Woven into History: Uncovering Hidden Lives of Viking Age Women
31 March @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
The tiny remnants of a Viking ship sail with red-and-white stripes. A left-handed mitten lost in a glacial mountain pass. Women’s names carved in runes onto spindle whorls and loom weights. A woven loop of blond human hair, tucked into the wall of a weaving room. Children’s pictures scratched onto a whalebone weaving sword. A patched-up dress, worn one final time for a woman to be buried in.
How to reconstruct the lives of Viking Age women from the fragile remnants of textile fragments and textile-making tools, preserved deep in the frozen Greenlandic soil or high in the glaciers of Norwegian mountains? In this talk, historian and broadcaster Dr Eleanor Barraclough focuses on the textiles of the Viking Age, to open up the stories of women not usually written into the grand narratives of history.
