A study in scarlet : red dyes for clothes of the viking age. Preliminary note : why is it actually complicated ?

This first post will not exactly help you to dye clothes in red. Not directly. It aims at helping you gain awareness of why it's actually not so easy to build certainties while dealing with accurate, archaeology-based reenactment.

I had to make this post, because doing reenactment is really a matter of how deep you are willing to delve, how much you are willing to read... and where you will choose to stop.

The better I get, the more uncertainties I have to face concerning the "accuracy" of what I'm doing.

 "I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole", or how deep reenactment takes you (not necessarily underground)

Let's start with a few facts. When making costumes, we base ourselves on archaeological finds.

Firts obvious statement : what we have been able to recover from the past is extremely little. Concerning viking age, we have maybe a dozen of extent garments, and they are not all coming from Scandinavia. Is a dozen garments representative from a period of history that lasted something like 300 years ?

Certainly not.

Second (a little bit less obvious) statement : fabric rots. The fragments that we have recovered were preserved by special conditions, whether mineralized in contact with metal (from brooches, knives, swords, shield bosses, silver and gold thread from table-woven trims, silver and gold posaments, pins, pendants, etc.) or preserved by particular qualities of the soil (for example, in bogs, like Huldremose "peplos-dress" which is not from viking period).

Tablet-woven trim from the Kostrup suspended dress photo by Hilde Thunem taken in Odense museum, Denmark

Some fabric have been recovered in funny circumstances, for example, Haithabu's (modern Hedeby, Germany) viking-age harbour yielded fabric that had been used to repair ships, that had been doused in tar.

That leads us to the third (not obvious at all) statement : you have to be very careful when using evidence to back your costume projets. If you base yourself on evidence recovered from a grave, most likely, that means mineralized fabric in contact with metal. And if there is metal, most likely, that means a wealthy grave. Check if the assessed level of wealth of the grave matches your character's level of wealth.

Ship-burials are for very wealthy people. Oseberg's lady was a queen, or a chieftain's lady. That means that despite the fact that we are very happy to have plenty of evidence from her grave, maybe, you shouldn't use that for your costume. Tablet-woven trims were luxury items, if there are gold and silver threads to preserve them, you will need all of your costume to be accordingly rich.

NOT a middle-class garment, so if you are, choose something else.

Dress made by Toril Sørbøe Rojahn, posted on Viking Clothing Facebok group

Some of the fabric recovered from excavations are more likely to have belonged to humble people. The clothes from bodies found in bogs, the fabric from Haithabu harbour are probably better evidence if your character is humble. But it's not easy to make out their colour !

The acidic Ph of the bogs makes it difficult to analyze the dyes. It's the same for clothes that have spent a long time in the sea, or under ice (the Greenland settlements have yielded a lot of extent garments, although they are XIIIth-XIVth century, not viking-age).

The conclusion is : the coloured clothes samples that are at our disposal to guess what was used for dyeing are not representative of "the viking period". They can be representative of the settlement, or of the burial site, though. In Birka, there was a wealthy area of burials, and a poorer one. Guess what ? More grave goods are recovered from the wealthy area. Solid information about a specific site doesn't allow us to jump to general conclusions.

Most costumes we see in festivals are typical of high-rank individuals. There are trims and jewels galore. Do not let this lead you to the conclusion that most people of the viking period dressed this way !

In Thor Ewing's opinion, red clothes were more likely to be costly items, the dyed fabric either being imported, or dyed with imported madder.

Can we be sure of that ? No. We can only gather evidence, and make educated guesses.

In my opinion, fabric produced domestically could not have only been dyed with the top-quality, most-efficient dyestuffs. Some must have been dyed with local plants. But this would have been done by poorer individuals... and unfortunately, we don't have a lot of evidence for them, because their graves have been lost.

Red dyes achieved with bedstraw, by Jenny Dean

Moreover, when dyes can actually be analyzed, they are not always recognized. Quite a lot of yellow samples from the viking age haven't been identified at all. They are refered as "X yellow". Dyer's broom and weld are quite commun yellow dyes, but they are not the only ones. A considerable number of plant gives yellow, and many of them are solid dyes that would not be sneezed at by the housewhife when she made her cloth.

A smaller number of plants gives really interesting red colour, which (thankfully !) restrains the field of investigation, but still there is a lot of space for study.

