Birka Bj. 968: The Clothing

For the clothing of Birka Grave Bj. 968, I was fortunate that there were some fragments of textiles that were found on top of her oval brooches. Unfortunately, none were found in the pin of the brooches themselves, so while I could make assumptions about the other layers of clothing based on her brooches and their placement, there were things that I would never be able to know for sure.

Agnes Geijer, in her analysis of the textile fragments of Birka published in 1938 (Birka III), identifies four textile remains. W14 is a wool fabric, M8 is a fabric made from wool and flax, B5 is identified as bands or ribbons, S4 is a silk fabric and T is categorized as animal hair. Inga Hägg also analyzed the textile fragments of Birka, with particular interest in the layers as found within the brooches (Kvinnodräkten I Birka).

The Textiles:

W14 was identified as a 3 shaft, blue- black, diamond twill wool fabric. This fabric was found directly on top of her oval brooches, so it was likely a coat or shawl. As another layer was found on top of this one, I believed it to be a coat. I wanted to do a solid dark blue brown diamond twill, but I couldn't find anything close (everyone really loves contrasting colors in their diamond twills!). I thought about dyeing the right fabric with woad myself, but my stove wouldn't accommodate a dyepot big enough to do all the necessary yardage, and I didn't love the idea of dyeing outside in February. So I settled for a blue and black broken diamond twill from Woolsome.

S4 was a piece of silk twill that Hägg identifies but Geijer does not. Hägg states that it was bent around the edge of the oval brooch, having wrapped around it as the body decayed and the brooch sunk into the grave. She felt the silk belonged to a garment under the coat and suspended dress, but over the sark. The majority of silk textiles being brought into Scandinavia at this point were woven in a compound twill technique called sammite and show traces of patterns, are often from Byzantium or Central Asia, and a majority seem to have used red and purple dyes. They were usually cut into long, very thin strips and used as decorative bias edging or bands. I picked a red and blue silk with a Byzantine pattern from Living History Market on Etsy, and cut it into long strips to trim the neckline of the wool tunic dress.

This silk is beautiful but it SHEDS. It frays instantly if you look at it, breathe on it, move it, or even think about it too hard. To save my sanity and prevent everything in my home from being covered in silk threads, I serged stitched the edges of the silk as soon as I cut it. Would 100% recommend using a serger to do the process in one step. Because of the edge stitching and the fact that it was cut on the grain and not on the bias, I had a little trouble easing it around the neckline. Patience, a lot of steam, and pins to hold it in place as it dried worked reasonably well.

I had a little leftover so I trimmed the cuffs as well.

M8 was a wool and linen textile with brocadex stripes. Making this fabric was a journey. Geijer describes it as "Fragment of a brocaded wool fabric. The base fabric is thin plain weave, warp and weft in different colors. The warp black-brown, 12-14 threads per cm, the weft light brown, 9 threads per cm; always left-spun and otherwise the same yarn. The brooch is made from two-thread, right-twisted yarn (each part approximately the same size as the single yarn) in red and blue colors. On the largest piece (barely 3x4 cm) you can see a double diagonal stripe in yellow and a single red stripe perpendicular to it. The pattern thread goes over 5 warp threads each time. On a smaller fragment, a slightly wider red stripe can be seen in the direction of the warp. The fragments lay, some folded twice, on pieces of delicate three-tie fabric on the top of an oval clasp. Above it are remnants of beaver fur.” (Geijer, 56-7).

Image of the textile film Birka III. You can see the stripes standing out from the base textile on the bottom left piece.

Hägg elaborates a little "Close above one of the oval buckles were the remains of fine blue-black, three-shank twill fabric of W 14 type. The preserved textile fragments (cf. Birka III, p. 172 and textile description p. 56 f.) shows that this fabric when mast was overlaid by a pattern fabric (M 8) and that this in turn was covered with fur remains. The pattern fabric is brocaded with wool on a linen base fabric. Pattern in red, blue and yellow yarn. The pattern fabric can be thought to derive from a fur-trimmed cloak (?), while the twill fabric (W 14) should have belonged to a different garment, probably worn over a skirt and sark” (Hägg 68).

