The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

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  Ragnhild had no say in the matter. That wasn’t unusual. The boy was not consulted either. First marriages among the Vikings were arranged, for boys as well as for girls. Even in Christian times, as the sagas show, it was normal. In a scene set after the conversion, the hero of Njal’s Saga took his foster son aside. “I would like to arrange a match for you,” he said, “and find you a good wife.”

  “See to it, foster father,” the boy replied. “I will agree to whatever match you make.”

  A marriage was an alliance. Its purpose was to produce children who would, physically, unite two kin groups. A marriage was a matter of politics, of economics, of avoiding the social chaos that ensued when husband and wife were not an equal match in wealth and status, when their families were not allies. It had nothing to do with love. If equality turned out not to be enough for the married couple, if love or at least respect did not follow—and, especially, if no children were produced—the couple could divorce. Love outside of marriage was also not out of the question, for either husband or wife, if the sagas can be trusted. Even for Christians, marriage throughout Europe was not a sacrament until the eleventh century; not until 1200 was divorce forbidden. In tenth-century Orkney, the idea of marriage as a lifelong vow of sexual fidelity would have seemed absurd.

  Ragnhild knew she must marry. She was Eirik and Gunnhild’s only daughter. Descendant of kings, she was a valuable peace weaver. In the gift economy of the Viking Age, she was the ultimate prize her family could bestow on a friend. She might have been content with her betrothed, as Gunnhild was when she first met Eirik Bloodaxe. But, like her mother, Ragnhild grew disappointed with her spouse over time. Unlike her mother, Ragnhild acted. Queen of Orkney, after a dozen years of marriage she still had no children. She plotted her husband’s death and married his brother. Havard the Fertile, they called him, but he gave Ragnhild no children either. She cast her eye on the men around her, played one nephew (greedy, gullible) against another (same), and when Havard was murdered by one and avenged by the other, Ragnhild called for the third son of Thorfinn Skull-Splitter and married him instead. He “became a mighty chieftain,” says the Saga of the Orkney Islanders, yet Ragnhild remained childless. When he died fighting the Scots, he was succeeded by a married brother, and that brother by his half-Irish son. The Orkney line of Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings came to an end.

  But Ragnhild’s second marriage, and her third, were still years in the future. Now, in the early 940s, she was a young girl endeavoring to stand straight and look queenly while the Orkney wind grabbed the tails of all her garments and tried to rip them away, or whipped them against her legs and breast and face with the loud slap and crack of a banner in a gale.

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  The textile arts are often called “women’s work.” I think of them as “mothers’ work.” It may be true that the first spinsters and weavers and seamstresses were women, as myths portray them. Ancient societies were practical. Only women could breastfeed, and they did so for two or more years per child, both to improve the child’s chance of survival and to space out births, as a breastfeeding woman is less fertile. For the society not to lose the mother’s labor for those years, she needed a task compatible with caring for an infant. Spinning, weaving, and sewing fit the bill. They were not pastimes, either, but essential contributions to culture.

  Like tattoos and body paint, clothes are symbols. They send a message. When Eirik Bloodaxe and Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings arrived on Orkney, they did not need to announce their royal status: Their clothes (and weapons) did it for them. They dressed in layers of fine, flowing cloth, an underlayer of crisp linen covered by two or more of wool. Depending on the time of year, their woolens were lined with silk or fur or quilted with goose down. Regardless of the season, they were trimmed with bright-colored ribbons and braids and strips of figured silk, their showy patterns picked out in gold and silver threads, and accessorized with bulky, ostentatious jewelry—the overall effect signaling power and success, provoking envy and desire.

  Gunnhild, especially, shimmered and clattered with wealth. As a mother—and Mother-of-Kings—she wore a long-sleeved linen dress long enough to drag along the ground, showing her disdain for the time and effort put into its making. The whiter the linen, the better: Linen did not dye well, but it bleached beautifully. Gunnhild’s white linen underdress had a low neck opening, low enough to free a nipple for breastfeeding when she unclasped the brooch at her throat. Otherwise the dress was tight-fitting, following her ample, motherly curves, with a wide, flowing hem to accommodate an easy walking stride and fine pleats for free arm movement.