I intend to research evidence for red dyes and their use during the viking period, and write an article on the subject. But it's a tricky subject indeed, and we have to speculate, guess, and make hypothesis.

I hope this preliminary article have "rung your bell" and made you more aware of the need for carefulness when embarking on making a costume, choosing the fabric, the weave, the colour and the ornaments.

See you (hopefully) soon for the "study in scarlet" article itself !

Aelfgyva

Updates

Since this blog is made of quick ideas and random thoughts, updates are likely to occur quite often!

Here is a bunch of these:

Achtung panzer!: update about the "spangabrynja" (lamellar armour).
Achtung panzer!: update about the "panzari" (gambeson).
Slippery ground: update about type A2, A3 and A4 cleats.

Achtung Panzer !

Ugh.

URGH!

I really HATE lamellar armour. Or rather, I hate the stupendous amounts of lamellar armour seen in viking reenactment, and especially its horrible leather variant.
But I'm willing to talk about my problems in order to feel better about them, so let's have a go at lamellar armour and leather armour.

The existence of lamellar armour during the Viking Age is undeniable, since it is supported by a number of archaeological evidences, such as the 33 sets of plates found in Birka, at the so-called "garrison" site. It is likely that such plates were found in other places too.

Set of plates from a lamellar armour found in Birka
(now kept in Stockholm History Museum)

In Old Norse, lamellar armour was called "spangabrynja". "Brynja" is the byrnie, or mail shirt, while "spǫng" designates a spangle, a floe or ice flake. So a "spǫng" is a small, flat, shiny thing, and it is perfectly logical to think of the "spangabrynja" as a spangle, i.e. lamellar, armour. However, this kind of armour is mentioned extremely rarely, appearing only in chapter 63 of the Laxdœla Saga, and in chapter 10 of the Sagan af Hákoni herðibreið, in the 3rd book of the Heimskringla. So seeing them everywhere in all reenactment battlefields does not seem to reflect the realities of the Viking Age.

Now that we know for a fact that these lamellar armours did exist, both practically and conceptually, we'll see where they did come from, and how they did look like.

For the origin, the answer is twofold.

The first possible origin for lamellar armour is local: it might be a descendant of the types of armour found either during the Vendel Age, or more generally in North-western  Europe during the Migration Era.

An example of Vendel splint armour from Valsgärde is discussed here in details (only in Czech).

Valsgärde splint armour, 7th century. The interpretation of this armour is debatable, more recent studies see these sets of staves as shin and forearm protections.

An example of earlier Germano-Roman lamellar armour is discussed here in details (only in Czech, again...)

Fragment of 5th century Germano-Roman lamellar armour.

It is interesting to note that the Valsgärde armour seriously lacks longitudinal mobility, while the Roman lorica segmentata lacked transversal mobility - the Germano-Roman lamellar armour solves the two problems.

The second origin of the Norse lamellar armour is obviously Varanguian. Lamellar armour is well known to have been favoured by Byzantine military, and the elite Varanguian guards, of Norse origin, loved using the heaviest available protection, therefore wearing lamellar armour on top of mail. Many Varanguians, such as the future king Harald Hardrada, came back to Scandinavia after their service in Byzantium, and they could have brought back with them such armour, or at least the idea of it.

Therefore, the Viking Age "spangles" that we find in museums today come from armour that either derived from earlier Scandinavian designs, or was imported from Constantinople, or was a copy of these imports.

The looks of such sets of lamellar armour it unknown, too.  What everyone is mostly used to are the lamellar armours with smaller or larger pauldrons and faulds, that we see in reenactment (or on the first to pictures of this page). But my bet is that they most probably looked like this:

Byzantine fresco showing 12th century lamellar armour

Well, maybe the pteruges were not part of the Scandinavian lamellars, but the armour itself is nothing but a cuirass, while the protection of other parts of the body, such as the arms or the hips and thighs, is granted by something else, lighter and more mobile, such as mail or pteruges.

The reason behind the shape of the reenactment lamellars is the wish of the fighters of having more and more protection to bash each other with more and more force on a set of allowed targets, which include the torso, the thighs and upper arms. Therefore, sacrificing mobility for the sake of protection in a context were the number of moves is reduced by the fighting rules makes sense.

