The Ingstad family—Helge, Anne Stine, and Benedicte—spent the summer of 1961 exploring the northeastern coast of Canada on board a tiny ship stocked with Norwegian chocolate bars and a copy of the Norse sagas. Their intrepid tenacity became the stuff of legend—they would, indeed, find the fabled Vinland of Leif Eriksson and his crew, and they would spend the next seven seasons excavating its hidden crevices. As we will discuss in a future post, the work of the Ingstads drastically altered modern perceptions of the Vikings, not to mention universal understandings of North American history. The lives of the Ingstads as well would be changed forever, and not always for the better.
Although Anne Stine’s archeological discoveries in Vinland have made her forever famous, they brought her little fulfillment. Given the international significance of the site, political and professional rivalries frequently marred her research. Despite being the trained archeologist, she was often in her husband’s shadow, and she never forgot it was his dream they were pursuing. With the exception of a few glorious moments, such as the discovery of a spindle whirl belonging to a Norse woman, she begrudged the frozen days far from her home.
Yet a lesser-known area of research brought her a great deal of joy—research into the textiles of the Oseberg Ship. According to Benedikte, Anne Stine was “in her element” pouring over the waterlogged fragments of silk, wool, and linen. (A Grand Adventure 376) At the time of its discovery, the Oseberg ship was a tremendous find for Norway, akin to their own tomb of Tutankhamun. One day in1904, a farmer named Oskar Rom dug into a burial mound on his land and uncovered a miracle—a ship from the early ninth century containing the bodies of two women along with an unprecedented wealth of grave goods, including sleds, a wagon, beds, tents, five intricately carved animal heads, and the slaughtered remains of fifteen horses, six dogs, and two cows. The carved prow and stern have become synonymous with the Viking Age, as have the beast heads which may have adorned a chieftain’s ship or hall.
Even more remarkably—it was women who merited such wealth—and older women at that—with one closer to seventy and one to fifty. The oldest lady suffered from cancer while the younger one was healing from a broken collar bone. Nico Pace discusses the circumstances of discovery and potential identity of these women in another Norsebygod substack post.
This vast array of finds has occupied generations of researchers for over a century, and they are slowly revealing their secrets as archeological methods advance. For Anne Stine, it was the vast grandeur of textiles that preoccupied her—over a thousand separate pieces. The trained scholar in her catalogued them, scrap by scrap, dividing them into categories and subcategories based on weave, technique, and origin. But the young girl who had dreamt of Howard Carter’s excavations thrilled to the stories they revealed.
Studying the Oseberg textiles allowed her to explore two great areas of fascination. As she had felt close to Gudrid the Far Traveler in Vinland, both longing for home, with the textiles, she could study the material work of women’s hands and consider how they had spent their hours. The pieces included tablet woven braid, warp-weighted wool cloth in multiple patterns—herringbone, twill, diamond—as well as embroidery and silk from the far east. The weight of the burial mound dirt had pressed the ship and its contents deep into the clay soil, allowing for preservation, but some pieces were in better shape than others. Hundreds of “textile cakes”—layers fused together with dirt and moisture baffed even the most patient scholar. Yet even the smallest of fragments testified to the sheer material wealth at hand—the silk ribbons woven in central Asia or Byzantium, as well as the networks of traders of foreign markets required for these far away luxuries to end up buried in a mound in Norway. For these and so many other reasons, Anne Stine was convinced the older woman, who had been clad in an elaborately woven red gown, must have been a queen of the legendary Yngling dynasty, most likely Asa, wife of King Gudrod, and the grandmother of the famous and verifiably historical Harald Fairhair.
The women were buried with tools as well—not only the ubiquitous spindle whirls for spinning cloths, but tablets for card-weaving ribbons, iron shears, a yarn winder, and a small tubular loom. And it was perhaps on this very loom that the tapestry fragments were woven—the true treasures of the Oseberg ship in Anne Stine’s eyes, as they offered a glimpse into the mythological imaginings of the Viking Age. In addition to the braids, the ribbons, the remnant of blankets and coverings, the ship contained sections of a majestic pictorial tapestry.
The tapestry sections are shriveled and brown today, resembling antique lace, but chemical tests reveal the wealth of colors (madder reds, indigos, welds) that would have illuminated these images. Although they call to mind the most famous narrative work of the Middle Ages—the Bayeux tapestry—the Oseberg tapestries were woven, rather than embroidered, and at roughly six by nine inches, comparatively miniscule. They nevertheless display elaborate scenes in astonishingly intricate detail, using a technique known as slyngesmett—the outline of each figure marked by a thread of a different color from the background and wound around the warp. Given their size, a single woman could have woven them, one with years of experience and skill, as well as the time the devote to entirely decorative work. Anne Stine found it significant that there were no large vertical looms among the Oseberg grave goods—the kind that would have been required for weaving bolts of fabric for functional items like bedding and clothing. The woman of Oseberg clearly had a labor force at her command for such tasks.
