Cloth Making

All of the steps of making a set of clothing, from processing the fibers, to spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing, were done by the women of the family. Since the process was so labor intensive, a set of clothing was highly prized and carefully maintained.

Clothing was commonly made from wool or linen. Other fabrics (such as silk) were known, but were costly and rare. It has been thought that outer garments were typically wool, while under garments were linen. More recent research suggests that linen was commonly used for outer garments as well.

Viking Raids



Evariste Vital Luminais (b.1821-1896), "Norman Pirates", 1897.

The Norse were looking for three things: new victims, new partners with which to trade and new land on which to settle. In many cases, Norse voyages included all three activities.

The raids were usually opportunistic, against targets that could be attacked, plundered, and departed from quickly. Vikings stayed along the coast or on navigable rivers; overland marches were avoided. The goal was to grab as much valuable booty as possible before an effective defense could be raised. Typical booty included weapons, tools, clothing, jewelry, precious metals, and people who could be sold as slaves.

Vikings invaded Europe for many years and Warriors from Nidaros were also among them. 

The Viking raids didn't come to an end with any singular event. Some would say the widespread conversion to Christianity in the Norse lands at the beginning of the 11th century signaled the end of the Viking age. The teachings of the Christian religion did not encompass the kinds of activities that took place on a typical raid.

Edward Matthew Hale (b. 1852-1924), "After the Raid", 1892.


In the year 1066, King Harold of Norway died trying to conquer England. It would be the last major Norse raid. In the same year, Polish tribesmen overran and destroyed Hedeby, the primary Norse trading center. The climate turned colder that century, making life more difficult in the north. The Norse influence in continental Europe gradually declined.

Viking Expansion Map

Viking Expanstion Map, Wikipedia. Retrieved 28 September 2011.

Map showing area of Scandinavian settlement in the eighth (dark red), ninth (red), tenth (orange) and eleventh (yellow) centuries. Green denotes areas subjected to frequent Viking raids.

Valhalla Rising

Photo: Valhalla Rising (2009) is a viking film from Bronson director Nicholas WInding Refn.

The movie will promote the theory that an expedition of Vikings from Scotland reached North America centuries before Christopher Columbus. Most historians now accept that Vikings beat Columbus to the New World. Voyages are described in Norse sagas and evidence has been found to prove their presence on the continent. “Valhalla Rising” will though be shot as a fictional movie, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s documentary style.

For years, One-Eye, a mute warrior of supernatural strength, has been held prisoner by the chieftain Barde. Aided by a boy, Are, he kills his captor and together they escape, beginning a journey into the heart of darkness. On their flight from bounty hunters, One-Eye and Are board a Viking vessel for Norway, but the ship is soon engulfed by an endless fog that first disintegrates as they sight an unknown land. As the new land reveals its secrets and the Vikings meet a ghastly fate, One-Eye discovers his true self.

'Valhalla Rising' Trailer HD

Viking Museums

Below is the list of Viking museums across the world 

Dublinia & the Viking World (Dublin, Ireland)

A heritage centre, located in central Dublin, at the heart of the medieval city. The exhibitions at Dublinia explore life as it was in the medieval city and the world of the Vikings.

Jorvik Viking Centre (Great Britain)

A ‘must-see’ for visitors to the city of York and is one of the most popular visitor attractions in the UK outside London.

Lofotr Viking Museum (Lofotr – Vikingmuseet) (Borg, Norway)

A historical museum based on a reconstruction and archaeological excavation of a Viking chieftain’s village in the North Norwegian archipelago of Lofoten, Norway.

Ribe Viking Centre (Ribe Vikingecenter) (Denmark)

A unique experience and new knowledge about the Viking Age. You can wander round the reconstructed life-size Viking estate, peopled with Vikings with whom you can work and talk.

Ribe Viking Museum (Museet Ribes Vikinger) (Denmark)

Thousands of archeological finds from the excavations show how the vikings lived and traded with Europe. From the year 800 down to the year 1100 the town is fortified several times with big banks.

Viking Museum (Vikingemuseet) (Aarhus, Denmark)

The newly renovated museum tells the story of the Viking Period in Århus and is a part of Moesgård Museum. The museum is located where the archaeologists of Moesgård found Viking houses. A visit in the museum is a tour back in time.

Viking Museum at Ladby (Vikingemuseet Ladby) (Denmark)

The central “artefact” of the Viking Museum is the unique Viking ship grave, the only one in Denmark and the only one in the world that is exhibited on its original site. The museum career of the ship grave began in 1937, when the reconstructed burial mound, actually an arched concrete building, was dedicated.

