and helmet, with a cloak over his shoulders fastened with a beautiful brooch on his
chest. We see similar figures on the Bayeux tapestry and on contemporary coinage from
England and Scandinavia. Adult ideals are also reflected in children’s clothing, in Birka
just as in northern Germany, where we similarly find boys’ burials with the same silver
headbands, swords and so on.
It is entirely possible that differences in dress during the Viking Age were reflected
far more by social status than through regional variation, unlike the folk costume of
early modern times. Someone in England of a certain status probably looked very similar
to a person of comparable standing in Kiev. In high-status burials all over the Viking
world we find traces of a collective fashion. However, despite its standard cut, one
emblem of this dress was its costly and exotic materials, reflecting a familiarity with
innovation, mobility and perhaps a sense of adventure. The wearer was part of a culture
that was used to travel.
We should also remember a different kind of production for daily use. Just as now,
Viking Age people needed bedding, packing, sails and many other products for multiple
purposes. In the Valsgärde boat graves, for example, there are remains of unspun wool,
used for caulking the boats. However, it is worth emphasising that the finest textile-
working implements – small, delicate spindle whorls, needles, scissors and tweezers,
thin tablets for weaving – are found in rich contexts, the halls and graves of the wealthy.
The tiny spindle whorls were used to twine fine woollen threads from fleece, used
for wool-comb weaving. Quality wool-comb textiles of this kind are hard to find today
except in the houses of haute couture, but in the Viking Age were regularly woven on
looms with a horizontal warp. Parts of such looms have been found in, for example, the
trading town of Hedeby, and by no means all weaving at this time was done at upright
looms with a hanging warp. While the market sites had a very high-quality output,
finds from more everyday settlements indicate that domestic production continued
much as it had for at least a thousand years. The real Viking Age innovation was the
manufacture of the sail.
In Birka a different tool has been discovered that has implications for how we should
view textile production – an instrument for drawing wires of the same kind used by the
Sámi in their silver- and tin-thread work. Silver and tin were warmed and drawn
successively through smaller and smaller holes to produce very thin but solid metal
wires. The threads could be wound around a core of textile material, as the Sámi do
today, and during the Viking Age we find this kind of work throughout Scandinavia,
Poland and north-western Russia. In Christian Europe thin metal threads, often of
gold, were worked in a quite different way. Even described in the Old Testament, gold
was hammered into thin foil that was then cut into narrow strips, so-called lan. Such
strips from the Viking Age have been found in tablet-woven bands, as displayed in
Lund. They were found in a tenth-century urban context, and reflect contacts with the
Continent.
Drawn metal threads, often of silver, have been used in tablet-weaving further north-
east. The bands are only a centimetre or so in width (and sometimes even narrower),
made of wires as thin as cotton threads. In fact, modern sewing threads must be used of
necessity when making reconstructions of them.
In wool production, archaeological finds indicate that sheep were specially bred for
white wool to be used for yarn, and clothes were dyed bright red, blue and yellow
colours. These played a role in demonstrating status through clothing, and in achieving
–– chapter 12 : Viking Age textiles––