Viking Women, Weaving, and Power

If ever you were to consider the history of fabric-making, you are unlikely to have associated it with horror. But that is just what this contemporary rendering of the Norse poem “Darratharljóth” conveys, and it’s really quite sick.

In the poem, which appears in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, a man sees a vision of twelve Valkyries weaving as they choose who will be slain in an upcoming battle. The loom they use has human entrails as both the warp and weft of their cloth, with men’s heads as weights, and swords and arrows in place of the treadles and battens that normally help shuttle the cloth.

So there. Behind this fictional (we very much hope, at any rate) account is a very real connection with Viking women, weaving and power, explored recently by historian Michèle Hayeur Smith in her book from 2020 _The Valkyries’ Loom: the Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic_ (Florida UP).

After having reviewed hundreds of pieces of Viking cloth, she found a regularization of the process from between the 12th-17th centuries which had between 4-15 warp threads, and after the 11th century the weft (that’s the horizontal thread) switched to a counterclockwise rotation — this standardization and shift in cloth-making enabled Hayeur Smith to realize she had identified the “vathmál” fabric featured in Icelandic law codes, fabric which functioned as a sort of currency in Viking culture. (See second image).

Whereas silver was a valued commodity that could purchase many different things, Vikings would also use vathmál as a type of currency — they could trade it for crops or food, and it would have been able to make the smaller economic exchanges done by ordinary Viking people possible.

The weaving-hut called a “dynaja” was a place only women could go, because weaving was purely the domain of women until after Christianity entered the picture around 1000 CE, and weaving was more and more done in the longhouses, and eventually men took up the trade.If ever you were to consider the history of fabric-making, you are unlikely to have associated it with horror. But that is just what this contemporary rendering of the Norse poem “Darratharljóth” conveys, and it’s really quite sick.

In the poem, which appears in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, a man sees a vision of twelve Valkyries weaving as they choose who will be slain in an upcoming battle. The loom they use has human entrails as both the warp and weft of their cloth, with men’s heads as weights, and swords and arrows in place of the treadles and battens that normally help shuttle the cloth.

So there. Behind this fictional (we very much hope, at any rate) account is a very real connection with Viking women, weaving and power, explored recently by historian Michèle Hayeur Smith in her book from 2020 _The Valkyries’ Loom: the Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic_ (Florida UP).

After having reviewed hundreds of pieces of Viking cloth, she found a regularization of the process from between the 12th-17th centuries which had between 4-15 warp threads, and after the 11th century the weft (that’s the horizontal thread) switched to a counterclockwise rotation — this standardization and shift in cloth-making enabled Hayeur Smith to realize she had identified the “vathmál” fabric featured in Icelandic law codes, fabric which functioned as a sort of currency in Viking culture. (See second image).

Whereas silver was a valued commodity that could purchase many different things, Vikings would also use vathmál as a type of currency — they could trade it for crops or food, and it would have been able to make the smaller economic exchanges done by ordinary Viking people possible.

The weaving-hut called a “dynaja” was a place only women could go, because weaving was purely the domain of women until after Christianity entered the picture around 1000 CE, and weaving was more and more done in the longhouses, and eventually men took up the trade.

It is interesting that the battlefield was not the sole purveyance of men in 10th c Viking culture. This is seen in a grave from this time period in Birka Sweden, which in 2017 was demonstrated by DNA analysis to have been occupied by a woman — but the grave goods were weapons.