She would next wind it up into a skein, twisting it almost as if doing a cat’s cradle, holding it with her teeth and stretching it. From a hook on the frame of a loom leaning against the wall, she pulled off an already-prepared skein of white wool thread. It was a little longer than my hand and about as thin as my finger—more like a skein of embroidery thread than the plump skeins of yarn I would buy in a knitting store. It was 40 meters long, or 131 feet, and had taken Linda an hour to make.
“It’s not strange that textiles were so valuable and that people appreciated them so much as gifts,” Eva said. “For just two Viking Age costumes at Lejre, one male and one female, we had to produce 40,000 meters of thread. For one sail for a ship, around 100 square meters in size, we had to produce over 300,000 meters of thread. It’s endless meters of thread.”
The 1,000-square-foot sail, requiring almost a million feet of thread, took two women four and a half years to make. It used the wool of more than 200 sheep, each sheep the size of a large dog and yielding two to four pounds of wool.
The average Viking housewife like Gudrid needed to clean, sort, and spin the wool of 100 sheep a year to provide clothing for her husband and children and their servants and hired hands (who were paid in food and clothing), along with bedclothes, wall hangings, tents for travel, packs and sacks, diapers, bandages, and burial shrouds. Most of this was made of undyed wool—“moor-red” or black were the most popular colors among men, while children’s clothes were generally white or gray. But a man of means, like Gudrid’s husband Karlsefni, would have worn bright colors, which meant that some of the wool had to be dyed.
When she analyzed bits of Viking cloth found in Greenland, Penelope Walton of the British company Textile Research Associates found that the most common color, a bright purple, came from lichens. Growing throughout the far north, these lichens were scraped off rock faces in early summer, dried in the sun, and steeped in more stale urine. The resulting blue-black mass was made into cakes and hung to dry in peat smoke, where it would last for years. Depending on how acidic the dye water was, this so-called lichen purple ranged from a bright crimson red to a deep blue. Another blue came from indigotin, the chemical found in indigo from India but also in a spindly yellow-flowered plant called woad, an “aggressive weed,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, that does well in Iceland. Other dye plants Gudrid might have used to make yellows and greens are Labrador tea, green alder, and dwarf birch.
Even with the wool of a hundred sheep, Gudrid could not have made Karlsefni or herself new clothes every year. The “average housewife” calculation is based on a set of Icelandic inventories from the 1700s, which allots each person 11 pounds of new, unprocessed wool for clothing. But when Else Ostergard, a textile expert who retired in 2006 from the Danish National Museum, weighed a gown, a hood, and a pair of stockings from a Norse burial in Greenland and added to it a cloak and some underclothes, she came up with a weight of 17 to 22 pounds of finished cloth. Ostergard concluded that each suit of clothes must have been worn for at least two to three years before the family could afford to replace it. And yet, on top of all this, women like Gudrid produced enough extra cloth that it was Iceland’s main export for two hundred years.
Cloth making was not just mindless drudgery. “You need to have a good head for mathematics to work textiles,” said Eva, “just to calculate how much thread you need and to lay out the patterns.”
But it was physically taxing. “If you’re sitting and spinning for half a day, it hurts!” Linda said. “From spinning, it’s the shoulders.” She lifted her left arm into “spinning position,” elbow cocked at shoulder height, hand dangling. “You have to hold yourself this way all day. It’s the same when you’re weaving, except both arms are up. And your fingers get stiff and swollen. From wool combing, it’s the wrists that hurt.”
Eva turned to the loom leaning against the conference-room wall. It was a vertical loom, also called a warp-weighted loom, known, in its many variations, from ancient Greece to modern Norway. The warp threads hang vertically, weighted taut with stones. The weaver passes the weft through the warp, shuttling from side to side, starting at the top.
“This loom is set up to make a tabby,” Eva said, “the most simple weave. Even so, it takes a whole day to set up the warp. For a very intricate weave, such as a lozenge twill, it might take two weeks to set it up.”
