Archaeologist Michèle Hayeur Smith at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has discovered that Viking women weaved a highly standardized cloth valued as a currency in Iceland in the Viking era....
"Textiles and what women made were as critical as hunting, building houses, and power struggles," Hayeur Smith said... Smith has a fashion degree in Paris and has focused on Viking women's cloth during her Ph.D. studies at Glasgow University in the 1990s.
This is not exactly a groundbreaking discovery, as the role of women in producing woven cloth was hardly shrouded in mystery. Rather, it is documented extensively in sagas, histories, epics, even mythology -- think of the Norns weaving fate.
She is putting the cart before the horse, though, in claiming that weaving gave women power in Viking society. Women in ancient Greece were extremely talented weavers too. They didn't parlay that into power in their society; in fact, it was one of the qualities that made even aristocratic women sought-after slaves. The fear of the Trojan women in the Iliad is that their husbands and sons will be killed, but that they will spend the rest of their lives weaving for a Greek master.
Why didn't they just go on strike? The idea of women striking in other ways occurred to the Greeks. Their skills were highly valuable: arguably quality cloth was one of the main forms of wealth produced in the ancient and medieval worlds.
Fear of violence, I suppose. So why were free Viking women also free of violence? The laws of the North punished any transgression against them especially harshly -- as did the culture. In Njals Saga, Gunnar's wife Hallgerður rebukes her husband's having struck her by refusing to braid some of her hair into a bowstring that might have saved him from an attack. He accepted this even though it meant his death.
No, the cart goes after the horse. Women in the North were treated with a kind of rough equality and much greater respect than in the south, even though they both could perform excellent weaving. The mastery of the craft did not drive the respect and equality: the respect and equality came first.
1 comment:
I played Cinesias in Lysistrata in 1970.
Yes, the "rough equality" as you put it shows up in place after place in the north. In some places women could inherit property or purchase it. They could refuse a husband over the wishes of both sets of parents. A few went into battle or on voyages of exploration. In Germanic and perhaps Baltic and some Uralic cultures women were buried prominently, with grave goods, and not always associated with a husband. In a few Indo-European kurgans they are 25% of the total. Yet in other prominent Yamnaya DNA examples, the male supremacy is profound, with evidence of a few intrusive males impregnating ten women on average, with other males leaving no descendants. Theories abound, but it is best not to let speculation run too wild, as we don't actually know. It seems to be there as soon as they show up in the written record. That they were economically very useful, not just symbolically or ritually so seems likely.
It is not complete equality, but it is striking.
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