Layers

On a large plateau with a view over the Kungsbacka river and the fjord beyond, there was a village. It had been there, as far as anyone supposed, for generations, stretching back deeply into the Middle Ages. Around a dozen farms with their barns and stables; home fields held closely and outer fields escaping to the river, where hooves sunk into the soft ground. Fences of wood and stone, ditches, paths. Every so often a house burned, fell into disrepair, or was deemed obsolete, salvaged, and rebuilt. Again and again houses rose upon the remains of their predecessors. Like the cells of a human body, the houses were replaced, but still it was the same village; still it was Varla.

It even was Varla in the 1960s, when I was there. Hand-in-hand my grandfather and I took sugar cubes and apples to the horses stabled down the dusty road. With trepidation I observed the hay-bailing machine in the summer pasture, suffered a wasp-sting and burning nettles, but nothing clouds the sunshine in my memory.

Today much of the plateau is covered with typical, tasteful, functional Swedish homes, lining up along the streets that arch their way around the hilltop. In between now and then, though, came the archaeologists, looking for history and traces of earlier times.

Who lived there before? Would you believe it? Women in woven aprons and bronze brooches, keys dangling, in longhouses by hearth-light weaving sails for the ships that plundered and traded. Men in peaked Viking-helmets and riders with iron spurs and gleaming silver buckles of twisted animal limbs. Meat roasting in pit-ovens and bread baking on heated stones. Wells dug, and wells filled in with refuse. Births, deaths and burials following upon each other as times and habits went through their slow changes.

Is my Varla is gone? Is it gone, too, the Varla that nurtured the Bronze Age, the Vendel Age, the Viking Age and generations more? Once again we’ve built upon past structures seemingly obliterated. I wonder if, this time, it is still the same village. Is the old grown new again, or is it just layers?

A Quick Re-View of <i>The Greenlanders</i> by Jane Smiley

Author Jane Smiley has written a new novel that takes the premise of the Boccaccio's Italian Renaissance classic the Decameron and applies it to modern-day Hollywood. I haven’t read the book, called Ten Days in the Hills, but the recent Washington Post story on the subject included a mention of one of Ms. Smiley’s earlier novels, The Greenlanders.

You don’t hear much about The Greenlanders, but it is an amazing book. Dark and haunting, it is Ms. Smiley’s brilliant imagining of the final years of the Norse Greenland colony. Unlike Ten Days in the Hills, it doesn’t appropriate an earlier literary conceit and rework it with modern characters and setting. What it does do is take the current apocalyptic sensibility—whether expressed in Christian, Muslim, environmentalist, or other terms—and gives it some depth by portraying the progress of a real, historical societal extinction on an intimate human scale. In that sense, The Greenlanders has much to tell us about the terrifying nature of both human power and human impotence.

Greenland was settled by Norse colonists shortly after its exploration in the 980s by Erik the Red, Leif Eriksson’s father. (Leif, by tradition one of the Norse discoverers of America, was partly responsible for the Norse settlement in Newfoundland, at L’Anse aux Meadows.) It was Erik, a Norwegian outlaw, who gave Greenland its name, hoping to attract settlers to this largely glaciated land. Whether because of the name or some other factor, settlers did come to Greenland, and by 1300 there were probably some 2,000-5,000 people there, split between the Eastern Settlement (at Julianehåb) and the Western Settlement (at Godthåbsfjord). Settlers built turf longhouses in the fashion of those in Iceland and raised livestock, supplementing meat and dairy products with seal, fish, sea birds and their eggs, and the occasional beached whale. They depended heavily on trade with Iceland, and through Iceland, with Norway and Europe beyond. With a bishop installed at Gardar (Igaliku) from the early 12th century, the Greenlanders likely felt that their home, built with their own hands and sanctioned as it was by God and the church, was permanent.

And it was permanent for nearly 500 years, which is, after all, longer than European civilization has existed in North America. But ultimately the Norse colony disappeared: first the Western Settlement (around 1350) and then the Eastern Settlement (about a century later). A cooling climate at around this time helped to push the Greenlanders, whose survival had always been marginal, over the edge. By the time of Ms. Smiley’s story their seafaring abilities had suffered decline. Ice must have clogged their harbors for much of the year and wood for shipbuilding was not locally available. Strangely enough, though, we don’t know exactly why or how the Greenland colony disappeared. Was it famine (no stranger to these parts), an epidemic (also common), strife or assimilation with the Inuit, or pirates? Some suggest that once the population had dwindled to a certain point those remaining were transported to Iceland or elsewhere, although there is no historical record of such an occurrence. Some of the last Greenlanders, found buried in the churchyard at Herjolfnes (Ikigaat), were wearing up-to-date European-style clothing, so they must still have had some connection to the outside world.