Viking Museum Foteviken (Fotevikens Museum) (Sweden)

The Viking Reserve of Foteviken is a unique institution. Here researchers, antiquarians and Viking re-enactors are working together, developing and establishing a settlement from the late Viking Age and early Middle ages.

Viking Museum Haithabu (Wikinger-Museum Haithabu) (Germany)

A museum near the site of Hedeby, a former medieval city in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany focusing on the Viking Age history of the region. The museum features reconstructions of various Viking Age dwellings, ships, and houses numerous artifacts discovered during the ongoing archaeological research of the area.

Viking Ship Museum (Vikingeskebs Museet) (Roskilde, Denmark)

Danish national museum for ships, seafaring and boatbuilding in the prehistoric and medieval period.

Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset) (Oslo, Norway)

The museum displays the Viking Age Oseberg ship, Gokstad ship and Tune ship alongside sledges, beds, a (horse) cart, wood carving, tent components, buckets and other grave goods.

Clothing in Viking Era

As with many aspects of Viking-age material culture, our knowledge of Viking era clothing is fragmentary. The Viking people left few images and little in the way of written descriptions of their garments. Archaeological evidence is very limited and spotty. Thus, different scholars examining the evidence come to different conclusions. What is presented in this article represents only a range of possible interpretations.

Viking apparel was distinctive in style and originated in the Scandinavian and Germanic regions of Europe. The peasant dresses were mostly simple tunics worn more for functionality than for appearance. On the other hand, high medieval fashion clothes worn by nobility were highly ornate, decorated and embellished. Today, when people talk of medieval clothing it is not chain mail and armor, but the clothing that evolved during the latter part that they commonly refer to.

Norse people used worn out clothing for many purposes. Sometimes, it was coated with pitch and used to seal cracks in the shipbuilding process. In other cases, fabric was coated with pitch to use as a torch, but never lit. These pitch-coated fabrics have survived very well. At least one entire garment (a pair of men's trousers) has survived from the Viking era because someone used it in the process of building a ship.

Headwear was very much in use then as it is these days, with more variety. There were close-fitting coifs, wide brimmed straw hats, hoods, capes and jackets with hoods and hoods with a short cape just falling to the shoulders.

In Medieval Europe, sumptuary laws were enacted to dictate the types and colors of clothes people belonging to various classes could wear. This was done to help aristocracy retain their unique looks and distinguished styles. Though laws were enacted, enforcement was not simple or possible, giving people the freedom to wear different styles and colors of their choice.

Viking Slave's Clothing

We know little about the clothing worn by slaves, or how it differed from the clothing worn by free people. Most likely, it was similar to but simpler in design and execution than clothing worn by free men and women. Coarser, un-dyed fabric was probably used to reduce costs, with little or no ornamentation.

Viking Men's Clothing

Viking used more wool than anything else for making clothing. The Vikings made their own clothes from cloth woven from a loom by women and children in their own home.

Viking men were a long woolen Viking tunic that was tight fitting across the chest with a broad skirt and/or long trousers. The tunic was pulled on over the head. Men wore a tunic that was tight fitting across the chest. There were usually no fasteners, although some tunics had a simple button and loop of thread (left) to fasten the neck opening. A keyhole neckline was the most common, although many other shapes were used for the neck opening for both men and women. Men's necklines were high, since a garment that revealed the chest was considered effeminate.

Tunics of all but the poorest people were decorated with braid, at least on the neckline and cuffs. The tunics of the more wealthy were also decorated with braid on the hem of the skirt. Silk was also used to trim a tunic, although the cost of imported silk must have limited this kind of trim to only the wealthiest people.

Under the tunic, it's likely that most men also wore an undertunic (right). This was made most commonly from linen. (Linen was more expensive than wool, but more comfortable against the skin.) The construction was similar to that of the overtunic, except that the sleeves and skirt were made longer. It has been suggested that the undertunic was visible under the overtunic, so that people could see that one was wealthy enough to be able to afford an undertunic.

It appears that a wide range of styles of trousers were used in the Norse lands. Some were tight. Some were baggy. Some trousers were of simple construction. Some were complicated, using elaborate gores around the crotch area for freedom of motion, and built-in socks (like modern sleepwear for toddlers), with belt loops around the waist.

Trousers had no pockets and no fly. The lack of a fly meant that men had to pull up their tunic skirts and drop their trousers to relieve themselves. The lack of pockets in any Viking-era clothing meant that men and women had to carry their everyday items in other ways, such as suspended from the belt, carried in pouches, carried around the neck, or suspended from brooches.