The process begins with putting together the loom. Tall and bulky, with two stout wooden uprights linked at the top by a heavy crossbeam, it took up too much floor space to keep out all the time. In summer it would be set up in a pit house next to the longhouse. Eva had doubted the archaeologists’ theory that these were weaving rooms, until she worked in one at Hogs Viking Village in Scania, Sweden, one year from March to October. “I now think these houses are really good for textile work,” she said. Based on plans of Viking pit houses, she sited hers so that the door was in the southwest corner—at the edge of the roof, rather like a trapdoor—and the loom leaned against the northeast wall. “If the door was open, the light came into the house like a window in the roof. It was absolutely the best weaving light I could have had, so much better than inside the longhouse. I didn’t even have a shadow.”
Once the heavy wooden frame of the loom was in place, the uprights leaning at a gradual slant, the crossbeam held away from the wall in sturdy wooden brackets, the part of the process calling for good light and mathematical talent began: stringing the warp threads on the loom, fastening them to weights to provide tension, parting them with the shed rod, and knitting them to the heddle rods to make possible a pattern.
Each warp thread—of which there were hundreds—is one of Linda’s 131-foot-long skeins. It is fastened to the crossbeam at the top and unwound until it almost touches the floor. In the simple tabby, every other warp thread goes in front of the shed rod, a fixed wooden bar that crosses from one upright to another in the bottom half of the loom. The still-wound end of the warp skein is knotted to a stone. These stones, or loom weights, have been found in dozens of Viking houses, sitting in neat rows as if their warp strings had just snapped. Archaeologists use them to say where the loom had been, but though weavers know a light weight is needed for light threads and a heavy weight for heavy threads, no one has studied how the stones’ diversity of size and shape affects the cloth.
The next step in stringing the loom is the most painstaking. Half of the warp threads are hanging straight down, nothing impeding their drop from crossbeam to stone. The other half are hooked over the shed rod, pulled out at a slant in front of the loom for most of their length before gravity takes over. That gap, between the back threads and the front threads, is called the shed. Through this gap, the weaver will pass the weft, a long, loose skein. Before she passes it back a second time, though, she must change the shed.
Changing the shed requires heddle shafts—one for a simple tabby weave, up to four for some other designs. A heddle shaft crosses from upright to upright like the shed rod, but it isn’t fixed in place. Its bracket has two options: snug against the uprights or a handspan forward. The shaft is looped to the back threads—each loop is called a heddle—so that when the weaver pulls the shaft out to the forward bracket, the back threads are all brought forward, too. They rise above the front threads and create a new opening—a new shed—for the weft. The heddle shaft’s backward-and-forward motion is thus the key to weaving, catching the rows of weft in the changing pattern of the warp.
The loops that hold the threads to the shaft are all knotted from one long, strong cord, saved and reused again and again. Knotting the heddles is where a good head for math comes in handy. Mistakes are easy to make and hard to spot—until you’ve started weaving, and then the only way to fix them is to unweave it all and start over.
It’s easy to imagine knotting the heddles for a simple tabby. Loop a thread, skip a thread, loop a thread, skip a thread. But tabby was not the most common cloth in the Viking Age. The standard was a plain twill in which the w
eft goes over two threads, under two threads, over two threads, under two threads—simple, except that the thread pairs chosen were not always the same. On the return journey, the weft goes over one thread from the first pair and one from the second pair, then under the remaining thread of the second pair and one from the third pair, and so on. “So you have to have three heddle shafts,” said Eva. “If you have four threads, the first one goes to the first shaft, the second one to the second shaft, the third one to the third shaft, and the fourth one is not attached to a shaft. You can have two shafts in front and one in back, or two in back and one in front. You have to be very, very careful that you have the right thread tied to the right shaft.”
Once the loom was strung, the work—and the walking—began. The weaver walked from right to left, slipping the weft through the open shed. Parking the weft in a hook on the loom frame, she lifted the left end of the heddle shafts from one bracket to the other. She walked back to the right side of the loom and changed the right end of the heddle shafts—the shafts are too heavy to pick up in the middle and change both sides at once. She walked back to the left side of the loom, picked up the weft, wove a new row walking from left to right, and changed the heddle shafts again. According to one calculation, a hardworking weaver walked 23 miles every day.