On the other hand, real armour is always a trade-off between weight, mobility, and protection. Historically, one can see that most rigid or semi-rigid torso protections stop at the waist, not at the hips or below, to allow for a full flexibility of the body. The shoulder protections have to be mobile as well, and are therefore highly articulated, unlike the broad single-piece pauldrons that we see on the first two pictures.

The need for flexibility of the lamellar armour is further illustrated by an element that we can see on the archaeological finds, but never on modern reconstructions: the plates are of many different types and sizes. We see larger scales on the chest and stomach, to provide a more rigid protection to vital areas, and smaller plates that allow for more flexibility around the shoulders.

Now, on to leather armour!

Game nr. 2:

Which of these leather armours has the slightest chance of being historically accurate?

You can be level 0 and think that leather armour did exist. Or be level 1, and know that it didn't. Or level 2 and know that it actually did exist, but not in the form of that weird leather plate armour we often see in fantasy settings. Let me take you to level 3...

Leather can obviously be a very resistant material. Be it very thick veg-tanned leather or "boiled leather" (i.e. leather cooked in wax or gelatine), it can provide a substantial protection against cuts and thrusts. As late as in the 17th century, thick leather was used as a primary level of protection again edged weapons. The word "cuirass" itself, which designates an armour for the torso, comes from the French "cuir" - leather.

Now, how was it in the Viking Age ?

We know that Norsemen used mail for protection, which is highly ineffective at absorbing impact. Therefore, the use of gambesons or other kind of subarmalis is very likely, even though unattested. Leather, either in one thick layer for a subarmalis, or as the outer layers of a padded gambeson, is a good material, and there comes a first possibility of having some kind of leather armour.

What about leather lamellar armour then? Well, as we have seen, lamellar armour was already very rare, and the chances of having some leather surviving archaeologically were close to zero. And having someone making a copy of an elite armour in a cheaper material is not impossible, but rather unlikely.

But what do the texts say about this? Well, here comes the much-dreaded word : "leðrpanzari"! It exists! A leather panzer, it must be some kind of leather armour! Well, not quite. Translators rather use the term of "leather jack" - so rather a gambeson - and we'll see that it is for good reasons.

The word "leðrpanzari" appears only in one text, the Karlamagnús saga. It is a Norse translation of the "Matter of France", a collection of Carolingian chansons de geste, for the court of Norway. So we're not strictly speaking looking at a text that is supposed to describe Norse arms and armour - the Matter of France is even said to have Oriental influences, which can be seen for example in the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

In this saga, the word "panzari" appears 23 times. This word comes from the Latin "pantex" (belly, intestine), through the Frankish "pancier", which designates a cuirass (no leather pun intended). So we're dealing with a kind of armour for the torso.

It is interesting to note that the world "brynja" (mail shirt) appears over a hundred times, which shows how unimportant the "panzari" is.

Out of 23 times, the "panzari" is described:

• 7 times as a "leðrpanzari"
• 2 times as a "silkipanzari"
• 1 time as a "linpanzari"

Do I even need to translate these words or do you already understand that there is no way that "panzari" would designate a lamellar armour? Would you believe in plates made of linen or silk? No! The "panzari" is most obviously a kind of gambeson, which can be made of a variety of materials, depending on the wealth and the wishes of the wearer.

Silk-covered gambesons became quite popular among nobility in Europe from the 14th century on, but we can imagine Easterners wearing such kind of protection in the tales of pilgrimages to Jerusalem and other travels to the Middle-East.

So, I guess we're done here. As far as Norsemen are concerned, they probably wore a "panzari", which could be made of leather, and, if they could afford it, a "brynja" over it. If they wished and had the extra silver, they could also have a "spangabrynja" on top of the "brynja". Maybe (maybe) someday I'll come accross a clever reenactor in a perfectly historically valid kit, with a short lamellar cuirass made of a variety of specialized plates... I'll take pictures, I promise.

Yours, Eiríkr

UPDATE!
Another point about the "spangabrynja" that I think is worth mentioning: by the time the sagas were written, lamellar armour was clearly obsolete, but coats of plates were starting to appear in Europe. And guess how they were sometimes called? "Plate hauberk" (watch the whole video, it's worth it).
So, did the word "spangabrynja" used by the authors of sagas designate the Norse or the medieval armour? That's an open question.