Six hundred years ago Greenland was on the far edge of the (European) world and its existence was, sad to say, largely irrelevant. Perhaps—and again, we don’t know what actions they did or didn’t take—the Icelanders and Norwegians, the Greenlanders’ closest relations, so to speak, had more pressing matters to attend to. If that seems callous, we should remember that even in our own era—with its instant communications and live video and audio feeds from all parts of the globe—there are still people (think of the Jews and others in Europe, the Cambodians, the Bosnian Muslims, the Rwandans, the people of Darfur, etc.) who were/are largely abandoned by us, their human kin who are fortunate enough to have been born elsewhere. In this age of global climate change the Inuit people are now facing the possible extinction of their society in the Arctic, thanks to a combination of our actions and our inaction.

It must have been a combination of factors that doomed the Greenland colony. Ms. Smiley, herself a scholar of Norse language and culture, examines them all, weaving them organically into the lives of her characters in ways that are believable and chilling. One of the most relevant aspects of the novel for us now is how the countless variations on human frailty—greed, envy, fear, superstition, hatred, irrationality, closed-mindedness, conformity, etc.--can play into the demise of a society.

If we choose our actions and our leaders carefully, can we hope to avoid such a demise?

References

Arneborg, Jette and Kirsten A. Seaver “From Vikings to Norsemen” and Lynnerup, Niels “Life and Death in Norse Greenland” both in Fitzhugh, William W. and Elisabeth I. Ward. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. Washington and London: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Graham-Campbell, James, Colleen Batey, Helen Clarke, R.I. Page and Neil S. Price. Cultural Atlas of the Viking World. (A Facts on File book). Oxfordshire, England: Andromeda Oxford Limited, 1994.

Book Review: <i>The Reindeer People</i> by Piers Vitebsky

The Siberian reindeer herders’ camp is a fairly intimate collection of perhaps a dozen people and a few small tents, surrounded by thousands of square miles of space. One might mistakenly describe the space as empty, but in fact it is manifestly full. Stands of larch, lichen, grasses, bogs and lakes adorn the mountain ranges and river systems that feed into the Arctic Ocean. Bears, wolves, marmots, and other fur-bearing mammals, as well as birds, fish and spirits live here. Graves are carefully placed in the landscape, many on platforms or stilts in an older style. Their inhabitants require offerings from passersby, and they have stories, as do many of the mountain passes and other landmarks.

There are blueberries here, and even in a dry year Emmie knows exactly where to find them. There are mushrooms here, and when the reindeer flock to them in a late-summer feeding frenzy, Kostya can retrieve his animals, spread over many miles of territory, with amazing ease. The inconceivably large Siberian taiga, though austere and even deadly, especially during the bitter winter and the treacherous spring thaw, is portrayed in this book as well-ordered and peaceful. Each herding “brigade” (to use the Soviet term) knows the land as it knows its own mother.

Within the camp all is orderly and calm, too, which is nothing short of miraculous, considering that these people pack up their things and move every few days as they shepherd their reindeer through a yearly migration cycle, making use of the best grazing land while, as much as possible, avoiding stinging, parasitic insects and hungry wolves. (These two categories of creatures seem to be the bad guys of the taiga.) Every few days the herders pack tents, gear, books, journals, clothing and bedding, as well as kitchen items from utensils and pots to provisions and even the stove itself. These items are loaded into saddlebags carried by specially trained reindeer. All that remains behind is a stack of wooden poles (for the tents) and perhaps a platform with appropriate supplies neatly tied down under a reindeer skin or tarp, ready for use when the brigade returns to this spot in a year’s time. When the herders arrive several hours later at their next location, everything must be unpacked and reassembled for immediate occupation and use.

The village of Sebyan, around which the herds in their Soviet incarnation revolve, is the foil to the open, spacious, calm, orderly taiga. It is crowded and noisy with gossip, bureaucratic paper rustling, and wheeling and dealing. The government-run village and its mandatory state school rob men of their families, women of their traditional role as partners in a family enterprise, and children of their culture, replacing them with vodka, sugar and phony folkloric performances. The State Farm bureaucracy is a purveyor of revenge on successful families and an instigator of rage, despair, murder and suicide.

