CHAPTER 9

The Farm of Merry Noise

They passed Glaumbaer at the close of the day . . . and when they had gone on a short way, a man came to meet them. He was tall and thin, and had a big head. He was poorly dressed. He greeted them and they exchanged names. He said his was Thorbjorn. He was a wanderer, not one to work much, always chattering and boasting. Some people thought him amusing. He was very friendly and started telling funny stories about the people of the nearby farms. Grettir thought him great fun. Thorbjorn asked if they didn’t need a man to work for them. “I would gladly join you,” he said. He told such good stories that they let him tag along. . . . And because he was such a talker and joker he’d earned himself a nickname and was called “Glaum,” or “Noisemaker.”

—Grettir’s Saga

 

Of all the houses Gudrid lived in during her long and adventurous life—at Arnarstapi under the Snow Mountain’s Glacier; in Greenland at Eirik the Red’s Brattahlid and farther north, at Sandnes; at L’Anse aux Meadows in Vinland and somewhere near the Miramichi River on the Gulf of St. Lawrence; at Reynines with her haughty mother-in-law—the house at Glaumbaer was her only true home. The others were owned or overseen by someone else. Glaumbaer was hers, unfortunately, alone.

The sagas say almost nothing about the years she lived at Glaumbaer, only that she raised her two sons alone. Karlsefni died before the eldest, Snorri, came of age. Chances are that Karlsefni was lost at sea soon after his second son was born—otherwise, we could expect Gudrid to have had more than two children. Nor, this time, did Gudrid inherit a ship. Perhaps Karlsefni was caught in a storm on a routine trading run from Norway, and sailed his ship down somewhere in the icy North Atlantic. Gudrid never remarried.

But barring loneliness, her life at Glaumbaer was not a difficult one. She remained wealthy enough to fund her final adventure—a pilgrimage to Rome, essentially a grand tour of Europe that would have taken at least a year to accomplish—with enough money left over to let Snorri, in her absence, build her a church on their property. And, like all of her neighbors, her only source of income was the cloth she could make from the wool of her sheep.

By tallying the sexes and ages of sheep’s bones and teeth, archaeologists concluded that the sheep in Iceland in the Viking Age were not kept mainly for milk and meat, as they are now. Instead of being culled young, as tender lambs, males were gelded and allowed to become “aged,” as one archaeologist puts it—up to eight years old. These wethers were “valuable assets,” another expert writes. “They were the kind of property which the farmer could keep from one year to the next with limited risk.” Sturdy enough to graze outdoors in most weather, they could be turned loose and essentially forgotten until shearing time, when they would yield twice as much wool as a ewe that was being milked. At the two farms studied, 20 percent of the flock was tall, wool-heavy wethers: the Viking cash crop.

One day I remarked to Sirri about the amount of pasture in the area. “Is that why Glaumbaer was such a good farm when Gudrid lived here?” I asked her.

“I don’t think Gudrid did live here,” Sirri said, “though she may have died here. I think Gudrid lived in Reynines for a decade or two while Snorri was small. Reynines was Thorfinn Karlsefni’s heritage. It was the best farm in the district. I think Gudrid and Karlsefni lived there, but also owned Glaumbaer. Eventually their family owned the whole area. Snorri was the first farmer at Glaumbaer, but you can’t tell when he started to farm—at age fifteen or at twenty-five—no one knows when Karlsefni died and Gudrid became a widow. Nobody will ever know that.

“But to answer your question,” Sirri continued, “Glaumbaer must have been a very good farm when Snorri lived here. It’s a very easy farm. You can cut grass wherever you like, everywhere in the area. You have good fodder for the animals all year long, even if you don’t make hay. In normal years you didn’t need hay. But of course you had to make it just in case.

“I suppose Gudrid would not stay at Reynines after Karlsefni’s death,” Sirri added, picking again at the old problem. “The saga says something about her mother-in-law not liking her. But this is just my theory. I have no way to say she lived at Glaumbaer or not.”

“Doesn’t the dating of the house John found suggest that she did?”

“No.” Sirri pursed her lips, turning very serious. “All we can say, when archaeologists find something, is that the saga takes place at the same time. It’s wonderful to see the old turf house that you found under the hayfield, because now we have the first generation of turf house down in the field and the last generation of turf house up on the hill, and people can see what has changed and what has not in a thousand years. The two houses are real. People really lived there. The sagas are not real.