UPDATE!
A few new thoughts about the "panzari":
According to several sources, like Hjalmar Falk's Altnordisches Waffenkunde, the "panzari", or linen gambeson, only showed up in Scandinavia aroud the 12th century, when the so-called Viking Age was long over, and Scandinavian kingdoms where fully integrated into the European culture, sharing a common faith and technology.
So it seems that the "panzari", be it made of leather, linen or silk, would be anachronistic for Norsemen. However, some kind of arming garment but have been worn under mail armour to provide some padding. It is maybe what the word "vapntreyja" (arming jacket / jerkin) refers to. It occurs often that the "vapntreyja" is mentionned as being "ermlauss" (sleeveless). This reminds of the Roman subarmalis, which was a sleeveless jacket with pteruges worn under the lorica hamata (mail armour). The subarmalis was either thick leather, or linen, or lighter leather padded with wool and / or linen... We don't really know, even for the Romans who wrote plenty. Guessing what Norse arming garments could have looked like it even more tricky. But experimenting with leather, wool and linen on Scandinavian pattern with or without sleeves seems a good starting point.

Wings of doom

What were the wings, or lugs, of the famous Norse (and Germanic, in general) winged spears (krókspjót) used for? These wings were very common, and came in a variety of shapes and size.

Assortment of winged spearheads, the topmost being 38 cm long

There are several possible answers.

The one that comes immediately to mind is that they are here to prevent over-penetration, so that the spear doesn't bury too deeply into the body of the opponent. This answer is motivated by the use of later period hunting spear (boar spear) and swords, in which the lugs or the crossbar prevented the impaled animal, sometimes as dangerous as a wounded boar, to run up the blade or the shaft towards the hunter.

This use is attested at least once, in Grettis Saga, where Gretti kills both Thorir and Ögmund with a single thrust, and the spear is buried into Thorir's body up to the wings:

IS: Í því bili kom Grettir að. Hann tvíhenti spjótið á Þóri miðjum er hann ætlaði ofan fyrir riðið svo þegar gekk í gegnum hann. Fjöðurin var bæði löng og breið á spjótinu. Ögmundur illi gekk næst Þóri og hratt honum á lagið svo allt gekk upp að krókunum. Stóð þá spjótið út um herðarnar á Þóri og svo framan í brjóstið að Ögmundi. Steyptust þeir báðir dauðir af spjótinu.

EN: Just at that moment, Grettir turned up. Using both hands, he thrust the spear at Thorir's stomach just as he was on his way down the steps, and it went straight through him. The spear was fitted with a long, thin blade; Ögmund the Evil was behind Thorir and bumped against him so that the spear pierced him right up to the wings, out between his shoulderblades and into Ögmund's chest. Both of them tumbled down dead from the spear.

However, in my opinion this use is rather the exception than the rule. Unlike the hunting spear, which is used to kill only one animal, the battle spear must be wielded against multiple opponents. Therefore, one cannot wait with an immobilized weapon until the first opponent is dead - the spear must be retrieved quickly and used again against the other incoming enemies. So spear thrusts have to be quite shallow, even more so when the spear is used one-handed: as soon as the blade encounters a bit more resistance, it must be withdrawn, or it risks getting stuck in the wound it created. This applies just as well for winged and wingless spears. Besides, wings are present on spears with various sizes of blades, including very large hewing spears where the blade is almost broader than the wings (so that the wings would get into the wound) and so long that the opponent would be pierced through long before the wings reach his body (and such an exaggeratedly deep thrust is useless, and not recommended for the aforementioned reasons).

The wings must therefore have another role. And this role is contained in the name of the weapon: the krókspjót is a "hooking spear", and the wings are called krókar, that is "hooks".
Before the Viking Age, there were even example of spearheads having literally (and laterally) hooks on the socket, not wings.

Merovingian hooked spearhead, 7th century

So, if the Viking-Age "hooking spears" have appendices that do no look so much like hooks anymore, the name rather indicates a use, than a shape. The wings of the Norse spearheads were mostly used for hooking.

But hooking what, and how?
Well, several answers to that, again.

