SDA Book Club: The Valkyries’ Loom reviewed by Faith Hagenhofer
March 7, 2025
The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic by Michele Hayeur Smith
This work, based on research funded by the National Science Foundation’s 9 NSF Arctic Social Sciences Program might, at first perusal, seem to have predominantly a niche appeal, but as an interdisciplinary study, it is much more than that. The chapters carefully catalog research into the basis of material culture in textiles, resources, tools and techniques as uncovered and analyzed through archaeological labor. Only through this painstaking scientific work and myriad comparisons does the author, Michele Hayeur Smith, come to propose a historical view. It is a look at the lives of women, the makers, and thus, adds greatly to the cannon of writing Women’s Studies. As such, it’s an excellent addition to Scandinavian Studies. While it’s very place-based as well as a scientific study of a time period (Medieval/roughly 800–1600, though more of the middle years) it is still easy to see parallels across both time and place.
Hayeur Smith’s detailed examinations of Icelandic and Greenlandic material artefacts of cloth has foregrounded some thoughts on womens’ labor. It follows the shifts from group production in a dedicated womens’ space to a homespun home-woven practice, and finally to a men-oriented mass manufacture setting. In that last setting men had become the weavers and women the spinners. This parallels Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s findings about womens’ textile labors in colonial America in The Age of Homespun (2002). This long shift accompanies the change from upright warp-weighted looms to horizontal treadle looms. The textiles were made both for subsistence and as objects of commerce. Indeed, the term “vadmal” is used to describe Icelandic cloth as currency. In order to function that way it would have been highly standardized and quality controlled. One might wonder if the makers’ families dressed in the trade cloth or not, since it was synonymous with money. This recalls research done on Navajo rugs, made and sold for the trading post system, so that families could eat. In that scenario families were then forced to purchase inferior quality textiles to clothe themselves. Swept Under the Rug (2008), by Kathy M’Closkey tells this story. Cloth originating in Greenland was more varied, and more often mended, recycled and reused. It was not part of a trade economy. It was “about keeping warm and avoiding waste, not stockpiling… to pay taxes and tithes” (p. 161).
Readers are reminded throughout that the shifts in economics, production methods and culture happened over a period we now recognize as a Little Ice Age—which lasted hundreds of years. That context of climate change affected everything.
I confess to be a footnote and reference reader, often inspired by a written piece to delve further into the works upon which my current read depends. Because The Valkyries’ Loom is very interdisciplinary, the references I’m headed toward span some subjects: L. E. Norrman’s Viking Women: the Narrative Voice in Woven Tapestries (2008), and Woven into the Earth: Textiles from Norse Greenland (2004), Cloth and Human Experience (1991) ed. A. B. Weier & Jane Schneider. Likewise I finish this with an urge to learn the history of knitting, anything about Inuit/Thule contact with Greenlanders from an indigenous point of view, and reexaminations of the small works on plant dyes in Iceland, as well as Dressing With Purpose (2021) ed. Carrie Hertz—a book on Scandinavian dress practices as negotiations of cultural belonging.
–Faith Hagenhofer
- Publisher: University Press of Florida (buy it here)
- Date: November 2020
- ISBN: 978-0813066622
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