In the Old Norse poems, exalted women such as goddesses and queens wove tapestries recounting men’s deeds. Perhaps this woman, who Anne Stine refers to as the Oseberg Dronningen (the Oseberg Queen), wove her own imaginings—celebrations of wealth, divinity, and fertility. Certainly, one of the central scenes struck Anne Stine as one of peace rather than war—swastikas repeat as a decorative motif, and although it is almost impossible for modern viewers to disassociate them from the Nazis, swastikas had functioned as an ancient symbol of harmony for thousands of years across Eurasia.
This particular section, decayed into two fragments, depicts a procession of riders and horses travelling to the left. There are male and female riders accompanied by hawks, falcons, and ravens, Men and women on foot lead their way, some holding spears, others with staffs or torches. The horses loom larger than life, elaborately patterned and with their tails knotted. Some of the horses pull wagons piled high with brocaded weavings. One figure wears a horned helmet—perhaps a shaman—or are the horns his own, in some transitional state? An entire story unfolds in woolen thread, but no one alive has the context to understand it.
To Anne Stine, these images were deeply personal to the Oseberg Dronningen. If she was indeed, Queen Asa, then the man astride a white horse leading the procession must be her husband, King Gudrod, with his royal falcons flying overhead. Anne Stine read deeply into the symbolism of the colors and the motifs, connecting them both to mythological references and to the grave goods of the Oseberg ship. The wagons, ornate with color, traveling in state to somewhere unclear—conjured up the carved wooden wagon buried in the ship—as it must have looked piled high with woven fabric. Referencing an ancient Roman anthropological text, the Germania by Tacitus, she posited that these wagons may have carried images of the Gods—the red horse ridden by a tiny woman, perhaps the image of Freya, the one escorted by two ravens—perhaps it was Odin himself, accompanied by his own ravens, Hugin and Munin.
The royal procession appears frozen in time—as precise as a photograph. But another fragment reveals a disturbing image so dynamic it appears to shift with every glance. In the center looms a tree of hanged men and twisted serpents. The branches morph into horse heads and writhing snakes, surrounded by cloaked women bearing torches and swords, another with her hands raised in prayer. The men swinging creakily from the barren limbs call to mind scenes from Eddic poetry, where Odin hangs himself on a tree for nine windy nights to gain knowledge, sacrificing “myself to myself.” It inevitably suggests as well as the gruesome description of Adam of Bremen, the eleventh-century chronicler who recounted a traveler’s report of a sacred grove in Uppsala, where every nine years, nine victims “of every living that is male,” are sacrificed. Their heads and bodies were separated and hung in trees. It takes very little imagination to sense the movement of the woven bodies, like a dream in which images flicker in time and space.
Anne Stine didn’t find these stories repellent but rather reflective of the world of the Oseberg Dronningen,a world where royal women held sacred power, led ecstatic cults, and walked the earth as the incarnations of goddesses. Even the men carrying spears, staffs, and torches, she considered as references to the fertility and divinity of a goddess. The knotted hairstyles of the women and their red cloaks all suggested worship of Freya. Perhaps the younger woman was a priestess who served Freya, and the Oseberg Dronningen herself was worshipped during rituals as an earthly representative of the same goddess?
Anne Stine spent many happy hours deciphering the images which both invite and defy interpretation. Fabric analysis and archeological methods continually evolve, so that contemporary researchers continue to find new meanings in the tapestries—the identification with Queen Asa is less popular now—but they rely upon Anne Stine’s foundational notes. Her findings appeared in a book published in 1992, Osbergdronningens grave. She contributed several chapters focusing on the identity of the Oseberg queen, the textile fragments, and breaking down the tapestries into minute detail. She was able to consult colleagues such as her childhood friend Charlotte Thomas and Charlotte’s husband, Martin Blindheim. They knew her as an archeologist and scholar, not Helge Ingstad’s wife. She received an office at the Viking Ship Museum where she could spend time alone without the interruption of family and household chores. Her writings on the tapestries were uniquely her own; they told of her own days and deeds. Like the weavings of the Oseberg Dronningen, Anne Stine’s research was fully women’s work, a creation of her own choosing.
**
Further Reading:
Arne Emil Christensen, Anne Stine Ingstad, Bjørn Myhre, Oseberg-Dronnigens Grav: Vår arkeologiske nasjonalskatt i nytt lys Oslo: Chr. Schibsteds Forlag A/A, 1992.
One of Anne Stine’s chapters is available online in English translation at The Textiles of the Oseberg Ship
Benedicte Ingstad, A Grand Adventure: The Lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and Their Discovery of a Viking Settlement in North America Trans. J.K. Stenehjem, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
Marianne Vedeler The Oseberg Tapestries Scandinavian Academic Press, 2019.
—Silk for the Vikings Oxbow Books, 2014.
–. “The textile interior in the Oseberg burial chamber,” in 2014, In A stitch in time. Essays in Honour of Lise Bender Jørgensen (Eds. S. Bergerbrant and S.H. Fossøy), Gothenburg University, 281-300.
Oseberg Tapestry | The Viking Ship Museum | Viking.TV | Viking.TV
The excavation of the Oseberg ship – Museum of the Viking Age