The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantichas an eye-catching cover illustration, especially for a scholarly book. Standing before a loom on which they have woven a cloth from the intestines of dead men while using those same men’s heads as loom weights are Valkyries holding the spears they use as heddle rods. This scene is from the poem “Darraðarljóð” in Njal’s Saga, and it represents the view that Michèle Hayeur Smith would like her readers to take away from her book: of the power, resistance, and cultural creativity that textile work afforded pre-nineteenth-century women in the North Atlantic, a group little documented in written sources. She instead explores their experiences via the material remains of their cloth production. This ambitious and welcome study of women in the North Atlantic over the course of 1000 years examines archeological evidence from Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the northern Scottish islands, and parts of northeastern Canada. Hayeur Smith aimed to learn about women’s culture via the textiles they made and the remains of the tools that permitted that labor, such as loom weights, spindle whorls, and needles. Her project rests on technical analyses of cloth and other archeological materials, but rather than cataloguing such items, she attempts to understand them as female cultural expressions within their historical contexts. Many of the findings have appeared in her earlier publications (credited throughout this book), but here she uses the overarching theme of female power to connect evidence over centuries and across the North Atlantic. Although some chapters read more as the individual articles they once were, she does succeed in constructing a cohesive volume that conveniently gathers references to prior scholarship, accounts of available evidence, and new interpretations regarding the pre-modern North Atlantic in one place.
Hayeur Smith’s first chapter explores the power of female textile work from an anthropological perspective, setting up the theme that holds the book together. Drawing from archeological findings and medieval Norse literature, especially certain sagas, she notes that culturally weaving and cloth production was gendered female. Because, prior to the twelfth century, most such labor took place in pit huts, which were apparently off limits to men, textile work represented a form of female production that discomfited men for its unfamiliarity and for the ways it gave women power. Hayeur Smith further notes that men avoided engagement with cloth production for fear it would make them seem effeminate in a society with strong masculine ideals. She demonstrates the importance of female textile work in day-to-day terms through her exploration of the archeological and textual evidence for vaðmál, the Icelandic form of cloth currency. Its ubiquity across a range of sites and the ways it standardized cloth in Iceland suggest how crucial the female labor necessary to producing it was. Hayeur Smith notes how it let women insert themselves into the generally male-dominated economic sphere.
One of the great strengths of The Valkyries’ Loom is its comparative approach. In analyzing Icelandic and northern Scottish remains of weaving alongside one another, Hayeur Smith is able to highlight technological, organizational, and cultural differences in the two regions all while still demonstrating the commonalities of North Atlantic communities. Hayeur Smith usefully refers to many studies of textiles from around the world, cross-referencing textile work in various cultures in novel ways, such as when she employs scholarly analysis of pre-Columbian cord pottery found in Florida in order to enable her discussion of spin direction as potentially cultural in nature. Drawing from that scholarship, she argues that, rather than necessarily resulting from technological constraints, geographically and temporally consistent spin direction (most basically if thread is spun in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction) could have stemmed from instruction in North Atlantic communities (36-37). That discussion enables her to point out further ways in which scholars can understand changes in textile production as cultural.
Among the most fascinating chapters are the two on Greenland in which Hayeur Smith explores the practices of patching, indigenous spinning, and weaving weft-dominant cloth as well as the use of Arctic species and goat fibers in textile production. Medieval Greenlanders did not have easy access to sources of ready-made cloth and often re-used and recycled textiles, sometimes over decades. Hayeur Smith rightly cautions that these patches may not be so much a sign of poverty or lack of choice but rather could constitute a means of personal identification either with the past (like wearing an heirloom as part of one’s new clothing) or with the Norse community, which wore woolens in contrast to the indigenous population’s common and practical use of skin clothing. Yet Hayeur Smith notes that scholars have been a bit too quick to accord skill in spinning among indigenous populations in eastern Canada, such as the Dorset and Thule Inuit cultures, as a result of Norse influence. In one of the most fascinating portions of the book, she shows that such spinning was an indigenous skill in existence long before Norse contact. Hayeur Smith also explores possible raw materials for medieval textiles other than sheep’s wool. She notes that Norse Greenlanders did not much take up the use of native fiber sources, even if archeological remains show that Greenland cloth often came into contact with Arctic species. Although some scholars have suspected Greenlanders used goat fibers because of the large number of goats in the archeological record, her aDNA analysis of goat fibers was inconclusive. Clearer was the adoption during the first half of the fourteenth century of weft-dominant cloth in Greenland, in contrast to the more widely used warp-dominant cloth. This kind of cloth, which had more threads per centimeter in the weft than in the warp, appears to have been a response to a changing climate for such cloth offered greater warmth during a time of cooling. Hayeur Smith carefully summarizes the archeological evidence demonstrating this adoption and notes that a similar evolution occurred in Iceland as the climate cooled.