If space is telling in The Reindeer People, so, too, is time, underpinning the entire story. There are the thousands of years during which, in symbiosis with the reindeer, the Eveny culture was crafted; the scant generations since the Soviets tortured it into a mundane system of post-capitalist production; and the relatively few years since perestroika introduced its own set of difficulties. There is also the time spent by Dr. Vitebsky and his Eveny hosts: quiet time, hour upon hour invested in building the personal relationships that give this study its depth. Also described here is the elegant yearly cycle of migration, traced over and over on the vast landscape of the Russian Arctic, which lies underneath the multitude of stomping, crunching reindeer hooves like a living, calendrical carpet. In this way of life, the movement through space is a concrete representation of the movement through time.

Since the retreat of the glaciers after the last Ice Age, reindeer have lived in the northernmost reaches of Siberia, moving through the river systems and mountain ranges. The Eveny are just one group among several who live with these partly wild, partly domesticated animals, managing them with techniques taken from psychology as well as animal husbandry. Over thousands of years the Eveny and their kin created a home in the coldest place on earth—a culture that is physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and socially sustaining. In The Reindeer People, Dr. Vitebsky’s experiences illuminate for us the interrelated beliefs, habits, dreams, and turns of tongue that deepen the many meetings and farewells, arrivals and departures of this still (for the herders) essentially nomadic life. Dr. Vitebsky provides fascinating background and history, and, I think, to his credit, he acknowledges his place as a participant on the ground (his wife and children even join him and Brigade 7 one summer) and as an anthropologist trying to make sense of it all, but to a large extent he lets the herders tell their own stories.

Before the Soviets, the yearly migration cycles were apparently augmented by other, longer travels over thousands of miles, made possible by the reindeer who, when winter snow and ice blanket uneven or boggy terrain, can virtually fly. There is also reference to a traditional midsummer ritual which symbolized the flight of each person to the sun on the back of a winged reindeer. Before the Soviets exterminated them, Eveny shamans also flew to the realm of spirits on missions of healing. (And the platform graves, are these a form of flight as well?) The centralized Soviet system disallowed these earlier forms of flying; its introduction of helicopters to move people and supplies, ironically but predictably, fostered dependence rather than healing or transcendence. This condition has been exacerbated by the post-Soviet reduction of transportation and other support.

Change is inevitable, both in natural systems (how will climate change impact this land and its inhabitants?) and in human affairs. There will always be a conquering people, a natural disaster, political discord, religious missions or schisms, new technologies or some other eventuality to catalyze cultural change, whether gradual or abrupt, violent or peaceful. The unrecoverable loss that results is acute and painful—in this case it is traumatic. Certainly, as I read this book, I mourned the loss of self-determination and freedom, the destruction of culture and tradition, the irradiation of the environment and its people, the breakup of families, and the impersonal cruelty of a morally bankrupt system that encourages treachery and death.

As Lidia, one of the herder’s wives, explains to Dr. Vitebsky, it is difficult for a herder to adjust to the village, because his soul is open from living in the taiga. I hope that the thousands of years of Eveny culture can ultimately transcend the destruction of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and that the people can, in some fashion, metaphorically or actually, return to the well-ordered space which they created and which is rightfully theirs. Dr. Vitebsky’s friend Tolya (Anatoly Alekseyev), an Eveny anthropologist, is perhaps the pivotal person in this story, if not in the book itself. As Dr. Vitebsky points out, Tolya, in his use of aviation to contact otherworldly beings, is like a modern shaman, flying from the taiga to the world of scholars and activists on a mission of healing for his people. I wish him all the best on his journey.

The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia is a winner of the Kiriyama Prize for Nonfiction and a recipient of the Victor Turner Prize Honorable Mention.

Piers Vitebsky is the head of anthropology and Russian northern studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He was the first Westerner to live with Siberian reindeer people since the Russian Revolution.

Climate Change in the North

Perhaps you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth. I did, and I applaud the recent nomination of Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize. He truly has, as Norwegian environmental minister Börge Brende said, “som ingen annan satt klimatfrågen på agenden” (like no one else put the question of climate on the agenda).

