Monday, June 15, 2015

Some Scholarship on Viking Age Weaving

At the moment, I'm kind of distracted, having lost my full-time contract job (the major source of my income) on Friday, so I'm not ready to blog about my sprang cap project, let alone start working on it.

Instead, I'd like to pass along a link of interest to Viking textile enthusiasts and weaving geeks.  My friend, Carolyn Priest-Dorman, reposted on her new blog, A String Geek's Stash, a great article from 2005 entitled "Viking Age Pick-Up Double Weaves from Sweden and Norway.  It discusses in some detail the Revsund border, the Överhogdal textiles, the Marby fragment, and the Kyrkås hanging.   Best of all (as is typical of Carolyn's work), it contains links to photographs of a number of the textiles discussed, as well as a substantial bibliography.

Although the pieces discussed in Carolyn's article probably came from wall-hangings or other non-clothing household textiles, they shed copious light on weaving techniques that were originally believed to post-date the Viking age, and I commend her article to the attention of anyone interested in Viking Age textiles.

5 comments:

  1. I'm so sorry to hear about your job. That lack of job security is the main problem with contracting. I hope you find a great new job soon, as I'm sure you will.

    Thank you for posting this article. It's just fascinating. I love these geometric weaves and would like to make one, possibly for one of the HSM challenges. Carolyn's article will help a lot.

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    1. Stella: thanks for the sympathy. Though in the present US economy, employment isn't much more secure--I was asked to leave after nearly 20 years of employment with a firm back in 2012 because they no longer had enough work for me.

      Glad you enjoyed the article; you were one of the people I figured would be interested when I decided to write the post.

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    2. It's not very different in New Zealand. I sometimes think the only form of job security that exists today is the ability to get a new job when one is inevitably made redundant.

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  2. Oh, no! That really sucks about the job. I am so sorry you are going through this again.

    Thanks for the signal boost. I wondered why pageviews were up. :-)

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    1. Thanks for the sympathy.

      You're welcome, but I enjoy boosting the signal for good Viking era scholarship.

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