“But it’s quite entertaining to have them both,” she added, smiling. “You can believe it was her house if you want. We have given her a place. And you can certainly place Snorri here. The saga says he built the first church here—though some people doubt that, too.

“But whether they are true or not, the sagas have a meaning for people. Icelanders have listened to them for a thousand years. They have the soul of the people in them, the image of the people. They name people, they name places. You can use them to learn genealogy, geography, history, to teach your children how to behave—”

“How do you use the saga of Grettir the Strong to teach children to behave?”

Sirri laughed, then sighed. “Oh, yes, Grettir. He did everything wrong. He was bad to animals, bad to people, he stole, he drank. He was in many ways crazy, an antihero. Many people would like to do what he did, but they don’t dare.”

 

The overarching theme of Grettir’s Saga is that the Viking Age is over. The Viking values that Grettir embodies no longer apply: He was stronger than anyone, courageous to a fault, even a good poet, but his tragic flaw was hubris. Only when he learned to live humbly and love his brother was he happy. Until then he had no luck. He was outlawed in both Iceland and Norway for a good deed gone wrong: Seeking help after a shipwreck, he was mistaken for a troll, got into a brawl, and burned down a house, murdering several men. With a price on his head, he hid in caves and wilderness camps until his fear of the dark grew overwhelming, then convinced his fifteen-year-old brother Illugi to accompany him to Skagafjord to the island of Drangey, whose steep cliffs couldn’t be scaled without a ladder.

It’s on their journey through Skagafjord on a snowy day that Grettir’s saga intersects with that of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, for at Glaumbaer they picked up a companion. He was a funny-looking fellow called Thorbjorn Glaum, meaning “Noisemaker” or “Chatterbox,” and although his name might imply he had a connection to Gudrid’s farm, he called himself a wanderer and spoke of the people there with no affection. He was a gossip and a boaster. His low status is clearly relayed by the phrase “he was poorly dressed.” Clothing, in fact, seems to obsess him.

 

“When you went by Glaumbaer, not even wearing a hood in this blizzard, they were pretty amazed,” Glaum said. “They were wondering if being so cold-hardy made you any braver. These two farmer’s sons, such big, strong men—when the shepherd told them to come out and give him a hand with the sheep, they couldn’t pile on enough clothes, they thought it was so cold.”

Grettir said, “I saw one youngster in the doorway. He was pulling on his mittens. And the other one was going between the cowshed and the manure pile. I wouldn’t be scared of either of them.”

 

The two farmer’s sons being lampooned would be Snorri and Thorbjorn, his younger brother. The year is about 1028, making Snorri twenty-three and master of Glaumbaer. Gudrid could have been away on her pilgrimage to Rome, for the years 1025 to 1028 saw a brief interlude of peace in the wars between Norway and Denmark, and King Olaf the Saint of Norway was encouraging Christianity in Iceland.

In these few words, the saga gives a good sense of the working farm of Glaumbaer a thousand years ago: two young men, a shepherd, sheep, a cowshed, a manure pile, work to be done on a cold winter day, and a painful awareness of the importance of hoods, mittens, and other warm clothes.

As Grettir’s Saga continues, we get a wider picture of the neighborhood around Gudrid’s farm. Grettir and his two companions walked on as far as Reynines, where Gudrid’s mother-in-law may still have been in charge. She must have been generous and discreet, as well as haughty and capable, for the travelers spent the night there (without making any snide comments about it), and the next day traveled on up the coast to the farm with the hot spring now known as Grettir’s Bath. There, by greasing a palm, the outlaws got a man to row them out to the island. They climbed up, secured the ladder, and settled in.

Grettir and Illugi were content on Drangey for five years. They had plenty of sheep to eat, with seabirds and gulls’ eggs for variety, and they were safe as long as they hauled the ladder up each night. The only unhappy one was Glaum. He got the blame when the fire went out—causing Grettir to swim the four miles to the mainland, warm himself up in the hot spring, and rape the serving maid.

And how was Glaum to know that the great driftwood tree trunk he lugged home for firewood one night had been cursed by a witch? Her spell turned Grettir’s axe, and he struck his own leg while chopping the log. The wound festered and turned black. While the hero lay feverish, Glaum forgot his duties once again and left the ladder down. Forewarned by the witch, Grettir’s enemies clambered up and killed them all.