The images from his movie---refugees fleeing flooded metropolises, massive droughts, and other cataclysms--are frightening and unforgettable. Now, thanks to the report recently issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, rationality and science are making even stronger headway.

The official report isn’t as tough to wade through as I had anticipated. With my interest in the North, I slogged through the chapter on Europe trying to get an idea of the ramifications of global climate change for Scandinavia.

Northern areas will be subject to more precipitation in the winter, when saturated soils are less able to absorb the extra moisture, setting up conditions for increased flooding. On the flipside, warmer and drier summers with increased evaporation could lead to greater concentrations of harmful nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) in the water. Longer summers will leave forests vulnerable to damage from insects and fungi that are new to northern regions, and stressed, dying, and drying vegetation could be susceptible to forest fires. Because of the warmer weather, all crops, annual or perennial (such as grapes and other fruit, for example), will be more susceptible to disease outbreaks.

Rising sea levels (7-23 inches by 2100 even if the polar ice remains largely intact) will cause disruption of human settlement and activities, and also will inundate and displace wetlands (disrupting breeding and nursery activity of fish, among other outcomes) and lowlands (including many agricultural areas), erode shorelines, exacerbate coastal storm flooding, increase salinity of estuaries, and threaten freshwater aquifers. The report mentions the Baltic, with its low tidal range, as particularly vulnerable, but it’s unclear to me how other factors, including glacial rebound, might mitigate the situation. Perhaps that depends on how quickly waters rise. There will also be (for all parts of the world) an increase in the likelihood of rare and extreme weather events, and the report states that coastal areas around the North Sea will be especially vulnerable to storm surges.

It seems widely accepted now that melting snow and ice (in particular, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves) will also contribute to the rising seas, bringing levels higher than those allowed in the IPCC report. According to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Svante Axelsson, the general secretary of Swedish environmental organization Sveriges Naturskyddsföreningen or SNF, counts Göteborg (Gothenburg) among the cities that will be flooded. Many believe that the melting of certain amounts of the Greenland ice could disrupt the Gulf Stream, thrusting the North Atlantic and northern Europe, including Scandinavia, into another Ice Age. This scenario is explored in An Inconvenient Truth.

Although the IPCC report expresses some optimism around the ability of humans, with the help of science, to adapt to changing conditions, statements such as the following indicate just how many variables there are: “A northward change in temperature patterns may not necessarily correspond to a simple shift in latitude of suitable areas for unusual crops because many plants are sensitive to photoperiod and adapted to a combination of temperature and photoperiod ranges. New genotypes therefore might be necessary to meet this new agricultural frontier, provided that the available soils are suitable for the crop.” (5.3.2.1.3) And, regarding fisheries: “a poleward movement of species in response to climate warming is predictable on intuitive grounds. Habitat, food supply, predators, pathogens, and competitors, however, also constrain the distributions of species. Furthermore, there must be a suitable dispersion route, not blocked by land or some property of the water such as temperature, salinity, structure, currents, or oxygen availability. Movement of animals without a natural dispersal path may require human intervention; in the absence of intervention, such movement may take hundreds or thousands of years.” (5.3.2.2) I wonder if our politically and ideologically fractured world is up to the challenge of cooperating to implement these types of survival strategies.

If we are in denial, or, on the other hand, overwhelmed, perhaps it is due to difficulty in making our way through the IPCC report, or our tendency to see a movie as entertainment. Or the multitude of other problems that humanity faces. Or perhaps the enormity of the problem makes it too hard to grasp.

To me, the smaller scale changes hit closer to home than the large. When I think back to the beauty of my favorite childhood places, it really hurts me to imagine that they may cease to exist, or become so changed as to be unrecognizable. I remember so clearly the beautiful, marshy land on the Kungsbacka fjord with its distinctive smells, sights, and bird sounds. Will they be inundated by rising waters? What about the red-granite island covered in purple heather where we used to swim—will it become nothing but an underwater danger spot on the navigational chart? And with hotter, drier summers, will the buckets of blueberries we picked as children be reduced to handfuls? Or will the entire area revert to an Ice Age?

I don’t know how many people care about the little things. Judging from the runaway development we experience here in the U.S., perhaps not many. Of course, if your life and culture are close to the land, as is the case with farmers, fishers, hunters, etc., you will be among the first to feel the pain. Ultimately, though, we all will feel it, as will our children, grandchildren, and on down the line.