Added to the walking was the beating. Every two or three rows, the weaver would insert a weaving sword—a long swordshaped tool made of whalebone or wood—into the shed and, using both hands, beat the weft upward, packing the rows of thread tightly together. The densest cloth required twenty thumps. A more delicate tool was the pin-beater, a slender finger made of bone or wood. Run along the warp from side to side, it evened out the spacing between the threads. The poets said it danced and sang—though the sound, to me, when Linda demonstrated, was more like that of a fingertip on the teeth of a comb.
“I am too tall for this loom,” Linda said, showing how it forced her to bend to work. A woman who owned her own loom would have it made to fit her height—if there was ample wood available. A short girl working a tall loom might need a stool, particularly to get the necessary power into her beating strokes. In the weaving room at the Farm Beneath the Sand in Greenland, a large whalebone vertebra was placed flat in front of the loom, making a sturdy hassocklike stool.
When the finished cloth filled the top half of the loom, the weaver rolled it up around the loom’s crossbeam—a stool would be helpful here even for a tall weaver, for the beam is heavy and clumsy to turn. Then, before she could begin again, the weaver had to get down on her knees to lengthen the warp threads, taking off the loom weights one by one, unwinding the skein, and retying the weights the proper distance from the floor.
All in all, weaving was an athletic task. By the 1400s, a professional weaver working on a warp-weighted loom was expected to finish about eleven yards of plain twill cloth a week. A more difficult weave would take longer. Among the fabrics archaeologists have found are stripes and checks and the fancy lozenge twill that required two weeks just to string the warp threads onto the loom. Unlike an ordinary twill, in which the fabric has a texture of diagonal lines, the lozenge twill has a pattern of rings.
The most distinctive cloth woven by Viking women was the pile or shaggy weave that imitated fur or fleece. The weaver strung her loom for a plain twill and used rather coarse thread in both warp and weft. But as she wove, she added in loops of unspun wool. These tufts were lustrous and wavy, untwisted locks of the sheep’s long outer fleece. Added to every fourth row, with twenty warp threads between each loop, the tufts were long and thick enough to cover the cloth completely after they were brushed out. The fuzzy surface was excellent for shedding rain and sea spray. Even if soaked with salt water, the cloth remained warm and soft—unlike a true sheepskin, which would stiffen up. Dyed blue or purple, these shaggy cloaks were eye-catching; the sagas describe them trimmed with patterned ribbons or braid. Even in nondescript gray, they were popular on the export market—especially after King Harald of Norway, in about 960, accepted one as a gift, earning him his nickname “Graycloak” and starting a new fashion trend.
Historian Jenny Jochens points out that these shaggy cloaks became so valuable during Gudrid’s lifetime that they were considered “legal forms of currency,” one cloak equaling two ounces of silver. You could buy a cow, candles, or passage on a ship for shaggy cloaks. A law passed around 1100 fixed prices of “all imaginable items—including gold and silver” in terms of cloth, with “six ells new and unused homespun” equal to one ounce of silver, the Vikings’ ell being the distance from your elbow to your fingertips, or about half a yard. One pound of beeswax traded for six ells; one cow was worth 120 ells. “By the end of the eleventh century,” Jochens writes, “the previous silver standard, founded on men’s violent and sporadic activities as Vikings, had been replaced by the homespun standard, based on women’s peaceful and steady work as weavers.”
Chapter 10: From Witch to Nun
But Karlsefni told the tale of these voyages better than anyone else...
—The Saga of the Greenlanders
THE WORLD WAS CHANGING IN OTHER WAYS AS WELL, those years when Gudrid ran the farm at Glaumbaer. Not only was wealth now counted in ells of cloth, not ounces of stolen silver, but the Otherworld was not attained in a clinker-built longship laden with beds and brassbound buckets, iron skillets, whistles, looms, bells, brooches, merchants’ scales, oxen, horses, and dogs.
