Professor Heather A. D. Mbaye, University of West Georgia
Volga to Vinland: Early medieval dress & textiles 9 November, 2024
Much of what historical reenactors think we know about 10th century Norse women’s clothing is fairly conjectural. The fragments available are tiny – some as small as a thumbnail, and none very large: the biggest is a sort of rhomboid shape 30cm tall by 16cm at the top and 24cm at the bottom – that’s 12″ tall, and about 6.3″ wide at the top and about 9.5″ wide at the bottom. That’s why we see so many different styles of aprons on reenactors – we have very little archeological textile evidence and what we do have doesn’t tell us very much. This paper will review the information we have from the Hedeby textile findings on the smokkr, and will review what we can glean from them. I draw some conclusions, and state carefully what we cannot know from these fragments. Then, I discuss several possible styles as represented by scale-sized dresses and at least one full sized reproduction dress.
