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

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 !

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