A review of the first edition of Viking Clothing by Anna Zanchi in Saga Book XXXI (2007), pp. 87–89:

Viking Clothing. By Thor Ewing. Tempus. Stroud, 2006. 208 pp. ISBN 978 0 7524 3587 9.

In his highly informative volume Viking Clothing, Thor Ewing ventures into the thorny field of Viking-Age dress and textile history, an area that has been ‘somewhat neglected by scholars’ (p. 18), as he notes in the introduction to the study. Not only is the evidence of archaeology often too scarce—and that of art and literature too unreliable—to allow clear-cut conclusions on the habitus of Old Norse men and women, but there has also been a tendency, within the scholarly world, to ‘simply accept each new contribution as a step forwards in our understanding, rather than to rigorously test new ideas through academic debate’ (p. 18). Ewing seeks to challenge any such consensus, drawing on evidence from all available sources. The author’s approach is, in this respect, quite original, as is his further objective of devoting as much space to men’s dress as to women’s.

The necessity of taking a fresh look at the history of Viking-Age costume and the motivation that underlies Ewing’s study are clearly stated at the beginning of the book: ‘We judge people by the clothes they wear. If we misrepresent the clothes of a historical culture, it will colour our judgements about that whole culture’ (p. 9). This is particularly true of popular belief about the appearance of Viking-Age men and women, which is by and large ‘still founded on a false picture of what they looked like’ (p. 9). Disproving once and for all the outdated notion of Vikings donning horned helmets, sackcloth and sheepskins, Ewing highlights the Norsemen’s attention to detail and love of splendour, noting the varied range of fabrics, both native and foreign, available in northern Europe from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, as well as the elaborate fashions and decorative elements in vogue at that time. There follows a preliminary but accurate overview of the available sources of information for Viking-Age costume and textiles, ranging from contemporary Arabic accounts of the Rus to the evidence of eddic poetry and the medieval Icelandic sagas, from the archaeological finds in Scandinavia to pictorial rune stones and the artistic evidence of medieval tapestries, as well as the contribution of Scandinavian and English manuscript illumination (pp. 13–18). Ewing aptly concludes his introductory note with the comment that ‘the more stones one turns, the more one finds to turn’ (p. 20) and the hope that his research will serve as a ‘catalyst for further debate’ (p. 18).

The first chapter (pp. 21–70), dealing with women’s clothing, begins with a description of the Greek and Roman evidence for female garments and accessories of the Germanic Iron Age, and continues with a brief but accurate overview of the major published works on Scandinavian textile history by textile archaeologists Agnes Geijer, Inga Hägg and Flemming Bau. Particular attention is paid to the lengthy dispute over the female ‘apron’, or suspended overdress, to which Ewing contributes his own—and in my opinion correct—interpretation and reconstruction of this particular garment, namely that it should be regarded as a closed dress rather than a peplos-styled one. Also worth noting are Ewing’s observations on female oval brooches as indicators of rank and marital status, and on belted skirts as typical attire of unmarried women. Among other items of dress considered are over- and undergarments, headwear and footwear, as well as jewellery, with the author drawing a vivid and easily comprehensible picture of Viking-Age female fashions.

Men’s clothing is treated at length in the following chapter (pp. 71–130). As in Chapter 1, Latin sources and Iron-Age textile finds from northern Europe are analysed at the outset, and are subsequently evaluated with reference to Norse attire. Particular attention is given to the skyrta ‘shirt’ and kyrtill ‘kirtle’, which are, in my opinion correctly, identified as a linen undergarment and a woollen overgarment respectively, and to the variations in their use and constituent materials from the early Viking Age to medieval times. Old Norse terms for the different styles of coats and breeches in fashion at that time are also explored in detail, and I found Ewing’s similar study of the vocabulary for male headwear and footwear a remarkably enlightening and original piece of research. Worth noting, for instance, is the differentiation between the conical hats with trailing tails as they appear on the tenth-century Gotlandic picture stones and the liripipe hoods of thirteenth-century Scandinavia (p. 118). On the other hand, Ewing’s observation on the kolhetta of Kjalnesinga saga (1959, 17), which he interprets as ‘skullcap’, is misleading. The ‘coal-biter’ Kolfiðr’s humble outfit includes such a garment: it is said that he var í kolhettu ok hafði kneppt blöðum milli fóta sér ‘wore a kolhetta and had tied its two laps between his legs’. Hjalmar Falk interprets this very rare term, in my opinion correctly, as indicating a round, close-fitting hood, devoid of the long ‘tail’ often associated with medieval hoods (Falk 1919, 96). Like that of the skauthetta, or skauthekla (see Helgi Guðmundsson 1967, 13–14), the head-piece also comprised a front and a back skirt, which, as Jóhannes Halldórsson also notes (Kjalnesinga saga 1959, 18 n. 1), is reminiscent of the kjafal described in Eiríks saga rauða (1935, 223).

The third chapter of Ewing’s work (pp. 131–60) offers a fairly technical yet accessible analysis of Viking-Age spinning and weaving techniques, as well as of textile fibres, types of weave and cloth, and the dyeing processes. Sewing and embroidery are also considered, as is the use of skins, furs and luxurious foreign fabrics in the Norse era. The author’s identification and definition of the ambiguous term guðvefr (cf. OE godweb) as ‘almost certainly’ indicating samite cloth (p. 152), however, seems to me a little rash; the assumption should perhaps have been more fully substantiated.

The purpose of ‘Clothes, Cloth and Viking Society’, the study’s concluding chapter (pp. 161–72), is somewhat obscure. It aims to highlight ‘just a few aspects of the function and meaning of clothing in Viking-Age Scandinavian society’; pit houses and textile production in Germanic and Scandinavian tradition are described, as are northern European textile workshops and the ‘Birka-type’ cloth; the analysis then shifts to the significance of coloured clothing and wedding garments as illustrated in medieval Icelandic literature, and to the literary use of items of clothing as gifts in the same corpus. Perhaps it would have been more coherent in the context of the work as a whole to have included the sections on textile production and workshops in an earlier chapter—perhaps Chapter 3—and to have reserved the rather too brief observations on narrative motifs for a separate study.

All in all, Viking Clothing represents the most up-to-date work available on Viking-Age and medieval Scandinavian dress, synthesising, scrutinising, expanding and upgrading previously published research. The analysis is generously illustrated and accessible to both scholarly and general readerships. The work may prove particularly useful to re-enactors, costume designers and—of concern to scholars of Old Norse literature—those who wish to understand better the creation and function of a specific outfit or item of clothing as described in Viking-Age poetry or medieval Icelandic prose.

Bibliography

Eiríks saga rauða 1935. Ed. Matthías Þórðarson and Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. Íslenzk fornrit IV.

Falk, Hjalmar 1919. Altwestnordische Kleiderkunde.

Helgi Guðmundsson 1967. Um Kjalnesinga sögu. Nokkrar athuganir. Studia Islandica 26.

Kjalnesinga saga 1959. Ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson. Íslenzk fornrit XIV.