The book’s purview extends into the early modern period during which Hayeur Smith charts a change in women’s textile production. After examining the archeological evidence from Iceland and the Faroe Islands, she notes the presence of imported cloth despite local production of cloth and raw wool respectively. How to interpret that presence is difficult given the changes of this period of North Atlantic history: the political shift from Norwegian influence and interest in the region to Danish colonial control and a relative lack of interest in some North Atlantic locations such as Greenland; the demise of the Norse Greenland colony; the increasing influence of the Hanse and its trade network, and the rise of Lutheranism. The early modern transformation in female textile labor that resulted from Danish efforts to increase industrial production of cloth in Iceland and from the import of European cloth parallels late medieval changes in cloth production in western Europe that resulted from the adoption of the horizontal loom. Despite authorities’ concerted effort to achieve greater industrialization in Iceland, Icelandic women kept weaving on warp-weighted looms and making traditional woolen cloth until the nineteenth century. Clothing in Iceland nevertheless kept up with continental European changes in fashion even as it was often made of homespun. Still the Danish approach won out in the end, and use of the treadle loom became dominant in the nineteenth century. Hayeur Smith suggests that the continued use of cloth made on warp-weighted looms and then the use of domestic knitted fabrics were means for women to resist Danish colonization. In so arguing she is in good company for other scholars have noted the ways that women have used textile work as a means of resistance, perhaps most influentially Rozsika Parker in her book The Subversive Stitch (London, 1984). But it may well be that inertia or some other factor was at work in early modern Iceland, for, as Hayeur Smith herself admits, we have few textual sources with which to explore the responses of Icelandic women of that era, and it is quite possible that women may have welcomed new ways to get clothing because they freed them from substantial and time-consuming labor.
For an anthropological study of cloth production, The Valkyries’ Loom is less technical and more interpretive than many other such volumes, making it possible to suggest the book to students and those without much expertise in its subject matter, although the book will be of most benefit to those engaged in the study of medieval textiles. The valuable overview it offers will be of interest to a range of scholars from specialists interested in the Icelandic sagas to medieval historians seeking ways to expand their coverage of the Middle Ages in the classroom. Hayeur Smith’s conclusion sums her findings up succinctly and manages to connect the sometimes-disparate chapters via the theme of women’s experience and expression. The book includes a useful glossary, especially for those lacking in specialized knowledge of textiles and/or the early history of this region. One just wishes the press had paid more attention to copyediting so as to have avoided the book’s typos and odd turns of English phrasing.
The Valkyries’ Loom makes important contributions to our understanding of the medieval and early modern North Atlantic as well as to the ways textile studies can enrich our knowledge of the pre-modern world. Hayeur Smith highlights the need to consider archeological remains for the ways they can confirm, alter, or change conclusions drawn on the basis of textual sources alone. Further she demonstrates a way to use material remains to explore female expression in cultures where such evidence is otherwise difficult to find. Although her book’s cover highlights a gory legend of weaving, she ends it aptly by reminding her readers of the quiet ways women in the North Atlantic provided life-sustaining products of high economic value over many centuries, a hidden but crucial form of labor that deserves further consideration.