The Valkyries' Loom
October 5, 2022 2:06 PM Subscribe
Dr. Michèle Hayeur Smith, an anthropological archaeologist at Brown University, has analyzed cloth from Viking and medieval archaeological sites to show that women were responsible for the manufacture of a vitally important resource: a legally standardized cloth used as currency. A 2020 virtual lecture by Dr. Hayeur Smith, referenced in the Scientific American article, goes into more detail.
I see Kattullus has it covered -- I was coming in to say, This is news? This is brought up in just about social history about Iceland and the Vikings I've ever read.
posted by Quasirandom at 3:43 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Quasirandom at 3:43 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
As Graeber says, always ask how "money" acts like religious artifacts, and in what actions or ceremonies it does or does not play a role, as well as how religious-money connects with the slave trade.
It's clearly religious somehow if men really stayed away, but vikings had relatively few slaves, only like 10% of the population. According to Graeber, American Indians' wampum held religious significance, and tribes exchanged wampum to settle blood feuds or other disputes, but you could not buy food, land, or labor with wampum.
If I understand his view, wampum was kinda women A giving women B their (necessarily portable) temple decorations, so that women B make men B not seek revenge for whatever violent stupidity men A recently committed, but they decided details via some court-like trials/rituals.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:07 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's clearly religious somehow if men really stayed away, but vikings had relatively few slaves, only like 10% of the population. According to Graeber, American Indians' wampum held religious significance, and tribes exchanged wampum to settle blood feuds or other disputes, but you could not buy food, land, or labor with wampum.
If I understand his view, wampum was kinda women A giving women B their (necessarily portable) temple decorations, so that women B make men B not seek revenge for whatever violent stupidity men A recently committed, but they decided details via some court-like trials/rituals.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:07 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
The value of textiles is still routinely undercounted by people outside of the field. The sheer amount of labour and the value of clothes have changed so sharply that you have to stop and consciously think about it when reading about the past. When someone gives or loses clothing, it can be more the equivalent today of losing e.g. a laptop, something valuable and necessary. It is so integral to pre-industrial communities and so vanished into a narrow commercial sector in ours that the importance of textiles economically and socially - and women's dominant role - has to be explicitly taught and brought up over and over because we simply don't have that perspective anymore.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:49 PM on October 5, 2022 [26 favorites]
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:49 PM on October 5, 2022 [26 favorites]
The value of textiles is still routinely undercounted by people outside of the field.
I went down a rabbit hole looking at how linen was made from flax once; holy shiiiiiiit. It's like a multi year process to just make a bolt of cloth, not even to turning it into a garment. Massive amounts of labor, and any hiccup in the process can waste months and months of work.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:28 PM on October 5, 2022 [6 favorites]
I went down a rabbit hole looking at how linen was made from flax once; holy shiiiiiiit. It's like a multi year process to just make a bolt of cloth, not even to turning it into a garment. Massive amounts of labor, and any hiccup in the process can waste months and months of work.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:28 PM on October 5, 2022 [6 favorites]
It’s good to fill in the archaeological detail, formally, I suppose, to complement the bits that are obvious to practitioners. Spinning yarn on a drop spindle, with wool from the same flock of sheep, year over year, will give you remarkably regular yarn in grist (diameter) and twist. Warping that the same way and weaving the same structure will also tend to a ‘groove’ where the weft is beaten in to the same degree, the web has a similar density before finishing, and then the wet finishing shrinks and fulls it to be even more same-same.
Climate change is going to change the quality of the forage, influencing the mechanical details of the fleeces from the sheep —and when in the season you shear them (or roo them to pull the wool off)— and those changes ripple through the whole process, without any Icelandic weaver necessarily ever saying to herself ‘I think I’ll beat up the weft more firmly this year.’
posted by janell at 10:04 PM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]
Climate change is going to change the quality of the forage, influencing the mechanical details of the fleeces from the sheep —and when in the season you shear them (or roo them to pull the wool off)— and those changes ripple through the whole process, without any Icelandic weaver necessarily ever saying to herself ‘I think I’ll beat up the weft more firmly this year.’
posted by janell at 10:04 PM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]
@Janell, if the cloth is standardised for trade though as the article points out with a very narrow range of patterns and thread sizes compared to much wider variety in cloth used for general domestic use, deliberate choices are being made about changes in trading stock that is a cash equivalent.