When I first read Grettir’s Saga, I wondered if this miserable creature known as Thorbjorn Glaum was really Thorbjorn of Glaumbaer, Gudrid’s second son. An impressionable eighteen years old, irritated by his older brother’s authority, had he remembered how Grettir refused to do farmwork? Had he pulled on his mittens and run after the ill-starred hero, looking for glory? Had he joked about himself and his brother to cover his tracks? What finally convinced me the name was an odd coincidence—or a scribe’s mistake—was the saga-writer’s remark that the chatterbox was “poorly dressed.” No matter how lazy or boastful, no son of Gudrid, living on the grass-rich farm of Glaumbaer, would be poorly dressed.

 

A housewife’s chief duty was to see that her menfolk wore good clothes. Clothing was the most visible mark of her family’s status, the main outlet for her creativity and industry, and the foundation of Iceland’s economy. The sagas say little about such everyday tasks as cloth making, but this gap in our knowledge of Gudrid’s daily life has recently been filled in by experimental archaeologists, like two I met at the University of Copenhagen. Using tools Gudrid might have owned, they make cloth that matches, thread for thread, the samples dug up from Viking houses and graves.

To clothe her family, Gudrid started in early summer, just after the lambs were born, with shearing the sheep. Their thick double-coated fleece could be pulled off by hand—called rooing—or snipped with iron shears, partial pairs of which have been found in several archaeological sites. Wool samples from the Farm Beneath the Sand in Greenland showed both rooing and shearing were done at the same time; no one knows which was better, or why. At Copenhagen’s Center for Textile Research, Linda Martensson spread a full, sheared fleece, mottled black and gray, on the conference table. Beside it she lay a partial one in the rich, rusty color called “moor-red,” after the tint bog-water takes on from iron ore. Eva Andersson, who is in charge of the Center’s “Tools and Textiles” program, ran a hand over the gray fleece, as if it were a cat that had jumped into her lap.

“The process,” Linda said, “is first you shear the sheep. Then you sort the wool.”

The best wool, I had read, came from the neck, the sides, and the back; the worst from the belly and the legs. In between best and worst was a medium grade. To get a uniform thread, you would spin wool from only one grade at a time.

Linda touched the gray fleece delicately here and there, poking, squeezing, petting, fluffing. “The back leg is coarse and dirty,” Linda said. “The back is a little dry. The sides I would see as a good quality to spin with. The front legs and neck are very felted. I would put that in another group.”

“After you sort the wool,” continued Eva, “you have to wash it.”

She plucked a handful from the moor-red fleece and gave it to me. It was greasy with lanolin and slightly gritty. The washing step, I knew, we weren’t going to get into here, in a glass-walled conference room. The Vikings washed wool in barrels of stale urine. When heated, urine, being alkaline, acts as a detergent—and it was certainly available. One scholar suggests that after the big milk tubs in Viking larders were emptied of skyr or whey during the winter, they were refilled with urine, little by little, especially on cold, windy days. Modern sensitivities should not preclude the proximity of functions in the past now regarded as insanitary, such as the storage of urine and food in the same room, he chides, noting, it is less than a century since Yorkshire women used the chamber-pot contents to wash their face and hair. The washed wool would be laid in the sun to dry, then stored in a wool crib until winter, when the work Eva and Linda were about to demonstrate would occupy every woman’s day.

Linda had begun combing a hank of red wool with her fingers, teasing apart the mats and tangles, stretching it like taffy. “You can do a lot of work by hand, separating the different kinds of wool and hair, and opening it up.” The handwork also warms the wool, softening and spreading the lanolin. She piled the fuzzier, woollier bits on the table, leaving the longer hairs in her hand. “Long hairs make a stronger yarn than short hairs. The warp of a loom is long hairs, but for the weft you can use short ones.”

“You can’t do too much by hand, though, or you start to make felt,” Eva said. She got out a pair of wood-handled combs shaped like small rakes, with one row of four-inch-long metal teeth—reconstructions of Norwegian Viking finds. “You put them next to the fire to heat the teeth. That melts the fat while you comb.” She placed the worked hank of wool in one comb, the teeth through the woolliest part, the long hairs hanging down, and passed both combs to Linda. Keeping the loaded comb still, cocked up to provide tension, Linda used the other to brush out the strands.

“You’re so calm,” Eva commented. “I’m much tougher when I comb.”

“I like to be meditative,” Linda said, with a flash of a smile.

