The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (25 page)
“You’re so calm,” Eva commented. “I’m much tougher when I comb.”
“I like to be meditative,” Linda said, with a flash of a smile.
After a moment she put down one comb and waved the other, letting the well-brushed wool ripple in the wind. “Doesn’t it look like angel hair?” she said. With her fingers, she then pulled very slowly and gently on the dangling end. The hair lengthened magically until it was a yard long, from a beginning length of about four inches.
If she had been working, not just demonstrating, she would have wound the combed wool onto a stick—or distaff—accumulating a full reel before moving on to the next step, spinning. But now Eva simply took the handful of combed wool, twisted it a little, and tied one end to the top of a spindle stick, securing it in a notch like that on a crochet hook. At the bottom of the stick was a conical weight, the spindle whorl. Holding on to the wool, she flicked the stick between finger and thumb to set the whorl twirling like a top in air. It dropped toward the floor, slowly as a spider on its silk—except the thread was being produced from the top, from Eva’s fingers feeding the wool down, pulling and pinching it, while the spinning whorl stretched and twisted it into thread. When the spinning slowed, but before it could stop and reverse, she flicked the spindle again. When the whorl reached the floor, she caught it, wound the new-spun thread around the stick, and started over. The motion was so simple, the tools so light, that she could have spun—as Viking women did—anywhere, sitting or walking. Spindle whorls are often found in odd places, like the boatshed at L’Anse aux Meadows; at one farm in Greenland, out of twenty-five whorls, nine were in the kitchen and two in the church.
The whorl could be placed either at the bottom of the stick or at the top, without affecting the thread quality. The shape and substance of the whorl—whether amber, soapstone, ceramic, or bone—also didn’t matter. But the size and weight of the whorl did.
For her doctoral dissertation in 1999, Eva studied the textile tools from Viking Age houses in southern Sweden. “I found that whenever there was more than one spindle whorl found in a house, they were of different sizes. Why? So I got these four spindles reconstructed, all copies of whorls found in Hedeby in Denmark. They’re 30, 20, 10, and five grams.” (Thirty grams is a bit more than an ounce.) She recruited Anna Batzer, who runs the weaving house at the Lejre Experimental Centre, a living-history museum outside of Copenhagen, and both women, the expert and the novice, spun thread with the same wool. “With the big spindle,” Eva said, “we got 40 meters of thread for 10 grams of wool. When we spun with the five-gram whorl, we got over 200 meters from the same amount of wool.” (Forty meters is about 131 feet; 200 meters is 656 feet.) The size of the spindle whorl determined the gauge of the thread. “When we look at Viking textiles, there are many types of quality. Of course, there would be different types of thread for different types of cloth.”
Spinning with the tiny whorl was much more difficult than with the bigger ones. “You have to concentrate a lot. You have to have few, few fibers in the thread, or it won’t turn around,” Eva said, still spinning while she talked. You also have to have the right spindle stick. “They had found some little sticks in Hedeby, but they were not interpreted as spindle sticks because someone said they were too short, they wouldn’t function. But when we started to spin, we learned we couldn’t use a long stick on a small spindle. It wouldn’t turn. So I looked at those sticks again, and they were perfect.” The smallest spindle whorls had also been mislabeled. “The classical archaeologists were very surprised that you could spin on a spindle under 10 grams. They were sorting all the little spindle whorls out and calling them beads.” She wound up the thread and dropped the spindle down again. “Sometimes it is hard to see the difference. The hole has to be absolutely centered, so the spindle is balanced. And the hole should be quite big so you can put a stick into it. That’s what I went after when I reregistered them. There are some spindle whorls made of amber—they were called ‘beads,’ but they had a very big hole.”
Linda leaned over and pointed at a minuscule bit of fuzz on the thread Eva had spun. “Here you can see it wasn’t combed enough,” she said. “If there is any underwool, any fuzzy wool in it, it will look like this. And it will break.”
Eva laughed. “Even if they had slaves to do their spinning, Viking women had to watch. They had to know it was good enough. What is Gudrid’s status? If she was rich, she would be doing mostly sewing and embroidery. Rich women did some spinning, but they never did weaving—at least, they were not producing the everyday textiles. But I’m quite sure Gudrid learned how to do it all. We see, historically, that it’s important for all women to know how to produce fine cloth. Textiles are often used as gifts. It’s a sign of a woman’s status that she could produce excellent textiles.”
In addition to choosing the right whorl for the job, the spinner also chose the direction of spin, the twist she would give the thread. On two samples of thread wound flat onto a paper card, the twist was easy to see. Reading right to left, the angle of the first sample went from high to low, like the midline of an S; the other went low to high, like a Z.
“It’s easiest for me to spin sunwise,” Linda said. She did not say “clockwise” because Viking women didn’t have clocks. Half sitting on the edge of the table, she didn’t flick the spindle with her fingers to set it twirling, but rolled it down her thigh. Since she is right-handed, she explained, her thread is S-spun; if she switched hands, or rolled the spindle up her leg instead of down, it would be Z-spun.
The spin angle matters for two reasons. First, if you began spinning S and switched to Z, the thread would unwind and break. Second, the spin angle provided texture to the finished cloth.
Said Eva, “You can see in the archaeological excavations whether they wanted S-S or S-Z cloth,” that is, whether they used the same twist for both the warp and weft of the loom, or not. S-S cloth has a fine nobbly pattern and gives a nice drape for a shirt or dress. With S in the warp and Z in the weft, the fibers will be going in the same direction, Eva explained. “It’s much easier then to full the cloth, which you would do for a sail or an outer cloak.” Fulling called for more hot, stale urine. When the cloth was soaked in it and pressed, the ammonia in the urine caused the lanolin to coagulate. Fulling shrank the cloth and tightened the weave, making it more waterproof.
Linda had begun transferring the spun thread to a reel, three sticks of wood connected into a crooked H. “When I get enough thread that its weight affects the spinning, I wind it off onto this other tool. The thread wants to tangle, so I put it on this reel for a few days to straighten it out. That’s called ‘killing’ it.”
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.