The Latest Viking Figurine

The latest find.   Photo: Østfyns Museer.

An alert reader of my blog recently brought my attention to a new metal detector find.  Although the article she told me about is written in Polish (and may be found here), the English-language archaeology magazine site Past Horizons also wrote about it in English, here.

This figure was recently found in a field near Revninge, in Denmark. Like the Hårby "Valkyrie" figurine, it has a hole in it that makes it wearable as a pendant.  Unlike the Hårby pendant, the body portion of the woman is intact, though it's done in a kind of flat relief instead of being sculpted in the round like the head. The figure has been dated to 800 C.E. and is thought to be a depiction of the fertility goddess, Freya.

Archaeologist Claus Feveile of the Department of Landscape and Archaeology at Østfyns Museums was quoted by Past Horizons as saying, “Small characters from the Viking period are extremely rare and Revninge-woman’s dress is incredibly detailed which will contribute to the discussion on the appearance of clothes and how they might have been worn.”  While I agree with Mr. Feveile that this figurine is much more detailed than previous figurines and will add to our knowledge of pre-Viking/Viking era Scandinavian costume, it will not end the more enduring disputes about women's clothing of the period.  To the contrary, it may inspire new ones.

Consider the specific features of the woman's dress and appearance that are clearly depicted.  They are:

Her hair.  It is drawn straight back from her face into a small bun, high on the back of her head. Unlike other Viking age depictions of women, there is no indication of a ponytail beneath; she is wearing a simple bun.

Her sleeves.  They end at the wrist, and are long enough that deep wrinkles show along her arms, suggesting that they were made close-fitting, but longer than her arms so that they need to be pushed up when she is wearing them.

The length of her dress.  Since her feet are clearly visible below its hem, her dress must be ankle-length.

Though evidence for these elements of Viking women's dress and appearance are useful, and confirmation of them has been scarce, they are the only unambiguous features of her costume.  Like the other female images of the period, most of the clothing details depicted in the Revninge figurine raise more questions than answers.  For example:

• What is that band along her neckline?  The Past Horizons article suggests that this band might be a strand of beads, such as the strands, often found in graves, that Viking women wore between their tortoise brooches. However, there is no sign of tortoise brooches on this figure, and similar punched-circle detailing also appears in the section at the center bottom of the skirt, which would not be completely covered with beads in this manner.  (If such a beaded dress had been worn, we would be finding even more beads in Viking women's graves than the quantities that typically emerge.) If the band is embroidery, it appears to show a garment with a very low neckline. Are we seeing an overtunic or a smokkr (apron dress)?  If it is an overtunic, it is depicting a costume very different from the garments popularly associated with Viking women.


• What does the area inside the band represent?  It seems clear that the garment with the wide banded neckline is not the woman's only upper body garment, since the vee is filled in by lines suggestive of pleats.  But those pleats do not run down the woman's body, as the few finds of women's undertunics/shifts suggest; instead they form a vee inside the vee.  Is this meant to be a stylized depiction of a pleated shift with a high round neck. or something else?


• Is she wearing a belt? At first, I thought it clear that the woman is wearing a belt, though what kind

  

  Brooch from Bj. 466*

  is anybody's guess. Thin leather?  There's no clear sign of a buckle, but leather belts can be knotted too, though probably not in a bow as this belt appears to be knotted.  Tablet weaving? Cord? What are those circular things on the ends of the belt?  They do not look like knots.  They might be metal plaques, or beads of some kind.  Then I looked again, and saw that the raised borders that frame the vee-shaped area at the bottom of the skirt that is decorated with punched circles go all the way to the hem of her dress, which suggests that they may be decorative bands on the skirt.  I also noticed that the placement of her thumbs obscures whether she has anything around her waist at all.  Moreover, the three-lobed shape that rests over where the woman's navel should be isn't really a bow knot, as I had thought.  It looks more like a certain style of trefoil brooch that is found in Viking age graves--I've included a photograph of such a brooch to demonstrate what I mean.  Note the length of the three lobes of the brooch and the triangular motif at the center.   


• Is she wearing a caftan?   It is believed that trefoil brooches like the one above were used to close outer garments, such as caftans or possibly shawls.  Could the figure be wearing a caftan?  The vee-shape with a contrasting texture inside it certainly suggests the opening of a coat, though the top part looks like more like a pleated or gathered shift.  


• How many layers does she have on?   There are no markings on the figurine that unambiguously indicate whether she is wearing a sleeveless tunic or caftan (i.e., a long coat without buttons) over a pleated, extra-long-sleeved shift; a long-sleeved caftan over a dress and smokkr; a long-sleeved tunic over a shift; or something entirely different. 


• What is that triangular "gap" at the bottom of her skirt?  It could be an underdress, showing beneath a caftan.  Or beneath an open-fronted smokkr.  Or a contrasting colored or patterned gore in a full-skirted overdress.  In short, it could be almost anything.  


• And what about those odd patches of punched circles at the waistline, just above the woman's hands?  They do seem to match the "pattern" in the triangular gap, don't they?  Maybe the woman is actually wearing a panova (a Slavic-style overskirt that is roughly contemporaneous with the Viking period, and whose form is even more speculative than that of the smokkr).

In short, I'm not prepared to attempt to craft a recreation of the Revninge woman's costume, because I can think of too many possible items of clothing that she could be wearing.  Once again, new artistic information about Viking costume just gives rise to more questions that the new information cannot answer.  It's frustrating, and fascinating, at the same time.

*    I believe the photograph to be from Birka I: Die Gräber by Holger Arbman (Almqvist & Wiksells 1940), but I'm not certain. The photograph I have reproduced here is one photograph from of a full-page of photographs of trefoil brooches. You can see that page on my Pinterest board here.