After a moment she put down one comb and waved the other, letting the well-brushed wool ripple in the wind. “Doesn’t it look like angel hair?” she said. With her fingers, she then pulled very slowly and gently on the dangling end. The hair lengthened magically until it was a yard long, from a beginning length of about four inches.

If she had been working, not just demonstrating, she would have wound the combed wool onto a stick—or distaff—accumulating a full reel before moving on to the next step, spinning. But now Eva simply took the handful of combed wool, twisted it a little, and tied one end to the top of a spindle stick, securing it in a notch like that on a crochet hook. At the bottom of the stick was a conical weight, the spindle whorl. Holding on to the wool, she flicked the stick between finger and thumb to set the whorl twirling like a top in air. It dropped toward the floor, slowly as a spider on its silk—except the thread was being produced from the top, from Eva’s fingers feeding the wool down, pulling and pinching it, while the spinning whorl stretched and twisted it into thread. When the spinning slowed, but before it could stop and reverse, she flicked the spindle again. When the whorl reached the floor, she caught it, wound the new-spun thread around the stick, and started over. The motion was so simple, the tools so light, that she could have spun—as Viking women did—anywhere, sitting or walking. Spindle whorls are often found in odd places, like the boatshed at L’Anse aux Meadows; at one farm in Greenland, out of twenty-five whorls, nine were in the kitchen and two in the church.

The whorl could be placed either at the bottom of the stick or at the top, without affecting the thread quality. The shape and substance of the whorl—whether amber, soapstone, ceramic, or bone—also didn’t matter. But the size and weight of the whorl did.

For her doctoral dissertation in 1999, Eva studied the textile tools from Viking Age houses in southern Sweden. “I found that whenever there was more than one spindle whorl found in a house, they were of different sizes. Why? So I got these four spindles reconstructed, all copies of whorls found in Hedeby in Denmark. They’re 30, 20, 10, and five grams.” (Thirty grams is a bit more than an ounce.) She recruited Anna Batzer, who runs the weaving house at the Lejre Experimental Centre, a living-history museum outside of Copenhagen, and both women, the expert and the novice, spun thread with the same wool. “With the big spindle,” Eva said, “we got 40 meters of thread for 10 grams of wool. When we spun with the five-gram whorl, we got over 200 meters from the same amount of wool.” (Forty meters is about 131 feet; 200 meters is 656 feet.) The size of the spindle whorl determined the gauge of the thread. “When we look at Viking textiles, there are many types of quality. Of course, there would be different types of thread for different types of cloth.”

Spinning with the tiny whorl was much more difficult than with the bigger ones. “You have to concentrate a lot. You have to have few, few fibers in the thread, or it won’t turn around,” Eva said, still spinning while she talked. You also have to have the right spindle stick. “They had found some little sticks in Hedeby, but they were not interpreted as spindle sticks because someone said they were too short, they wouldn’t function. But when we started to spin, we learned we couldn’t use a long stick on a small spindle. It wouldn’t turn. So I looked at those sticks again, and they were perfect.” The smallest spindle whorls had also been mislabeled. “The classical archaeologists were very surprised that you could spin on a spindle under 10 grams. They were sorting all the little spindle whorls out and calling them beads.” She wound up the thread and dropped the spindle down again. “Sometimes it is hard to see the difference. The hole has to be absolutely centered, so the spindle is balanced. And the hole should be quite big so you can put a stick into it. That’s what I went after when I reregistered them. There are some spindle whorls made of amber—they were called ‘beads,’ but they had a very big hole.”

Linda leaned over and pointed at a minuscule bit of fuzz on the thread Eva had spun. “Here you can see it wasn’t combed enough,” she said. “If there is any underwool, any fuzzy wool in it, it will look like this. And it will break.”

Eva laughed. “Even if they had slaves to do their spinning, Viking women had to watch. They had to know it was good enough. What is Gudrid’s status? If she was rich, she would be doing mostly sewing and embroidery. Rich women did some spinning, but they never did weaving—at least, they were not producing the everyday textiles. But I’m quite sure Gudrid learned how to do it all. We see, historically, that it’s important for all women to know how to produce fine cloth. Textiles are often used as gifts. It’s a sign of a woman’s status that she could produce excellent textiles.”

