Spindle whorls from Viking Age Britain

Clockwise from top left: bone, soapstone, soapstone, soapstone, sandstone, chalk

So I'm lucky enough to live in an environment and in a marriage where the question "Honey, could you go grab me a femur?" does not warrant even the slightest of eyebrow raises. Instead, he pulled on boots, grabbed the dogs and cheerfully headed to the farm's bone yard. It bears mentioning that the workman installing our new heating stove was considerably more alarmed.

One of the Ice Dragon Pentathalon projects that I learned the most from this year was the drop spindle whorl project. According to my research (pdf can be found on the research page), the spindles found in the Jorvik dig were of stone- mostly limestone, chalk, sandstone and siltstone- and bone, with a few outliers of lead and pottery.

The bone whorls were almost all from the femoral head of cattle. One really interesting mention was that one had tooth marks on it and two "appeared to have been through the stomach of a dog". How the archaeologists could determine that, I would love to know. Also, I'm dying to know- did the dogs eat an already shaped spindle whorl (ouch!) or, did a dog eat and pass a bit of bone and someone saw it and thought that it would make a great whorl. I'm not sure which is worse?

Our bone yard is mostly yak, which fit the bill for bovine femoral heads nicely. My husband was able to find one that had not been damaged too much by our local coyote and black bear populations. He sawed off the end and we boiled it to clean things up.

The bone was then sanded down to remove that spur and to flatten the bottom.

Once everything was sanded smooth, I drew the decorative lines and dremeled them on. The center hole was also drilled.

I also soaked the whorl in a peroxide bath to get rid of that "new bone smell". I hand buffed it a little, but the bone will buff even more with use and skin contact.

I spun up a little Icelandic on it and really enjoy the feel of this one. I also like that it came from materials on our farm, and as the yak project is being phased out in favor of the Shetland sheep, it'll be one of the last yak-made things I'll have.