I would love to see the two different types of cloth she talks about because although I will read Handwoven for pleasure, I don't have enough knowledge to be able to picture the technical differences - I imagine it is something to do with insulating loft in the pattern of fibres to create a cloth that while it takes longer to make, captures warmth better?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:17 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
I would love to see the two different types of cloth she talks about because although I will read Handwoven for pleasure, I don't have enough knowledge to be able to picture the technical differences - I imagine it is something to do with insulating loft in the pattern of fibres to create a cloth that while it takes longer to make, captures warmth better?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:17 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
I went down a rabbit hole looking at how linen was made from flax once; holy shiiiiiiit
I've been spinning and sometimes weaving for years now, and that hobby included learning all about this, and it really gave me another lens when looking at historical portraits etc and see how much the wealth is being flexed by the amount of cloth on display.
posted by cendawanita at 10:37 PM on October 5, 2022 [11 favorites]
I've been spinning and sometimes weaving for years now, and that hobby included learning all about this, and it really gave me another lens when looking at historical portraits etc and see how much the wealth is being flexed by the amount of cloth on display.
posted by cendawanita at 10:37 PM on October 5, 2022 [11 favorites]
Except that 4-15 warp threads per centimeter is an enormous range of variation, and the article describes the standardization of structure (a 2-2 twill). These vertical looms don’t use a reed to control the warp spacing - the literature on them in, eg Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s work, suggests that most had the warp constructed, and the sett (warps/distance) determined, by a tablet woven band used as the top selvedge. Here is a relatively clear image of an example. It’s not a device with a lot of degrees of freedom for fabric density once that tablet band is woven and you’ve committed to a particular twill interlacement. And these fabrics would have been fulled (think: shrunk in the wash) to reach their tradeable goods final dimensions.
My point is mostly that autopilot is a very strong factor in handspinning - so much so that it’s something people have to learn to overcome to spin different grists, and the same yarns in the same woven structure and the same finishing methods are going to end up with a snowball-shaped distribution of warp sett/weft sett values.
That range of setts, if we ignore the shrinkage from fulling, covers a range you could readily weave with manufactured knitting yarns from Sport weight up through Super Bulky.
posted by janell at 10:43 PM on October 5, 2022 [6 favorites]
My point is mostly that autopilot is a very strong factor in handspinning - so much so that it’s something people have to learn to overcome to spin different grists, and the same yarns in the same woven structure and the same finishing methods are going to end up with a snowball-shaped distribution of warp sett/weft sett values.
That range of setts, if we ignore the shrinkage from fulling, covers a range you could readily weave with manufactured knitting yarns from Sport weight up through Super Bulky.
posted by janell at 10:43 PM on October 5, 2022 [6 favorites]
I thought it was neat that they didn't used to need to ply the wool because it was strong enough. And that the sheep they got wool from have two different kinds of wool that they would carefully separate out and use one kind for warp and the other kind for weft, something about felting.
posted by aniola at 10:44 PM on October 5, 2022
posted by aniola at 10:44 PM on October 5, 2022
I was coming in to say, This is news?
It may not be to those who are closer to historical textiles or Icelandic culture - but it was new to me - so many thanks for posting.
In an era of cryptocurrency's "proof of work", it is interesting to think about how vaðmál worked. Vaðmál needed skilled labour on the part of the wavers - and skilled farming to provide the raw materials - it provided employment for both groups and would have had side benefits like lamb to eat and clothes to keep warm, look good, sell to clothe chilly English peasants (apparently) and stay alive. As a currency itself - it would have been very hard to forge in an era before industrial weaving - but (as with Bitcoin) it would have allowed anybody to get involved in the minting process if they put the skills to it. Finally - it would have boosted the social standing of the women who wove it - a talented weaver would have been somebody who knew how to print money.
Much better than just burning electricity to heat a server room.
posted by rongorongo at 1:31 AM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]
It may not be to those who are closer to historical textiles or Icelandic culture - but it was new to me - so many thanks for posting.
In an era of cryptocurrency's "proof of work", it is interesting to think about how vaðmál worked. Vaðmál needed skilled labour on the part of the wavers - and skilled farming to provide the raw materials - it provided employment for both groups and would have had side benefits like lamb to eat and clothes to keep warm, look good, sell to clothe chilly English peasants (apparently) and stay alive. As a currency itself - it would have been very hard to forge in an era before industrial weaving - but (as with Bitcoin) it would have allowed anybody to get involved in the minting process if they put the skills to it. Finally - it would have boosted the social standing of the women who wove it - a talented weaver would have been somebody who knew how to print money.
Much better than just burning electricity to heat a server room.
posted by rongorongo at 1:31 AM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]
The value of textiles is still routinely undercounted by people outside of the field. The sheer amount of labour and the value of clothes have changed so sharply that you have to stop and consciously think about it when reading about the past.
This is such a good point. I've been trying to work the knowledge presented in this article into my teaching for years, and the discussion here in the thread is inspiring.
A few years ago I learnt that there is such a surplus of wool that it may make sense to use it for building insulation in a relatively large scale. Because woolen clothes can't compete in the market, because we are used to paying near nothing for our synthetic winter clothes.
posted by mumimor at 3:29 AM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]
This is such a good point. I've been trying to work the knowledge presented in this article into my teaching for years, and the discussion here in the thread is inspiring.