In addition to choosing the right whorl for the job, the spinner also chose the direction of spin, the twist she would give the thread. On two samples of thread wound flat onto a paper card, the twist was easy to see. Reading right to left, the angle of the first sample went from high to low, like the midline of an S; the other went low to high, like a Z.

“It’s easiest for me to spin sunwise,” Linda said. She did not say “clockwise” because Viking women didn’t have clocks. Half sitting on the edge of the table, she didn’t flick the spindle with her fingers to set it twirling, but rolled it down her thigh. Since she is right-handed, she explained, her thread is S-spun; if she switched hands, or rolled the spindle up her leg instead of down, it would be Z-spun.

The spin angle matters for two reasons. First, if you began spinning S and switched to Z, the thread would unwind and break. Second, the spin angle provided texture to the finished cloth.

Said Eva, “You can see in the archaeological excavations whether they wanted S-S or S-Z cloth,” that is, whether they used the same twist for both the warp and weft of the loom, or not. S-S cloth has a fine nobbly pattern and gives a nice drape for a shirt or dress. With S in the warp and Z in the weft, the fibers will be going in the same direction, Eva explained. “It’s much easier then to full the cloth, which you would do for a sail or an outer cloak.” Fulling called for more hot, stale urine. When the cloth was soaked in it and pressed, the ammonia in the urine caused the lanolin to coagulate. Fulling shrank the cloth and tightened the weave, making it more waterproof.

Linda had begun transferring the spun thread to a reel, three sticks of wood connected into a crooked H. “When I get enough thread that its weight affects the spinning, I wind it off onto this other tool. The thread wants to tangle, so I put it on this reel for a few days to straighten it out. That’s called ‘killing’ it.”

She would next wind it up into a skein, twisting it almost as if doing a cat’s cradle, holding it with her teeth and stretching it. From a hook on the frame of a loom leaning against the wall, she pulled off an already-prepared skein of white wool thread. It was a little longer than my hand and about as thin as my finger—more like a skein of embroidery thread than the plump skeins of yarn I would buy in a knitting store. It was 40 meters long, or 131 feet, and had taken Linda an hour to make.

“It’s not strange that textiles were so valuable and that people appreciated them so much as gifts,” Eva said. “For just two Viking Age costumes at Lejre, one male and one female, we had to produce 40,000 meters of thread. For one sail for a ship, around 100 square meters in size, we had to produce over 300,000 meters of thread. It’s endless meters of thread.”

The 1,000-square-foot sail, requiring almost a million feet of thread, took two women four and a half years to make. It used the wool of more than 200 sheep, each sheep the size of a large dog and yielding two to four pounds of wool.

The average Viking housewife like Gudrid needed to clean, sort, and spin the wool of 100 sheep a year to provide clothing for her husband and children and their servants and hired hands (who were paid in food and clothing), along with bedclothes, wall hangings, tents for travel, packs and sacks, diapers, bandages, and burial shrouds. Most of this was made of undyed wool—“moor-red” or black were the most popular colors among men, while children’s clothes were generally white or gray. But a man of means, like Gudrid’s husband Karlsefni, would have worn bright colors, which meant that some of the wool had to be dyed.

When she analyzed bits of Viking cloth found in Greenland, Penelope Walton of the British company Textile Research Associates found that the most common color, a bright purple, came from lichens. Growing throughout the far north, these lichens were scraped off rock faces in early summer, dried in the sun, and steeped in more stale urine. The resulting blue-black mass was made into cakes and hung to dry in peat smoke, where it would last for years. Depending on how acidic the dye water was, this so-called lichen purple ranged from a bright crimson red to a deep blue. Another blue came from indigotin, the chemical found in indigo from India but also in a spindly yellow-flowered plant called woad, an “aggressive weed,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, that does well in Iceland. Other dye plants Gudrid might have used to make yellows and greens are Labrador tea, green alder, and dwarf birch.

Even with the wool of a hundred sheep, Gudrid could not have made Karlsefni or herself new clothes every year. The “average housewife” calculation is based on a set of Icelandic inventories from the 1700s, which allots each person 11 pounds of new, unprocessed wool for clothing. But when Else Ostergard, a textile expert who retired in 2006 from the Danish National Museum, weighed a gown, a hood, and a pair of stockings from a Norse burial in Greenland and added to it a cloak and some underclothes, she came up with a weight of 17 to 22 pounds of finished cloth. Ostergard concluded that each suit of clothes must have been worn for at least two to three years before the family could afford to replace it. And yet, on top of all this, women like Gudrid produced enough extra cloth that it was Iceland’s main export for two hundred years.

