The Bronze Age String Skirt

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

Dear Viking Answer Lady:

My question is about Viking cord skirts. I would like one for summer wear and for pagan events. I have seen a drawing in a book once and just thought it looked pretty. I'd like to occasionally wear something other than a apron dress. If you could tell me anything else about these, I'd be appreciative.

(signed) Stringing Along

Gentle Reader:

From time to time I run into the misconception that the Vikings used a short string miniskirt as summer wear. This idea seems to have originated in a "New Age" book on Viking religion by Ed Fitch, Rites of Odin.

On the cover, the book shows a supposed "Viking warrior woman" dressed in a string skirt, and inside the book Fitch shows the string skirt and claims that it is Viking Age summer wear. Unfortunately, as with many other things in this book, Fitch has it all wrong! This is NOT a Viking garment. This is a good reason to be cautious when using New Age books purporting to discuss runes or Viking religion. There are in fact a few that contain useful, carefully researched information. But the rest might as well have done their research by watching Kirk Douglas in The Vikings. The only way to determine how accurate (or not) one of the various New Age books on these topics is would be to check the information using reputable, scholarly sources.

The string skirt is actually a woman's garment from the Bronze Age in Denmark (c. 1700-500 BC). To get a true understanding of how far removed from being "Viking summer wear" this is, note that the Viking Age is usually dated from 793-1066 AD. The string skirt predates the Viking Age by about 2200 years. Note that this about the same amount of time as has elapsed between the days of Republican Rome and the present -- and consider how much change is possible in over 2000 years.

Left: Sketch of the Egtved Girl's possessions. Right: Photo of the Egtved Girl's log coffin during excavation.

The string skirt, therefore, is not a Viking Age garment at all.

There is, however, considerable evidence for the string skirt during the Bronze Age. Perhaps the best example would be the Egtved Girl. The Egtved Girl was buried ca. 1400 BC at Egtved, on the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark. The Egtved find consists mainly of the possessions of the woman who was buried here -- very little of the body itself remained, as seen in the field sketch made of the find in the 1920's, above.

The string skirt also appears in Bronze Age art. This garment is seen in small bronze figurines of young female acrobats, small-breasted figures wearing the string skirt, caught in the moment of performing a backflip.

Left: Bronze acrobat figurine wearing a string skirt. Right: The Norwegian parson Marcus Schnabel sketched this drawing of the bronze figurines found at Grevensvænge, Denmark. In the middle, shown upside-down, is one of the female acrobat figures in a string skirt.

The string skirt itself is based upon a warp-faced tabby band. One technique for producing this type of woven belt is inkle weaving -- although it should be noted that the inkle loom used today dates to 18th or 19th century England.

The Danish Bronze Age string skirts were created by producing a woven band in which the weft threads are allowed to extend past the edge of the warp on one edge, forming long loops of thread which make up the skirt. A thread is "chained" around the individual loops near the bottom to keep the strings from tangling uselessly into knots. The woven band becomes the waistband of the skirt, which is simply wrapped around the waist and the ends tied.

By the Viking Age, the standard method for creating woven strips and bands was tablet weaving, also called card weaving. The "tablets" or "cards" are small squares of rigid material, such as thin pieces of wood, bone or antler, with holes drilled through each corner through which warp threads were passed. The tablets are held in the hand like a pack of cards, parallel to the warp, and turned back or forward by half or quarter turns. This action twists the four warp threads which are threaded through the holes in each tablet into a cord that can be locked into position by a weft thread inserted between the turns.

Top: Modern Inkle Loom, used to produce a warp-faced tabby weave. Bottom: Tablet weaving was used in the Viking Age.

http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/EgtvedGirl.shtml