The one that is heard most often is "hooking limbs to hinder the opponent, hooking the shield to create openings". And again, it might not be the most important answer.
Just like in the case of over-penetration, one important point is to be able to retrieve the weapon quickly, since a spear is effective through its quick succession of thrusts. And to hook means to be hooked as well, therefore, hooking with the spear should be kept to a minimum, to avoid ending up with a trapped weapon and no other option than to drop it and draw an axe or a sword to keep up the fight.

In the case of a missed thrust, when drawing back the spear, an option would be to hook the limb of the opponent to unbalance him, or his shield to create an opening for the next thrust. But this might be a waste of time, compared to just withdrawing and thrusting again. Besides, if the spear is used in one hand, the shield hooking could work, but the limb hooking would be too weak to be effective.
The shape of the wings tells us something about it, too. If the goal was to harm the opponent when withdrawing the spear, the back of the wings would be sharpened - and it is never the case. If the goal was to hook anything when withdrawing the spear, the wings would have a shape optimised for hooking backwards - and it is not the case.
There are Dark-Age spearheads from Finland (of which I can find no pictures at the moment) that have the wings "backwards" compared to the Norse spears, and that could be a sign that the spear was meant to hook in a drawing motion, maybe used two-handed to create openings in a shield wall. However, the roughly triangular shape of the wings on Norse spears proves the exact opposite: the shape allows the spear to slide quite easily on encountered obstacles when it is withdrawn (remember, you don't want your spear to get stuck anywhere), but it maximizes the hooking ability during the thrust.

My interpretation is that such wings where most effective during an overarm downward thrust: the thrust intends to get in the gap between the opponent's shield and his helmet, and if the shield is raised for protection, the wing will push it out of the way and the thrust will connect anyway. At this point, it is just a hypothesis, and it will have to be tested with weapon simulators in sparring, and in a cutting session, to confirm this interpretation.

The overarm guard on the Bayeux tapestry

Last, but not least, the wings of a spear have a major role in hooking... another spear! When fighting spear against spear, be it with or without a shield, the contact of the shafts (the bind, in fencing theory) plays a major role. Controlling the opponent's spear in a bind allows to gain the control of the central line and therefore to thrust safely at the opponent. The wings allow to catch the shaft of the opponent's spear, control it to move the point aside, and, when control of the central line is achieved, a small rotation of the spear around its axis disengages the wings from the other shaft and allows the spear to thrust forward. We have already confirmed this efficient use of the wings when practising spear combat with Þorgeirr, and we intend to find later sources to confirm such use for similar weapons, such as the partisan or rawcon.

And remember, in Oðinn we trust, and with spears, we thrust. ;-)

Yours, Eiríkr

From carolingian army to norse women's fashion : the trefoil mounts

A very lovely example of reuse for foreign object by Norsemen is the trefoil brooch.

When browsing though excavation catalogues, (such as Holger Arbman's catalogue of the graves in Birka), you will encounter lovely clover-leaf shaped brooches in women's tombs. These brooches are usually ornamented with scroll-work or gripping beasts, but some stand out, with a completely different style of decoration, more Roman, or Byzantine than Scandinavian.

This example, found in Birka according to the manufacturer of this copy , has a central six-petals flower and sheaves of what appears to be laurel sprigs, a typical "antique" pattern for decoration.

Why is that ?

The first trefoil "brooches" were not brooches. They were Carolingian strap-distributors used to fasten a sword-scabbard to a belt or baldric, as we can see in these two illuminated images from Vivien's Bible.

 

This manuscript is a 9th century Bible which was offered to king Charles the Bald (grandson of the emperor Charles the Great, or Charlemagne) by Vivien, count of Tours. The book was probably composed at the abbey of St Martin de Tours, between 845 and 846, and provides us with interesting evidence concerning these trefoil mounts.

Apparently, one lobe of the trefoil was fixed to the belt, or baldric, and the two other lobes held two smaller straps from which the scabbard hung. My speculation is that these two smaller straps were fastened to the scabbard by means of small plaques of metalwork, like these two images suggest.

The "three connected straps" system probably wasn't a Carolingian invention, as a beautiful triangular strap-distributor of gold and garnet cloisonné was found in Sutton Hoo ship burial (Anglo-Saxon, 7th century), together with two mounts, a buckle, a strap-end and a slider... more or less the same assemblage of pieces as found in Vivien's Bible. The hypothesis is that this particular set of mounts was attached to a strap that ran across the body and over the shoulder to support the purse-belt, since it was found near a beautiful cloisonné purse-frame of the same style.