  Over this linen dress, Gunnhild wore a shorter one of the finest wool twill. It was made of the sheep’s soft, short-haired undercoat, combed and spun into whisper-thin worsted thread, and woven with a dense warp of a hundred and fifty threads to the inch. Because the threads used for warp and weft were both spun clockwise (or, rather, sunwise; Vikings had no clocks), the fabric was light and stretchy, smooth and glossy, with a graceful drape. Depending on how the loom was strung, even a single-colored cloth could show a pattern of lozenges, diamonds, or rings. In Icelandic poetry, a “ring-woven shirt” meant either this luxurious fabric, the finest the Vikings made, or, metaphorically, a warrior’s byrnie of linked metal rings.

  The technique for making ring-woven cloth seems to have come from Western Norway, as had Gunnhild. The English and Irish spun their weft threads counter-sunwise, producing a markedly different fabric. The color of Gunnhild’s dress also may have announced her origins. It was probably a rich, deep blue, a favorite color of the Vikings, archaeologists have found, just as the English preferred blood red and the Irish heather purple. The sagas, too, single out blue as special. Avengers often wear blue cloaks: By putting on their best clothes, the warriors show their pride in the deed, as well as preparing to meet their own possible deaths in style.

  Gunnhild’s wool overdress was cut as a tube or two rectangles and fell from her armpits to mid-calf. From the tiny remnants left in burials archaeologists can only guess at the style, so popular in the early Viking Age. But they agree that the dress must have hung, apron-like, from straps fastened above her breasts by a pair of brooches; these, with recessed pins that can only accommodate slender straps, are often found on female skeletons. Gaudy and heavy, the brooches are about four inches long, each one weighing nearly a quarter pound. Oval and domed, they looked like turtle shells to the archaeologists who first unearthed them; they named them “tortoise brooches.” The finest, like Gunnhild’s, were cast of bronze, their surface gilded and elaborately etched, with details enhanced by silver wire. Between their brooches, women hung strings of beads—glass, amber, jet, carnelian, silver, clay, rock crystal—sparkling with coins and gold or silver charms. One brooch might also anchor a chain of useful items: a knife, a needle case, a comb case, scissors, a purse, and even a key if the woman carried one. This apron-dress, too, was designed for easy breastfeeding. One brooch could be unhooked to quickly free a nipple. Long thought to symbolize her status as a free woman, a Viking woman’s oval brooches may have a more precise meaning. Only a third to a half of Viking women were buried wearing oval brooches. I suspect they mark the role of a mother: In Gunnhild’s case, the fineness of her costume marked her as Mother-of-Kings.

  For this reason Ragnhild, though only a girl, would also have worn an apron-dress with oval brooches over a long linen shift: Ragnhild was being advertised to the Orkney islanders as a future mother-of-kings, though childbearing was not to be her fate.

  Over her apron-dress Ragnhild, like her mother, wore a shawl or a cape, a long cloak or a showy backcloth. She may also have tied a braided fabric belt around her waist. Belts with metal buckles seem not to have been worn with this costume, but some way of controlling the flapping layers of fabric in the islands’ stiff wind seems logical. For the same reason, Ragnhild and her mother covered their hair with fancy headcloths, knotted at the nape or under the chin, or at least kept their h
air tidy with bands around their foreheads. If the weather was cold, beneath their dresses they wore linen leggings with feet, but no crotch; that way they could squat to urinate, the tent of their dresses providing privacy. Their feet were snug in soft leather ankle boots, with long laces that wrapped up their calves.

  Did Hervor wear this elaborate costume? Probably not. I assume from her later career as a warrior that she was not expected to marry and have children; Viking warfare was a task that did not mesh well with pregnancy and childbirth. In poetry, marriage is a punishment for a valkyrie; it meant expulsion from the warrior band. In the sagas, even the most warlike of the shield-maids put their raiding on hold to have children. Rather than advertise her as a girl of high status available for marriage offers, then, Gunnhild dressed Hervor as she did the rest of her household: in a manner appropriate for her role.