So in my head, this was a dark brown linen warp, and a light brown linen weft and then after each pass of the weft, I would use a pick up stick to create the passes for the red, blue and yellow diagonal stripes (I purposefully ignored the red vertical stripes; this pattern felt complicated enough at this juncture). But I was exceptionally hard to tell what exactly this was going to look like, as Geijer herself was basing the description off of a piece of fabric that was only 1" x 1.5". I consulted with a laurel in my kingdom and he agreed that this was the way to go about it. I set up the loom and drew up the layout.

And then when I started weaving- theory met reality. It was definitely not looking like the image. So I dug back into Geijer's description, pulled Birka III back up and retranslated some additional information.

"There are five examples of brocaded fabrics which, in terms of their entire character and drawing, are close to the Swedish “Krabbasnär”, i.e. H. they have a plain weave or rep background and a floating pattern weft that is freely incorporated into the fabric.

In contrast to the younger Nordic fabrics, however, the base fabric is made from warp rep, i.e. H. the warp is very dense and completely covers the weft. As with younger fabrics, the stitch of the pattern thread shifts to one side each time, creating the typical diagonal character. For very long stitches, the floating thread is tied under a warp thread at certain intervals.

The pattern yarn is always significantly coarser and different than the thread of the base fabric, and it was probably also different in color."

A Google search of Krabbasnär did not help a ton with a detailed how-to. But fortunately, there websites with people who had woven a piece of Krabbasnär and while they didn't show pictures of the step by step process, they had enough to help immensely.

https://www.ikfoundation.org/itextilis/historical-reproductions-3.html

https://warpedforgood.com/2020/03/swedish-art-weaves-with-joanne-hall/

Essentially, I needed to almost "stitch" in the designs as I wove, with the back (wrong side) of the project facing me. The stripes would move one thread to either the right or the left after each pass of the warp thread. I wove on a warp weighted loom, as that was the easiest for me.

Each stripe had its own thread and corresponding needle. This stripe is being moved one thread to the right.

Dog tails (and, I'd imagine, cats) and not helpful to this process! I learned to use shorter threads and tuck the needles into the fabric to keep things safe and secure.

The weaving was a very time consuming process. Even once I was comfortable with it, I could only do about an inch every two hours. I kept a tally as I was weaving so I knew how long the piece was, but my math did not math and when I cut it off the loom, I realized that I only had 36 instead of the planned 42 inches of length. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My husband swooped in to the rescue and suggested I use the warp still left on the loom to weave some coordinated stripes for a sewn on border. It was not the original plan and I doubt that it was period appropriate, but it saved the project from disaster.

The fur described in the textile finds was beaver fur so I used a naturally dark beaver pelt and cut two strips, sewed them together and then whipstitched them to the edge. I sewed it fairly loosely so it could be removed on the offchance that I ever need to wash the shawl. In period this likely would have been a plucked beaver, where the guard hairs were removed to create an even softer (and more expensive!) trim, but I left the guard hair intact.

Beaver was an expensive fur in period! The Lapp tax, which is the oldest tax known from a Nordic area, was paid entirely in skins. The accounts of 1553 from the Lapland area shows the value of skins as follows: 1 beaver = 3 marten skins = 120 squirrel furs. By comparison, 1 bear skin = 2 martin skins = 80 squirrel furs. In the Viking age, beavers were primarily trapped and traded by the Saami and were considered a rare commodity, compared to squirrel and fox furs.

B5 were brocaded bands. Geijer lists two that are similar to each other, such as B5 and B7. Only one is shown on the grave plan- around the skull, likely originally worn around the temples- and no lengths are given so it's hard to know if they were both part of the same headband or if one was headband and one belonged somewhere else. Hägg theorized that the other could have belonged with the silk trim on the dress. As it wasn't attached to anything, including the silk twill, I chose to make two separate ones, using one for a headband and the other as trim for the suspended dress.

Trim for the suspended dress

Headband.

They were both woven with silk threads. After an initial experiment, I used a silk sewing thread as the weft to keep the brocade threads as close together as possible.

The Garments:

Based on the textiles that were found and the number and positioning of the brooches, I chose the following layers for the clothing:

From skin out:

Linen sark

Wool dress with silk trim

Wool suspended dress with brocade band trim

Diamond twill coat

Shawl with beaver fur trim

The sark was made of a lightened but not bleached linen, hand sewn with linen threads.