The strap-distributor is the triangular piece at the top of the image. We don't know for sure if it was indeed a distributor. It could also be a strap-end.

The Carolingian swords that had such mounts were items of prestige that would have been prized loot, or luxury import, both for the quality of the Rhine steel of the blades, and for the beautiful metalwork of the fittings.

This item (9th century), from a private collection, is of silver, with gold inlay.

This one, displayed at the British Museum (9th century, found at Kirkoswald, England), is a particularly fine work of filigree and granulation in silver that included garnets at the end of the lobes.

Reusing foreign items as pieces of jewellery is common during the viking period.

The most obvious reason is the luxury-character of the original items : weapons and belt-mounts were already used to display wealth and status among the Franks where these objects came from, so, they were made with costly materials and a great deal of craftsmanship.

An other reason is that they were "exotic" and showed how far they had come from, through raid or trade. For example, coins such as dirhams and even sassanid drachmas were used as pendants, fitted with loops  to be hung on necklaces, or were added a clasp at the back, to be used as brooches.

Such was the fate of these carolingian baldric-mounts that were modified as brooches, to adorn the garments of a wife, a daughter or a sweetheart.

It is hard to find images of the back of these mounts to know how they were fixed to straps before becoming brooches, so I have found little of them. Two can be seen on this very interesting blog article. It seems that a system of loops was in use, but rivets are also a possible options, as holes are found is some mounts.

The aforementioned British museum example of brooch shows no sign of either clasp or loops whatsoever.

This is probably due to poor restoration in the 19th or early 20th century, says Daniel Perrier, curator of the Merovingian section of the National Antiquities in St-Germain-en-Laye.

"When mineralized fabric or leather clung to metal objects, the excavators used to "clean" them the hard way, often removing any trace of rusted or crumbling loops or clasps entangled in the rotten fabric. Old-fashion archaeology didn't know yet the value of this kind of evidence, and a lot was lost with these rough so-called restorations."

While the first trefoil brooches that arrived in Scandinavia were foreign, reused items, they were rapidly copied and the fashion became widespread. Finds of such brooches are widely distributed in Scandinavia, with a particular concentration of them in Denmark, where imported Carolingian items are similarly concentrated. They also are found in significant numbers in Britain. It is hinted that they were both made locally and imported from Scandinavia. Geographic areas had their particular style of trefoil-brooch ranging from simple geometric patterns, lines and dots, zoomorphic, acanth-leaf-like patterns and intricate interlace.

It is worth noticing that the use of the trefoil-shape was not limited to jewellery : the presence of pairs or loops at the back of all three lobes of some trefoils suggest the pieces were rather elements of horse-harness than clothing.

I'm still looking for a complete time-line of trefoil brooches, to be able to tell you when the fashion died and they stopped being made. I'll make sure to update this post when I do !

Slippery ground

North = cold = ice + snow

This equation is obvious for anyone. Therefore, all the people living in the North have invented throughout History means on transportation on such winter ground.
Norse people had skis, ice-skates and sledges, to slide through the Northern cold. But sometimes, they didn't want to slide at all. That's were ice cleats come into play.
Wikipedia suggests (without any serious source...) that modern-day "Scandinavian crampons", with steel spikes embedded in a rubber contraption, are a direct evolution from the Norse cleats.
On the other hand, the few examples of those Norse cleats that we had seen with Þorgeirr in the Stockholm History Museum came back to my mind during slippery hikes on winter vacations.

So I decided to dig a bit more into that topic. I spent several hours in the digital collection of the SHM looking at Viking Age cleats, then several more thinking about the way they could function... Now the next step will be experimentation : I have to find the way to forge some replicas and try them on!
Since I'm unfortunately a total ignorant as far as horsemanship is concerned, I didn't do much research about the horse cleats, which are most probably designed to be attached to the horseshoe without the need of shoeing the horse again for winter with spiked horseshoes.

The first product of my thoughts about these cleats is a typology, and some hypothesis about the use of each type of cleats.

