Weaving and Spinning: More than just a "Female Craft"

A brief history of textile production in medieval Iceland

Figure 4 source: Michèle Hayeur Smith, "Dress, Cloth, and the Farmer's Wife," Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 6: In the Footsteps of Vebæk Vatnahverfi Studies 2005–2011 (2014): 68.

For my final project, I have decided to go with the creative route. Though I am unfamiliar with weaving and spinning, I have decided to research it because not only was it an important craft done by women from all over Europe in the Middle Ages, but also because at the end of the day, textile work is an artform. While researching, I have learned that Michèle Hayeur Smith is both an archaeologist of textiles and a visual artist, as she describes in the following quote:

I am an archaeologist, but started my professional life as a visual artist... The textile work that I have been focused on for the past 6 years has permeated my art, and in the process of these analyses I have taught myself to work on the warp weighted loom- a very ancient Neolithic loom that was used across northern Europe. By teaching myself to weave it has brought me back to my initial passion: Art and have begun exploring concepts from my scientific research via visual medium. ( Michèle Hayeur Smith, "Michele Hayeur Smith – artist," Northern Women Arts Collaborative, last accessed April 16, 2022. find link in comments)

So for the creative aspect, in order to parallel Smith's life journey, I will be digitally painting a Valkyrie as she weaves on a warp weighted loom, while I do a voiceover of the research. To keep this paper short, I will be looking at three sources, one book and two articles, written by Michèle Hayeur Smith, to weave together a brief history of cloth production in medieval Iceland.

The political and economic spheres of Iceland were dominated by men, but textile production was controlled by women, which made its way into "all aspects of human existence, from birth to death and, more importantly, in the determination of fate." (Smith, The Valkyries' loom, 15.) Textiles were used in clothing, household accessories, sails for ships and tents and women presided over cloth allocation at "major rituals of death and regeneration, marriage and the establishment of new families, investiture and the transmission of ancestral authority." (Smith, The Valkyries' loom, 16.)

As explained in Smith's article "Dress, Cloth, and the Farmer's Wife," in Iceland, all textile production was done using the warp-weighted loom and the drop or high-top whorl. (Michèle Hayeur Smith, "Dress, Cloth, and the Farmer's Wife," Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 6: In the Footsteps of Vebæk Vatnahverfi Studies 2005–2011 (2014): 64, link in comments). When it comes to sail-making, an incredibly difficult cloth to identify archaeologically due to poor preservation, it was made using the "eyelet stitch." ( Ibid., 67.)

These eyelets served to rig the ship with ropes and they were embroidered or stitched into the sail, helping preserve some fragments of cloth. (Ibid.) 

Experimental ship reconstruction trials in Denmark showcased that "wool performed better than linen for making sails, providing more stretch and elasticity in strong winds." (Ibid., 68.)

For clothing, Icelandic collections show patching work, which indicates that people recycled it, and that cloth was worn to the extreme, adding to its value. (Ibid., 69)

In her book The Valkyries' loom : the archaeology of cloth production and female power in the North Atlantic, Smith addresses "the social archaeology of textiles and textiles as a form of material culture that encodes information about the societies who made them." (Michèle Hayeur Smith, The Valkyries' loom : the archaeology of cloth production and female power in the North Atlantic, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020, 1.)

That is because, according to Smith, textiles are like "text" which tell a story about the hardships and successes of the lives of the women who made them. (Ibid.)