  What that role was, I can only guess. Captured in battle at Kaupang, Hervor may have been considered a slave. If so, she wore only a loose knee-length tunic of unbleached linen or coarse wool, with a square-cut neckhole and a slit for slipping it over the head, leaving her arms, legs, and feet bare. Both men and women of slave rank were dressed this way. But the size and chemistry of the bones recovered from the Birka grave tell us Hervor was well fed all her life; given that evidence, I suspect her status was somewhat higher than a slave’s. A free servant girl would have worn the same long shirt in a finer fabric. She may have worn a long-sleeved linen underdress and a cloak or shawl but would still have had bare legs and feet. Ragnhild may also have worn a short dress to work in—when she wasn’t being paraded as a marriage prospect. A long dress with a wide-enough hem to walk and work in required much more cloth.

  If Hervor had already distinguished herself as a warrior in training, however, she wore a very different outfit. Her shirt was made of bright white linen, with the neck and hem decorated with colored braids or ribbons, or even with strips of imported silk. She wore it belted over wool or linen trousers. Unlike the leggings women wore, these trousers were closed at the crotch and had a wide seat gore to make them comfortable when riding a horse. They could be knee-length or longer. Hervor’s status was shown by the fineness and quantity of the cloth in her trousers, baggy, pleated trousers being more expensive than slim-fitting ones. In cold weather, she wore a short rectangular cloak, pinned at one shoulder with a single ring-shaped iron brooch. She wore woolen strips wrapped around her calves, sometimes over linen hose or socks, and the kind of simple shoe that gave Olaf Cuaran, the king of Dublin and York, his Irish nickname. A cuaran was made of a large oval of untanned leather or sealskin pierced with holes around the rim. Stepping in the center, you used laces to gather up the leather and tie it around your ankle. Hervor’s fighting outfit was completed, perhaps, with a headband to keep her hair out of her eyes.

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  All of this clothing, and the impression Eirik Bloodaxe and his entourage made when they arrived on Orkney, was the responsibility of Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings.

  Like queens in the Frankish Empire and noblewomen in England, like the Oseberg rulers and the lady of the Shining Hall, Gunnhild oversaw a textile workshop, producing both fine and practical clothing, bedding, tapestries, and even sails, work that was all possible with youngsters underfoot. With a few exceptions—timing a dye bath, warping a loom—most textile tasks did not require steady concentration. They could be interrupted by a needy child and returned to without loss. As the mother of nine children who survived infancy—making her continuously pregnant or nursing (or both) for perhaps twenty years—Gunnhild appreciated that fact.

  Some work the queen did herself: Through the arts of embellishment, through line and color, she told stories, preserved lore, and enhanced status and reputation—including her own. Some work she considered beneath her: For the weaving of sailcloth or the shaggy pile weave used for sea cloaks, she used slave labor. But all of it she needed to understand to control its quality. These secrets she kept close. Cloth making generated wealth and gave her political clout. Without a sail, Eirik Bloodaxe went nowhere. Without a sea cloak, he got soaked and shivered. Without a fine tunic or an embroidered shirt, he was just another sword. Without a tapestry picturing his deeds, who would remember them?

  Like the forging of iron into a sword, creating a deadly weapon out of fire and earth, cloth making magically transformed stalks, roots, leaves, and animal hair into wealth and standing. Gunnhild might not have been able to teach her daughter and Hervor to make a shirt like the Irish girl did in the saga: To ransom herself from Arrow-Odd, she sewed out of silk and gold threads a magic shirt that ensured he was never cold, never hungry, never tired when swimming, never burned by fire, and never wounded by an iron weapon unless he was running away. (It is this magic shirt that kept Arrow-Odd alive when he and his friends met Angantyr and his eleven brothers on the isle of Samsey in the Saga of Hervor; of the great battle, Arrow-Odd was the only survivor.)

  But Gunnhild could teach the girls another magic trick: to turn stinging nettles into a shirt softer than linen, as Viking women often did. If you were careful to always run your hand up the stalk as you plucked the plant, the spines would lie flat and not hurt you. Then, like flax harvested from the field, the stalks were kept damp, spread out in the rain or dew or soaked in shallow pools, until they began to rot and the woody stem separated from the tough inner fibers. Dried and pounded with wooden beetles, then crushed between a board and a wooden blade, the fibers came free, ready for heckling, or drawing through finer and finer combs to straighten and separate them for spinning, which was itself a bit magical. As with linen, nettle thread made from young plants was soft and pliable (nice for shirts); that from old plants was sturdy and stiffer (good for socks).