Type A: simple cleats, made of a roughly rectangular strip of iron with a protruding spike in the middle. The shapes and sizes vary a lot, hence the definition of several subtypes.
Type A1: they have the shape of a closed staple, with an internal width of about 2 to 4 cm. Type A1's are usually found in pairs, or alone, in one instance in a group of four.

Hypothesis: these cleats were literally stapled on a leather strap 2 or 3 cm wide, two by two, and the strap was then tied or otherwise attached to the front part of the foot.  I'm saying tied, because I'm not aware of any iron or bronze buckles found with such cleats.

Type A2: they have generally a narrow strip and a very pronounced U shape, and therefore have not been stapled to anything.

Hypothesis: (really unsure there...) they might have been nailed to the soles of wooden pattens ? But I don't know about any Viking-Age wooden soles or pattens...

Type A3:  similar to type A2, but with crooked / stapled extremities for the U, as if they had been affixed to something thick, with an almost square section.

Hypothesis: (of the top of my head) since the material to which these cleats were attached didn't survive, it was probably leather (as for type A1) or wood. If it's wood, it might have been the wheels of a chariot, to prevent it from slipping sideways when pulled by a horse wearing horse-cleats. The main problem here is that Norse chariots had rather very thick wheels, to my knowledge...

Type A4: these are quite rare, and often thought to be spurs. Similar to type A2, but with broader iron strips and a very broad U shape.

Hypothesis: these cleats are broad enough to accommodate a heel it they were actually spurs, or to accommodate the narrowest part of the foot sole. I'd rather go for the second option, since I would expect spurs to have a more rounded shape. So, such a tailor-fitted cleat could be placed under the foot and strapped.

Type B: these cleats have multiple spikes, and have generally the shape of a polygon, serving as a platform, with the spikes placed underneath it, one per angle of the polygon.
Type B1: triple-spiked cleats. They are shaped like a (slightly concave) equilateral triangle.

Hypothesis: from the designs that I tried, these cleats where probably rather worn under the heel (two spikes at the back, one at the front), being quite uncomfortable under the front part of the foot. One or two leather straps could be used to tie the cleats to the ankle, with quite a tricky lacing pattern.

Type B2: (existence unconfirmed) four-spiked cleats, with a square shape. Intermediate between types B1 and B3.
Hypothesis: similar in use to type B1, but their square shape makes them more suitable to be worn under the front side of the foot.

Type B3: hinged four-spiked cleats. These are found in later Middle-Ages, and would be descendants of type B1 and B2. They have the four-spiked, square shape of the type B2, but additionally they have two hinged plates on two opposite sides of the square, one with a slit, and the other one buckle-shaped.

Hypothesis: the use of this type of cleats is the most obvious : the square was place under the front part of the foot, and the plates secured the foot laterally when the leather strap attached to the slit was buckled, which also simplified the lacing.

One can very well imagine wearing in conjunction cleats of types B1 and B2, or B1 and B3, when going on a longer walk on something as dangerously slippery as a glacier. Such a combination of medieval cleats would make a good predecessor of modern-day alpinism crampons. On the other hand, type A1, being lightweight and versatile, might match more today's rubber "Scandinavian crampons".

So, next step is to build some type A1's, and maybe later some B1's too, and try them on the ice !
To be continued...

Yours, Eiríkr


UPDATE!
I had the opportunity to discuss several archaeological finds from the Birka catalogue with my friend Kára, who is an experienced horsewoman. Apart from various horse harness parts, her hindsight was also priceless for understanding the nature of several types of cleats.

Let's start with the simplest: for the type A4 cleats, they seemed very impractical to her to be used as spurs. Besides, comparing them with other Norse spurs, she concluded that it is definitely different and cannot be a surviving element of a spur. So we can even more confidently assume that this king of object was a cleat, not a spur.