Cloth making was not just mindless drudgery. “You need to have a good head for mathematics to work textiles,” said Eva, “just to calculate how much thread you need and to lay out the patterns.”

But it was physically taxing. “If you’re sitting and spinning for half a day, it hurts!” Linda said. “From spinning, it’s the shoulders.” She lifted her left arm into “spinning position,” elbow cocked at shoulder height, hand dangling. “You have to hold yourself this way all day. It’s the same when you’re weaving, except both arms are up. And your fingers get stiff and swollen. From wool combing, it’s the wrists that hurt.”

Eva turned to the loom leaning against the conference-room wall. It was a vertical loom, also called a warp-weighted loom, known, in its many variations, from ancient Greece to modern Norway. The warp threads hang vertically, weighted taut with stones. The weaver passes the weft through the warp, shuttling from side to side, starting at the top.

“This loom is set up to make a tabby,” Eva said, “the most simple weave. Even so, it takes a whole day to set up the warp. For a very intricate weave, such as a lozenge twill, it might take two weeks to set it up.”

The process begins with putting together the loom. Tall and bulky, with two stout wooden uprights linked at the top by a heavy crossbeam, it took up too much floor space to keep out all the time. In summer it would be set up in a pit house next to the longhouse. Eva had doubted the archaeologists’ theory that these were weaving rooms, until she worked in one at Hogs Viking Village in Scania, Sweden, one year from March to October. “I now think these houses are really good for textile work,” she said. Based on plans of Viking pit houses, she sited hers so that the door was in the southwest corner—at the edge of the roof, rather like a trapdoor—and the loom leaned against the northeast wall. “If the door was open, the light came into the house like a window in the roof. It was absolutely the best weaving light I could have had, so much better than inside the longhouse. I didn’t even have a shadow.”

Once the heavy wooden frame of the loom was in place, the uprights leaning at a gradual slant, the crossbeam held away from the wall in sturdy wooden brackets, the part of the process calling for good light and mathematical talent began: stringing the warp threads on the loom, fastening them to weights to provide tension, parting them with the shed rod, and knitting them to the heddle rods to make possible a pattern.

Each warp thread—of which there were hundreds—is one of Linda’s 131-foot-long skeins. It is fastened to the crossbeam at the top and unwound until it almost touches the floor. In the simple tabby, every other warp thread goes in front of the shed rod, a fixed wooden bar that crosses from one upright to another in the bottom half of the loom. The still-wound end of the warp skein is knotted to a stone. These stones, or loom weights, have been found in dozens of Viking houses, sitting in neat rows as if their warp strings had just snapped. Archaeologists use them to say where the loom had been, but though weavers know a light weight is needed for light threads and a heavy weight for heavy threads, no one has studied how the stones’ diversity of size and shape affects the cloth.

The next step in stringing the loom is the most painstaking. Half of the warp threads are hanging straight down, nothing impeding their drop from crossbeam to stone. The other half are hooked over the shed rod, pulled out at a slant in front of the loom for most of their length before gravity takes over. That gap, between the back threads and the front threads, is called the shed. Through this gap, the weaver will pass the weft, a long, loose skein. Before she passes it back a second time, though, she must change the shed.

Changing the shed requires heddle shafts—one for a simple tabby weave, up to four for some other designs. A heddle shaft crosses from upright to upright like the shed rod, but it isn’t fixed in place. Its bracket has two options: snug against the uprights or a handspan forward. The shaft is looped to the back threads—each loop is called a heddle—so that when the weaver pulls the shaft out to the forward bracket, the back threads are all brought forward, too. They rise above the front threads and create a new opening—a new shed—for the weft. The heddle shaft’s backward-and-forward motion is thus the key to weaving, catching the rows of weft in the changing pattern of the warp.

The loops that hold the threads to the shaft are all knotted from one long, strong cord, saved and reused again and again. Knotting the heddles is where a good head for math comes in handy. Mistakes are easy to make and hard to spot—until you’ve started weaving, and then the only way to fix them is to unweave it all and start over.