By then, almost all of the Western world was officially Christian. In the north, the last Viking land to abandon the old gods was Greenland, through Leif Eiriksson’s efforts in the year 1000. In the east, the Hungarian Magyars—as much a scourge of the Church as the Vikings were—asked the pope to bless their leader: Vajk was crowned King Stephen I in that apocalyptic year and remembered by posterity as St. Stephen. In the south, the grand Muslim city of Cordoba in Spain, with its library of 400,000 books of Arabic science and Greek philosophy, was sacked and burned in 1013; by 1035 Sancho the Great would call himself King of Spain, by the Grace of God (despite the fact that Muslims would control large areas of the Iberian peninsula until 1492).
A woman could not buy her way into Heaven by being buried with her treasures in a splendid ship. But she could earn entrance through godly deeds, the best being a humble pilgrimage to a holy site—-Jerusalem (the way made safe by St. Stephen), Santiago de Compostela (Sancho of Spain’s especial care), or Rome, where in 1027 Conrad II, king of Saxony, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor with Knut, king of England and Denmark, and Rudolph III, king of Burgundy, by his side.
At about that time, Gudrid’s son Snorri, born in Vinland, reached manhood and married. Gudrid handed off her housewife’s keys—and the heavy work of weaving homespun—to her new daughter-in-law and decided to take a pilgrimage to Rome. Whether it was to salve her soul or to serve her wanderlust we’ll never know. It would be her seventh sea-crossing.
She may have had good company. According to Laxdaela Saga, a handsome young son of Gudrun the Fair set off in about 1025 for Constantinople to join the Byzantine emperor’s Viking bodyguard. Their route much of the way would have been the same: from Iceland to the court of King Olaf the Saint in Trondheim, Norway. From there south by ship to Roskilde, Denmark, where King Svein ruled for his father, Knut the Great. There Gudrid would have seen the beginnings of the first stone church in the North, commissioned by Knut’s sister Estrid, and completed in 1027. From Denmark, Gudrid and her companions headed south on foot, as was customary, on the Pilgrim Way. They lodged in hostels kept by monasteries and were protected not only by their numbers but by the Pax Dei, the Peace of God, which threatened excommunication to anyone who robbed a pilgrim, broke into a church, struck a priest (if he was unarmed), or harassed a virgin, child, or widow. (A few years later, merchants and their goods would be added to the list.)
No saga says what Gudrid may have seen on her yearlong sojourn south through central Europe. Certainly she would have been astonished by the cathedrals built of stone and wood i
n the stark Romanesque style, with their columns and arches and arcades, the high clerestory windows of stained glass, the towers and belfries, the frescoes of Christ’s miracles, the candlelight and incense. She may have seen the books made in the scriptoria: the radiant Gospels with their illuminations in violet, red, blue, and green of fantastical birds and beasts and chimeras creeping through golden foliage, or of the Christ Child greeting the Three Wise Men under a sky of pure gold and a silver star streaming with colors. She would have marveled at the lifelike Madonnas carved from Greenland walrus tusk. And she would have descended into the sacred crypts beneath the sanctuary floor, where the relics—the foot of St. Andrew, a nail from the True Cross, the sponge held to the suffering Christ’s lips, a shred of His coat, a scrap of His crown of thorns, a drop of His blood, the cord of Mary’s dress—were kept in gold caskets encrusted with jewels. She may have met black-clad monks who lived simply, were kind to the poor, and never laughed. She may also have met the monks that Richer, a tenth-century French historian, described as “colored like peacocks,” wearing habits so tight “that they exhibit the shape of their arse,” and carrying “little mirrors on top of their shoes so that with each step they can admire themselves.” She may have seen Princess Sophie, who ruled the convent of Gandersheim; there, a few years before Gudrid’s birth, the nun Roswitha wrote plays modeled on the Latin comedies of Terence and an epic poem honoring the emperor. She may have stopped at Reichenau, on Lake Constance, where the crippled monk Hermann was working on his treatises on music, on astronomy, and on how to build an astrolabe. Finally, Gudrid would have heard, for the first time in her life, hymns and antiphons chanted in counterpoint by choirs, and the resounding chords of the pipe organs, whose design Pope Sylvester II had brought from Islamic Spain some fifty years before.
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