Now on to a topic that I said I would not tackle: the horse cleats (or calks, as I just learned they are called). It appears that my interpretations of the type A2 and A3 cleats were wrong - they are just various occurrences of calks.
Horse calks were not intended to be attached to horse shoes as I initially thought. The simple reason for this is that there is no such thing as Norse horse shoes! Most representations of Norse town show them having either "raw", muddy streets, or covered with wooden planks or logs. So, no paved causeways and rocky paths, only soft surfaces that do not damage the hooves, and therefore do not require the horses to be shoed. This is perfectly consistent with the fact that not a single horse shoe was found in a large city like Birka. Therefore, the calks were directly nailed to the hooves when needed, and depending on the relative length of the spikes and thickness of the hoof, either the spikes stayed straight, or they went all the way through the hoof and were bent back, hence the more or less square shape of the calk spikes.
Birka grave nr. 887 gives a perfect example of such calks and their use. The calks and their position in the grave can be seen here, in Taf. 39 (9) and 40 (3). You can see that the cleats are situated near the back of the hoof, in a manner very similar to these modern, screw-in calks:

Thanks to Kára for her help, maybe I'll manage to get more ideas on Norse horsemanship from her!

Hwæt ! Greetings from Old England.

Hello, I'm Aelfgyva and will sporadically contribute to this blog.

I'm a French reenactor belonging to la Compagnie du Dragon Vert.

I embarked on reenactment by following an unusual path : my group aims at recreating Tolkien's Middle-Earth, but from a historical perspective.

As you can guess by my name, I chose to be a person from Rohan. Tolkien specified that Rohirrim were based on late Anglo-Saxons and used Old English to render rohirric language.Thus, my costumes are sourced from 11th century Anglo-Saxon England. They even have travelled to the Battle of Hastings reenactment !

I'm a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades and have doodled with dyeing, tablet-weaving, leather-working, cooking and some sword-fighting.

My main interest is in the evolution of costumes. One of my long-term goals is to understand the evolution from Dark Age fashion to 12th century in England.

Most 11th century women were Christian and wore a veil. But this picture is of Léofwyn, girl from Rohan, where there is no such thing as a Christian deity, and so, we can leave our hair uncovered.

Aelfgyva

#víkingligr

Let's go and kill some misconceptions #likeaviking !

Vikings ?

Viking ?

Vikings ?

Game nr. 1: Cross out the pictures which are not labelled properly

So, what are we talking about in this blog anyway ?

Viking stuff, right.
Viking stuff ?

Yes, for example we would like to know if Viking horses looked more like the Fjord or the Icelandic breed, what was the role of Viking women in the household, what games Viking kids used to play, how much cargo could a trading Viking ship carry, or what were the tools of Viking craftsmen.

Well, no. We're not. Because we won't look into things that didn't ever exist.

The word "Viking" (which in proper English is supposed to be absurdly capitalized, like a nationality) comes from the Old Norse "víkingr" (sea-rover, pirate) and "víking" (raiding expedition). Both words derive from "vík" (a bay - where the víking ship can moor) - hence place names such as Reykjavík.

So, "viking" is an occupation, and a temporary one to that (see Cleasby & Vigfusson on that topic) - and definitely not a nationality. Therefore I will from now on drop the capital letter, even if the autocorrect doesn't like it.

The vikings were therefore strictly speaking sea-rovers coming from Scandinavia. Of course, they had nationalities : they were Danes, Svears, Northmen, Icelanders, Geats... In these countries / regions, there were women, children, craftsmen, shepherds, horses, dogs, houses, merchant boats... that were Danish, Icelandic or Geatish as well, but who were by no means vikings. Shepherds and children don't go on raiding expeditions (women neither, but that another story). If we were to use a word to designate them all, they were all Norse. People from the North, speaking Old Norse ("norrœna tunga"), and sharing a common culture that was, during the Viking Age, quite distinct from continental Europe. Norsemen.

So, deal with it. In this blog, we are talking about Norse stuff.

I will ramble about Norse houses, Norse dogs, Norse games and Norse gods, and sometimes, only sometimes, about vikings.

Yours, Eiríkr

Fǫrum á viking fram !

Let us start the journey...

Welcome, dear readers. I am Eiríkr - a History enthusiast and Viking Age reenactor from France, as well as a HEMA (historical European martial arts) practitioner.

The idea of this blog arose from the numerous emails we are used to exchange with my friend Þorgeirr, to share our ideas, resources and rough research results about anything related to martial History or to the Viking Age.

The intent for this blog is to follow that way of sharing random thoughts while making it available to everyone, so the published articles will probably be regularly updated, edited, or written by several hands...

Depending on their will and availability, other people from our tiny French Viking group might start contributing to this blog. When it will happen, we'll introduce the new writers to you - but for now, I am the only author and editor on board !

Yours, Eiríkr