A few years ago I learnt that there is such a surplus of wool that it may make sense to use it for building insulation in a relatively large scale. Because woolen clothes can't compete in the market, because we are used to paying near nothing for our synthetic winter clothes.
posted by mumimor at 3:29 AM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]
A few years ago I learnt that there is such a surplus of wool that it may make sense to use it for building insulation in a relatively large scale.
mumimor, this spring I was on a long walk through the Devon countryside that passed through a large plot of garden allotments where enormous amounts of wool were thickly piled around plants. Wool as mulch.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:40 AM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]
mumimor, this spring I was on a long walk through the Devon countryside that passed through a large plot of garden allotments where enormous amounts of wool were thickly piled around plants. Wool as mulch.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:40 AM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]
I get that this has been open knowlege for many of you, but this does sound like an element of new, confimratory knowledge being added, no? From the SA article:
"Scholars knew about vaðmál in an “abstract” sort of way, Hayeur Smith says, because it was precisely defined in the medieval law books. But the legal texts never mention the women weaving it, she points out. And nobody checked the cloth remains to see whether they conformed to the specifications in the legal texts.
In tandem with her textile analysis, she examined the legal texts—most of which had, thankfully, already been translated from Old Norse into modern English. Through painstaking inspection, she confirmed that the cloth Icelandic women wove conformed exactly to these standards: a 2/2 twill (a tweed), Z/S-spun, woven with four to 15 warp threads per centimeter. "
Knowledge is accretionary, we stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]
"Scholars knew about vaðmál in an “abstract” sort of way, Hayeur Smith says, because it was precisely defined in the medieval law books. But the legal texts never mention the women weaving it, she points out. And nobody checked the cloth remains to see whether they conformed to the specifications in the legal texts.
In tandem with her textile analysis, she examined the legal texts—most of which had, thankfully, already been translated from Old Norse into modern English. Through painstaking inspection, she confirmed that the cloth Icelandic women wove conformed exactly to these standards: a 2/2 twill (a tweed), Z/S-spun, woven with four to 15 warp threads per centimeter. "
Knowledge is accretionary, we stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]
A few years ago I learnt that there is such a surplus of wool that it may make sense to use it for building insulation in a relatively large scale. Because woolen clothes can't compete in the market, because we are used to paying near nothing for our synthetic winter clothes
A little O/T but Hi-tech softening enzymes offer hope of revival for Scottish wool industry might interest you. The original article talks about how the Icelandic wool - while being finely woven - was also considered low grade in England - fit for the peasants. This research appears to offer a way of taking scraggy Scottish highland wool and turning it into something which will give a product that has the softness of cashmere or merino.
posted by rongorongo at 4:15 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]
A little O/T but Hi-tech softening enzymes offer hope of revival for Scottish wool industry might interest you. The original article talks about how the Icelandic wool - while being finely woven - was also considered low grade in England - fit for the peasants. This research appears to offer a way of taking scraggy Scottish highland wool and turning it into something which will give a product that has the softness of cashmere or merino.
posted by rongorongo at 4:15 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think it's worth considering though the origin of place that the initial comment is from. I think we as a site community has to also guard that our sense of interest isn't dominated by the sense that it's exotic and unknown when the home culture finds it perfectly ordinary. It's something worth knowing and learning regardless, but this a more general comment (and i don't speak as an icelandic person but more of someone who's been attending textile lectures) but the need to have something headline-worthy in science public comms can interact unwisely in colonial habits of presenting cultural studies.
I don't know how to address the sensation of then being reluctant to know more though. Usually I'm already mentally tired enough explaining my culture (this is where I relate) that someone else needs to pick up the baton of soothing because of my presentation.
posted by cendawanita at 5:14 AM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]
I don't know how to address the sensation of then being reluctant to know more though. Usually I'm already mentally tired enough explaining my culture (this is where I relate) that someone else needs to pick up the baton of soothing because of my presentation.
posted by cendawanita at 5:14 AM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]
I look forward to seeing the lecture after work.
Apart from the usual stuff about male archeologists and anthropologists focusing on male activities, I think one issue with textile research is that it is really hard to understand how textiles are made and how to manage quality if you don't practice, at least on a skilled amateur level. Fairly recently I was supposed to write a book about a weaver, and I "read" all the canonical books, but I can't say my level of comprehension was sufficient for the task. (I quit that job for other reasons). So experimental archeology has played a huge role in understanding the economies of wool and other fibers.
How many sheep do you have to shear to make a sail for a war ship? How many hours does it take to prepare the wool and weave it? Who does this? Who owns the land where the sheep graze? What about the rather harsh depletion of the land that is used for grazing?
