I do bardic and I'm starting to do textiles, so Lena Norrman's dissertation/book titled "Viking Women: The Narrative Voice in Woven Tapestries" certainly caught my eye. It was an interesting, if sometimes opaque, read. Amazon has it for $100, and I would say don't buy it at that price unless this is exactly the sort of thing you are interested in.
What is in it:
- Chapter 1: Visual and Verbal Art: Orality, Poetry, and Representation in Classical Greek and Old Norse Narratives
This was sort of a discussion on weaving metaphors used to describe poetry, and weaving itself, and famous stories about weaving, and a lot of women's studies terms that were tossed around without any explanation. She makes a case for weaving being a form of communication, even if all it is saying is, "I am a rich person wearing diamond twill."
- Chapter 2: Culture, Gender, and Storytelling
This and Chapter 3 are the real heart of the thing. The basic hypothesis is that, since most women did not have a voice in the public sphere, they preserved their stories not in poems but in tapestries or embroideries. The single biggest 'a-ha!' in the book is the idea that the women who wove the tapestries should be considered as much authors as the men who wrote down versions of the ancient oral poems. These aren't just decorations - they are sequential art, like comic strips, and the artists have chosen which 'panels' to 'draw' to tell a particular version of a story. Naturally the tapestry is preceded by the oral poem or tale, just as the written version is - but those oral poems exist in a (documentable) profusion of variants, leaving an artist plenty of latitude in choosing which elements to present.
- Chapter 3: Visual Poetry, Weaving Meaning: Micronarratives in the Nordic Oral Tradition
This is the author's interpretation of the Overhogdal tapestry as showing scenes from the Volsung saga and the Nibelungenlied. I agree with some of her takes on the scenes - I thought it was Gunnar in the snake pit, too - but I'm less convinced on others. A figure she supposes is Sigurd with his sword, Gram, is pretty clearly holding an axe, for instance.
Between this chapter and the previous one, an idea is developed that masculine versions of these stories focus on gold, war, monster slaying, etc., while feminine ones focus on interpersonal dramas of love and betrayal. Thus, some of the songs in the Codex Regius were, if not by women, then for them - an example of the poet tuning the performance for a particular audience. It's an interesting hypothesis, although suspiciously in-line with our modern ideas about what men's and women's entertainments are like. Men like blockbusters and explosions! Women like romance and period dramas! And maybe they do, but women also like Star Wars and men also like The Godfather. In an honor culture, betrayal is an inherently dramatic theme with resonances for men and for women.
On the other hand, if the author's reading of Overhogdal is at all right, the women in the tales (Brynhildr, Guthrun) are featured prominently. Certainly when I first read those legends, it was the role of the women (Guthrun in particular) that caught my attention and inspired my art.
- Epilogue: Saint Birgitta and Gendered Verbal Performance in the Scandinavian Middle Ages
A short epilogue about a 14th century holy woman, who wrote about her visions and was revered as a teacher. She is held up as an example of a woman speaking in the public sphere, but needing to claim authority direct from God to do so, and some of the negative reactions that got. Oddly, not compared to, say, Hildegard von Bingen? Julian of Norwich? Feels like someone on her committee wanted it added at the last minute.
I am unreasonably excited about the bibliography. In Chapter... 2? 3? there's a discussion of the few women in the sagas who are public poets. I have been wondering if such existed, and now I have a roadmap to finding them. There's a further wealth of primary sources (sagas and poems to read) and secondary literature covering the intersections of narrative, performance, textiles, and women's studies, which is an area I'm finding myself very interested in.
All told - I don't regret my purchase, but it's a lot of money. This is pretty much exactly the wheelhouse I find myself in these days, so it was worth it to me, but if your interest isn't quite as focused - Interlibrary Loan.
This is not a good book if you are looking for detailed information on how to make tapestries like Oseberg, Overhogdal, or Skog. It is not a detailed analysis of any of them - even on Overhogdal, she focuses on the 'micronarratives', the small scenes placed among the larger procession of animals. It's a book about storytelling, when the stories happen to be told as tapestries.
