculpture demonstrating this ideal (see the photograph above on the left).  Interestingly, this taste for wide hips and small breasts lasted well into medieval times, judging by some of the nudes painted by Netherlandish painters in the 15th century, one of which I found on Wikimedia Commons and also posted here (see the photograph above on the right). 

I can't help but view Ms. Olson's statement about the Roman ideal of female beauty with amusement, because it also describes *my* figure, which to modern taste is far from perfect.  Maybe I was simply born a few...dozen... centuries too late. 

Ms. Olson also has some interesting things to say about the wearing of jewelery and cosmetics by Roman girls, which I'll save for another post.

Thinking About Female Images In Viking Art

Looking at the Leire statue reminded me just how common it is for women in Viking Age figurines to look as though they have a short narrow cloth covering their bodies from (approximately) waist to mid-calf. The length and width of these apparent aprons are further emphasized (as on the Leire figure) with either horizontal lines across the entire "garment", designs across the bottom edge, or, like the Leire statue, some kind of edging or design along the bottom and (or) sides.

As I thought about it, I realized that the Leire figure is not the only female figure that appears to be wearing an apron. This figure from the National Museum of Denmark, also wears a narrow cloth over her lap that looks like an apron (thank you, Pearl, for bringing this figure to my attention).

But apron-like designs on Viking Age figures of women are not limited to Danish pieces. The famous silver pendant of Freyja found in Götland also appears to be wearing an apron with horizontal trim across the bottom, under her clasped hands and her rows of beads. Some of the other female figures found in various locations in Sweden (i.e., the figure on the far left, and the third figure from the left, in the photograph under the link) show them also.

I'm not completely sure why I didn't focus on this feature of the existing Viking images before. Granted, the only evidence for the wearing of aprons (as opposed to the so-called "apron dress") during the Viking Age comes from Finland and the Baltic. Those finds survived because the Finns and Balts sewed lots of bronze coils onto their clothing, particularly onto aprons, and this had the effect of preserving parts of the apron as well as giving very exact information about its size and about what parts of the body the apron covered while it was being worn. In Scandinavia, where metal trim was sometimes sewn onto sleeve ends and bodices, but nowhere else, it is still possible that similar aprons were worn, but were not preserved for the archaeological record because they bore no metal trim to preserve them.

Nor am I the only person interested in Viking Age clothing to fail to consider aprons as a possible feature of Viking wear. In the years in which I have eagerly sought out and viewed photographs of Viking clothing reconstructions made by reenactors, costumers, and museums, I have found only one who wears an apron with her Viking garb. The accompanying photograph shows her work. Her name is Deborah Lane. I met her through the MedCos mailing list.

Consideration of the apron question may also help to answer another long-standing question about Viking women's clothing; namely, whether Viking women wore belts. Belt buckles rarely turn up in Viking women's graves and, to my knowledge, the only graves in which they have turned up are not in Scandinavia but in Viking-settled areas of England, Scotland, and the islands north of Scotland. Many have speculated that if Viking women wore belts, they must have worn tablet-woven belts, because so few belt ends and buckles have been found in women's graves.

If most Viking women wore an apron supported by a tablet woven belt, like Deborah and the woman at Eura, it would help explain why so little belt hardware has been found. Belts with buckles are usually made from leather, and it would be difficult to use a leather belt to support an apron in the manner of the Eura woman's apron (i.e., wrapping the belt around the body once, catching the top edge of the apron under it, then folding the top edge over that part of the belt before wrapping the remainder of the belt once again and tying it) because most leather belts are not long enough to wrap twice around the body, or flexible enough to hold the apron firmly and comfortably even if they were long enough.  Deborah's recreation, which shows her tablet woven belt holding her apron on in the manner of the Eura woman's apron, illustrates the point, though Deborah has added metal belt ends to her belt (I don't know of any women's graves in the Viking Age where two belt ends but no buckle have been found).

I need to think more about this issue, but an apron ornamented with embroidery, tablet weaving, or some other textile trim might be an appropriate addition to a recreated female Viking outfit.