In cold weather, Vikings wore fur or woolen hats, cloaks or sleeved jerkin. The cloak was simply a large rectangular piece of wool, sometimes lined with contrasting color wool. Cloaks provided protection from the cold, from the wind, and to a limited degree, from the rain. Some cloaks were made with very dense, very thick wool, which would have provided extra protection.



Fig - 5: 9th-10th century AD. A small penannular brooch with a flat, rectangular-section band with scrolled terminals and a long pin.



Cloaks were typically worn offset, with the right arm (the weapon arm) unencumbered by the cloak. Cloaks could be embroidered, or trimmed with tablet woven braid. Typically they hung to somewhere between the knee and the ankle depending on the wealth of the owner. The cloaks were fastened at the shoulder with a brooch or a pin at the right shoulder. The pins ranged from simple bone pins to elaborate gold jewelry.

Fig - 6:

On his feet he would wear socks and soft leather shoes or long leather boots suggest a certain elegance and style-consciousness. They were known to have worn puttee-like leg wrappings from knee to foot The wraps consistent of two long, narrow strips of cloth, typically wool, which were wound around the leg and foot. By starting at the knee and wrapping downwards, no clips or fasteners are needed. The wraps stay firmly in place, even during vigorous activity.

Most men wore long hair and beards as a protection from the cold weather. Caps were made of wool, or sheepskin, or leather and fur. Some had ear flaps for warmth.

Fig - 9:

In battle he would wear an iron helmet and a mail-chain to protect himself. The sword they carried seems lightweight and suitable for travel for warfare.










Source

Fig - 5: Lehtosalo-Hilander, P-L.,Luistari (Finland), A History of Weapons and Ornaments, Helsinki, 2000.

Viking Children's Clothing

There is little surviving evidence to help us determine what sort of clothing children wore, but there is little to suggest that children's clothing was anything other than adult clothing cut to fit the child's smaller frame.

Tunic and trousers were probably typical for boys, and a dress for girls. Their tunics were plain striped rough homespun wool, with trousers below. They both wore cloaks over their tunics.

Viking Women's Clothing

In general, women's clothing was made from the same materials as men's clothing. Typically, a woman wore an ankle length linen under-dress or shift, with the neck closed by a brooch. Over it, she wore a shorter length woolen dress suspended by shoulder straps fastened by brooches. This kind of suspended dress is sometimes called a an apron-skirt. Some interpret the outer dress as two separate panels, but more likely, it was a slightly flaring tube-shaped dress, longer at the back than the front. The details of how these garments were constructed is highly speculative. Inga Hägg's article  in Cloth and Clothing In Medieval Europe There is also evidence for an overdress similar to the one worn by the woman on the right, completely covering the shoulders and requiring no brooches, sometimes joined by a chain or string of beads to hold it in place. (left) Inga Hägg's article  in Cloth and Clothing In Medieval Europe which shoes of the inside of a pair of tortoise brooches that were found at Birka.

Belt buckles or other fastenings are rarely found in women's graves, as they are in men's graves, suggesting that women's belts were woven fabric, rather than leather.

Head coverings were typically worn by women, perhaps as simple as a knotted kerchief over the head (left), which even women of the lowest class wore a headdress. Some noble women ma have worn elaborate headdresses, which may have been worn like jewelry on special occasions. It has been suggested that the type of headdress worn served to distinguish married from unmarried women.

Women's shoes were similar to men's shoes in virtually every particular. Her legs and feet were covered with thick woolly socks and soft leather shoes.

Both men and women wore fur or woolen hats and cloaks in cold weather. The cloaks were fastened at the shoulder with a brooch or a pin.

Some evidence suggests that women's clothing was worn long. Images of women in picture stones and jewelry (right) show long, trailing skirts on female figures. Trailing garments would get soiled while working around animals and would be awkward around the fire burning on the floor of every longhouse. Perhaps high status women wore such long clothing on special occasions. As is often the case with Viking material culture, we are reminded of the limits of the available evidence.

Who Were the Vikings?

The term, "Viking Age" covers the period A.D. 800 to the 11th century (800-1066) in northern Europe. Scandinavians left their homelands to seek their fortunes elsewhere. These seafaring warriors--known collectively as Vikings or Norsemen "Northmen"; began by raiding coastal sites, especially undefended monasteries, in the British Isles and the areas bordering the Baltic and North Seas.

Over the next three centuries, they would leave their mark as pirates, raiders, traders and settlers on much of Britain and the European continent, as well as parts of modern-day Russia, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. The international trade enjoyed by these areas permitted the free flow of dyestuffs, mordant’s, and textiles across wide distances; accordingly, textile products throughout northern Europe shared a basic set of dyestuffs in the Viking Age.