It’s easy to imagine knotting the heddles for a simple tabby. Loop a thread, skip a thread, loop a thread, skip a thread. But tabby was not the most common cloth in the Viking Age. The standard was a plain twill in which the weft goes over two threads, under two threads, over two threads, under two threads—simple, except that the thread pairs chosen were not always the same. On the return journey, the weft goes over one thread from the first pair and one from the second pair, then under the remaining thread of the second pair and one from the third pair, and so on. “So you have to have three heddle shafts,” said Eva. “If you have four threads, the first one goes to the first shaft, the second one to the second shaft, the third one to the third shaft, and the fourth one is not attached to a shaft. You can have two shafts in front and one in back, or two in back and one in front. You have to be very, very careful that you have the right thread tied to the right shaft.”

Once the loom was strung, the work—and the walking—began. The weaver walked from right to left, slipping the weft through the open shed. Parking the weft in a hook on the loom frame, she lifted the left end of the heddle shafts from one bracket to the other. She walked back to the right side of the loom and changed the right end of the heddle shafts—the shafts are too heavy to pick up in the middle and change both sides at once. She walked back to the left side of the loom, picked up the weft, wove a new row walking from left to right, and changed the heddle shafts again. According to one calculation, a hardworking weaver walked 23 miles every day.

Added to the walking was the beating. Every two or three rows, the weaver would insert a weaving sword—a long swordshaped tool made of whalebone or wood—into the shed and, using both hands, beat the weft upward, packing the rows of thread tightly together. The densest cloth required twenty thumps. A more delicate tool was the pin-beater, a slender finger made of bone or wood. Run along the warp from side to side, it evened out the spacing between the threads. The poets said it danced and sang—though the sound, to me, when Linda demonstrated, was more like that of a fingertip on the teeth of a comb.

“I am too tall for this loom,” Linda said, showing how it forced her to bend to work. A woman who owned her own loom would have it made to fit her height—if there was ample wood available. A short girl working a tall loom might need a stool, particularly to get the necessary power into her beating strokes. In the weaving room at the Farm Beneath the Sand in Greenland, a large whalebone vertebra was placed flat in front of the loom, making a sturdy hassocklike stool.

When the finished cloth filled the top half of the loom, the weaver rolled it up around the loom’s crossbeam—a stool would be helpful here even for a tall weaver, for the beam is heavy and clumsy to turn. Then, before she could begin again, the weaver had to get down on her knees to lengthen the warp threads, taking off the loom weights one by one, unwinding the skein, and retying the weights the proper distance from the floor.

All in all, weaving was an athletic task. By the 1400s, a professional weaver working on a warp-weighted loom was expected to finish about eleven yards of plain twill cloth a week. A more difficult weave would take longer. Among the fabrics archaeologists have found are stripes and checks and the fancy lozenge twill that required two weeks just to string the warp threads onto the loom. Unlike an ordinary twill, in which the fabric has a texture of diagonal lines, the lozenge twill has a pattern of rings.

The most distinctive cloth woven by Viking women was the pile or shaggy weave that imitated fur or fleece. The weaver strung her loom for a plain twill and used rather coarse thread in both warp and weft. But as she wove, she added in loops of unspun wool. These tufts were lustrous and wavy, untwisted locks of the sheep’s long outer fleece. Added to every fourth row, with twenty warp threads between each loop, the tufts were long and thick enough to cover the cloth completely after they were brushed out. The fuzzy surface was excellent for shedding rain and sea spray. Even if soaked with salt water, the cloth remained warm and soft—unlike a true sheepskin, which would stiffen up. Dyed blue or purple, these shaggy cloaks were eye-catching; the sagas describe them trimmed with patterned ribbons or braid. Even in nondescript gray, they were popular on the export market—especially after King Harald of Norway, in about 960, accepted one as a gift, earning him his nickname “Graycloak” and starting a new fashion trend.

Historian Jenny Jochens points out that these shaggy cloaks became so valuable during Gudrid’s lifetime that they were considered “legal forms of currency,” one cloak equaling two ounces of silver. You could buy a cow, candles, or passage on a ship for shaggy cloaks. A law passed around 1100 fixed prices of “all imaginable items—including gold and silver” in terms of cloth, with “six ells new and unused homespun” equal to one ounce of silver, the Vikings’ ell being the distance from your elbow to your fingertips, or about half a yard. One pound of beeswax traded for six ells; one cow was worth 120 ells. “By the end of the eleventh century,” Jochens writes, “the previous silver standard, founded on men’s violent and sporadic activities as Vikings, had been replaced by the homespun standard, based on women’s peaceful and steady work as weavers.”