Suddenly you understand what an important ressource wool was then, and what an important industry textiles were.
Add in the similar importance and complexity of the other big viking age natural ressource: timber, and you begin to see that age a bit differently (and the subsequent middle ages up to colonialization).
There is a huge center for textile research here at the Copenhagen University. Looking around their website is a bit of a rabbit warren I get lost in every winter, when I prepare for my spring lectures...
posted by mumimor at 5:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [9 favorites]
Apart from the usual stuff about male archeologists and anthropologists focusing on male activities, I think one issue with textile research is that it is really hard to understand how textiles are made and how to manage quality if you don't practice, at least on a skilled amateur level. Fairly recently I was supposed to write a book about a weaver, and I "read" all the canonical books, but I can't say my level of comprehension was sufficient for the task. (I quit that job for other reasons). So experimental archeology has played a huge role in understanding the economies of wool and other fibers.
How many sheep do you have to shear to make a sail for a war ship? How many hours does it take to prepare the wool and weave it? Who does this? Who owns the land where the sheep graze? What about the rather harsh depletion of the land that is used for grazing?
Suddenly you understand what an important ressource wool was then, and what an important industry textiles were.
Add in the similar importance and complexity of the other big viking age natural ressource: timber, and you begin to see that age a bit differently (and the subsequent middle ages up to colonialization).
There is a huge center for textile research here at the Copenhagen University. Looking around their website is a bit of a rabbit warren I get lost in every winter, when I prepare for my spring lectures...
posted by mumimor at 5:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [9 favorites]
Oh no worries (eta: lol, replying to thoroughburro). Textiles in particular, I've come to understand, is particularly fraught because, if i base on my recollection of the invention of cotton gin and spinning jenny and the etymology of 'sabotage', cultural-specific economic goods were basically the first (intended) victims of the Industrial Age. Correlating with the Age of Sail and European expansion, India as an economy has yet to recover, for example. So there's a lot of interaction between scholarly energy (both of the more liberatory kind but also that very colonial 'we must put this in a museum for their own good' kind), national identity-building and trying to reconstruct one's heritage. That implicates more segments of society than average (no one is going to be super-invested about the cultural ownership of the internet other than the USA and the UK, for example, outside the sector specialists and hobbyists. But everyone who's worn clothes tend to wonder inevitably, ime) So for this area in particular the tension is... acute, shall we say.
posted by cendawanita at 5:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 5:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]
This whole thread is making my morning. Thank you, jedicus, and all the commenters!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 6:41 AM on October 6, 2022
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 6:41 AM on October 6, 2022
Wool as mulch.
I hereby coin the name “tree cosy”.
posted by notoriety public at 9:54 AM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]
I hereby coin the name “tree cosy”.
posted by notoriety public at 9:54 AM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]
the first several comments calling it out as old and uninteresting discouraged me from digging in. I wanted to say that, to point out that chilling effect
It's funny how individual reactions are - I saw "everybody already knows about this" and my reaction was "wait, I should go learn about this thing everybody else knows!"
(Also the Valkyries bit in the post title made me think the article might be a little on the woo side, or like much anthropological work drawing excessive conclusions from minimal evidence, so the comments about how this was a totally well-known thing actually made me more interested in reading on.)
posted by trig at 11:21 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's funny how individual reactions are - I saw "everybody already knows about this" and my reaction was "wait, I should go learn about this thing everybody else knows!"
(Also the Valkyries bit in the post title made me think the article might be a little on the woo side, or like much anthropological work drawing excessive conclusions from minimal evidence, so the comments about how this was a totally well-known thing actually made me more interested in reading on.)
posted by trig at 11:21 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]
I am sorry if I appeared to be negative. I am always glad to see textiles come up here.
posted by janell at 8:05 PM on October 6, 2022
posted by janell at 8:05 PM on October 6, 2022
This was new and very interesting to me. Vadmel, as it's spelled in modern Norwegian, is still made and this place not far from me sell it by the meter. If you click on the different products, except the two black ones, you can see examples of clothing made with the fabric.
posted by Harald74 at 10:57 PM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Harald74 at 10:57 PM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]
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That said, there’s nothing very egregious in the article, and at least they mention Elsa Guðjónsson, who was an absolutely brilliant scholar.
Also, since I mentioned Icelandic medieval literature, my pet theory for why it exists is that Iceland was fairly wealthy in the High Middle Ages, partly due to vaðmál, and there was lots of cattle (and therefore vellum), so books were reasonably easy to produce. And since books were expensive items, they made for good gifts between chieftains, and there really wasn’t much else giftworthy to find on the island, so they just made books, which meant they had to have something to write in those books, so that’s why they started writing down everything they thought was interesting.
posted by Kattullus at 2:53 PM on October 5, 2022 [49 favorites]