  Gunnhild could teach the girls to sort the wool of sheep, reserving the longer strands for strong warp threads and the fuzzy short hairs for the softer weft. She could teach them how long to card or comb the wool, brushing it between a pair of handheld rakes to fluff or align the fibers. She could teach them to heat the metal teeth of these rakes by the fire, to melt and distribute the lanolin, the natural wool fat, through the yarn. And she could teach them to amaze the youngsters—Ragnhild’s little brothers, the children of her workers—by slowly pulling and twisting the dangling end of a hank of well-brushed wool to make it magically lengthen from a four-inch hair to a yard-long thread.

  To lengthen and strengthen that thread further, Gunnhild taught them to spin. She taught her sons to spin as well: Spinning was an endless chore. The youngest boys—the nursling, the weanling, and possibly the five-year-old—were always with her in the weaving room, playing with a spindle like a top until they learned to use it properly. In the long winter nights, a boy or man without any other work to hand might have been set to spinning. It took a practiced spinster seven to ten hours to spin the thread a good weaver would use up in one hour. To make one set of clothes of coarse, practical cloth for a worker took at least thirteen miles (about 69,000 feet) of hand-spun thread.

  The trick to spinning was to add a constant trickle of straight fibers (wool, flax, or nettle) as you pulled and twisted the thread. The task seemed to require four hands: one to hold the raw fibers, one to add them at a steady pace (too much and you’ll get an ugly clot, too little and the thread will break), one to pull and twist (the critical step), and one to keep the finished thread from snarling. Having only two hands, ancient women invented tools: a distaff (literally, a “fuzz-stick”) to hold the raw fibers; and a spindle to provide tension, twist, and a spool to hold the spun thread. The distaff, notched and carved to give the bound fibers purchase, could be tucked under one arm. The spindle, a slenderer stick, was weighted with a disc-shaped whorl of stone, clay, bone, amber, ivory, lead—the material didn’t matter; the weight did. The lightest whorls made the finest thread; heavier whorls, depending on the spinster’s skill, made either coarse or fine thread. The whorl could be wedged on the top or bottom of the spindle stick. A top-loaded spindle you roll off your hip (or th
igh, if seated) and let spin to the floor. A bottom-loaded or drop spindle, you start twirling with a finger flick. Before either type strikes the floor give the thread a sharp tug and like a yo-yo the spindle will leap back to your hand. Coil the new thread around the spindle shaft, and start again. For a right-handed spinster, drop spinning gives a sunwise, or Z-spun, twist, while hip spinning gives a counter-sunwise, or S-spun, thread. It was important to keep track. If you start drop spinning and switch to hip spinning, your thread will untwist. Using one twist in the warp and the other in the weft made a cloth that was easily fulled—shrunk and made waterproof, good for a cloak or a sail. Using the same twist (usually Z) in both warp and weft was the way to add pattern and texture to plain-colored cloth.

  But plain-colored cloth, even the finest ring-woven cloth, was not Gunnhild’s ultimate goal. The height of the weaver’s art was tapestry. Hung on the walls, tapestries did more than just liven up the living space or block out drafts. They were signs, symbols, messages meant to be read. They spoke of wealth and status, skill and fine taste, and the leisure to produce luxuries. More, they were “memory pegs”: ways of passing down knowledge by fixing a tale in visual form.

  In an oral culture like that of the Vikings, stories needed to be repeated to be remembered. Poets fixed them in verse, but even poets needed a nudge. In a scene from the Saga of the Orkney Islanders about a celebration well after Gunnhild’s day, the women were hanging the tapestries in the feast hall when the earl turned to a visiting poet and said, “Make a verse about the man pictured there on the hanging.” Was that man Eirik Bloodaxe? Or Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer? Before the Old Norse word bók meant “book,” it meant “tapestry.” Before the verb skrífa meant “to write with quill and ink,” it meant “to weave.” In another saga, a woman wove a tapestry “and wrote on it many and great deeds.” She wrote, not with words, but with pictures. Tapestries were story cloths, carriers of tradition, time binders, tying the past to the present. Tapestries preserved—and shaped—history. The women who wove them were historians.