Viking Cloth Money: How Viking Women Wove Wealth

Michèle Hayeur Smith, an anthropological archaeologist at Brown University, earned a degree in fashion in Paris. Partly inspired by her anthropologist mother, who collected cloth from all over, Hayeur Smith took her experiences and applied them to her study of Icelandic Vikings and their laws regarding Viking cloth money, vaðmál or vöruvaðmál. Iceland used cloth money from the end of the Viking age, when raids and exploration died down, through the 1500s when international trade picked up.

The Archaeology of Cloth

For generations, archaeologists paid little attention to cloth. Scraps of brittle wool seemed less exciting than silver and swords, and a field long dominated by men tended to overlook textile work, and with it the work of women. Hayeur Smith’s research on Icelandic textiles shows how much those scraps can reveal.

Viking Places to Weave

The Dyngja was a pit house, dug into the ground between 1.5 and three feet, outside the longhouse. It would be about nine by 15 feet, which is space for about three women to weave, and have a hearth for warmth and light. About 1000 CE, when the Vikings converted to Christianity, the women brought their weaving into the home, but those places would’ve retained their taboo features. The men would’ve shunned the area.

Warp-Weighted Looms

The Viking looms are not the horizontal looms that are in use today. Instead, the Vikings and Icelanders used a warp-weighted loom. This loom is vertical in composition and uses rocks with holes to weigh down the yarn.

Vikings, Weaving Superstition, and Law

Iceland’s medieval laws spelled out legal cloth in precise detail. At the same time, weaving was women’s work, and the sagas mock men who hang around the dyngja, the weaving hut. Hayeur Smith argues that the people who knew enough to set those standards, and who produced every bolt of legal cloth, were women, so women must have shaped the system even if men sat in the law assembly.

Viking Cloth Money

Icelandic women were weaving the cloth money to the exacting standards set forth in the law. The cloth was to be a tweed, or a 2/2 twill. The yarn could be spun in either a clockwise (Z-spun) or counterclockwise (S-spun) direction. The fabric had to be woven with four to 15 warp threads per centimeter. The entire cloth would be measured at two by six ells, about one by three yards. This cloth was worth a standard weight of silver.

Implications for Archeology

Hayeur Smith’s work on cloth money widens our picture of the Norse world. A society isn’t only its warriors and kings; it is also the people who spun, wove and kept the accounts. At Asgard Alaska we look forward to bringing crafts like the warp-weighted loom to life, so visitors can see how much work went into every thread.