Are there places that you care about? Places that you remember or places that you enjoy now? Places that you hope your children will be able to enjoy as well? If so, please take a moment to prod your elected officials, if you are lucky enough to have them. Let them know that you want to see some action. Presumably with a problem so large, there are many ways forward, and we should probably walk them all. What about Al Gore for Climate Czar?

"Extended Forecast" by Ricardo Levins Morales. Click on the image for more information.

CD Review: Grovt och grant/Rough and Shiny by Alicia Björnsdotter Abrams and Emma Reid

I’ve only once been fortunate enough to hear these two young women perform, and, ever since, I’ve been keen to get a recording of them. I must say, it’s been worth the wait. I listened to it, candles burning, while I did all my Christmas baking, and I am still enjoying it in January.

This recording is a joy and a treasure. Most of these tunes are from masters of the Swedish fiddle, tradition-bearers who lived late and long enough to be recorded or even to participate in the folk revival of the 1970s. As in other such cases, it is remarkable good fortune to have these gems performed with such love and respect by younger players.

It is also a pleasure to hear these musicians build on the tradition in their own compositions (such as Alicia’s lovely Gröttschottis, track 7) and in their interplay with other traditions (Road to Poynton/Paul and Jenny’s Wedding, track 13 and Vals/Ville de Quebec, track 5.

Most of this recording, though, is devoted to the peculiarly Swedish polska. The polska is a dance said to have developed from Polish influences that arrived in Sweden around the end of the sixteenth century when the two countries were briefly united under one king. As it has evolved over the centuries, the polska is a dance in triple meter, although, unlike the waltz, its three beats are asymmetric—they are not organized around a stressed first beat and may even be of different lengths. Melodically, these tunes have been described as employing “blue notes,” but perhaps what we hear is better understood as either unusual (to our ears) modes or melodies that developed independently of the tempered scale. Be that as it may, it is well worth opening your ears, because this music really swings!

According to the brief liner notes, grovt och grant (rough and shiny) refers to the technique of playing in octaves, one fiddle above the other, in order to incorporate both the high, “shiny” voice of the fiddle and the lower, “rough/coarse” foot-stomping voice. (These are dance tunes, after all.) You can hear a lot of this octave-doubling work in Gumas Polska (track 4). But the reality is that these two fiddles saunter, swing, turn, and glide past each other not only at the octave, but at many different intervals, now closer, now farther apart, now intersecting in a passing unison. This Swedish art of stämma—creating a second part that shadows and engages the first—is richly realized here. A beautiful example of this is Trollpolskan (track 6), which the album notes describe as småpratande (small-talking or chatting). The countermelody work here is truly thrilling; it speaks its own mind quite independently, yet somehow manages to achieve unison with the melody as each phrase tapers to a close. I can see the chatting ladies, sitting forward in their chairs, coffee cups clinking, but this intricacy also brings to mind the ever-twining wood carvings at Urnes or the pattern on a tablet-woven ribbon—the ones that grace the hem or cuff of a Scandinavian folk costume.

This music is extremely evocative of landscape and of the feelings of being immersed in nature. But there is also the presence of human beings. There is Auld Swaara (track 14), a lament from the Shetlands, in a darker, more mournful version than I’ve previously heard. The Skänklåt (track 11) and Gamla Rådasin (track 3), are both weighty and declarative; the latter is paired with a lively polska that has more than a hint of the baroque in its countermelody. And are those cow horns I hear in Hedningspolska (track 6) and the Anders Södersten polska (track 4)?

I wish I knew more about Uppland fiddler Viksta Lasse (1897-1983)--I adore these versions of his tunes: the utterly gorgeous, twirling, breathing, thinking-out-loud Polska til Wik (track 9) and likewise Vendelspolskan (track 10), which recalls the strathspey with its sharp, rhythmic push-and-pull, although the melody is so Swedish!

Grovt och grant begins and ends with journeys. For me, the Himmelfärd (heaven-journey, track 1) is over the hard, glinting sea, the fiddle bow mimicking the rocking of the wave-tossed boat. Längs gamla stigar och färdevägar (track 17) takes us along winding roads through sunny pastures, cool woods, and marshy bogs, all punctuated with boulders left by glaciers--or trolls, take your pick! But however you see it, both journeys will take you, unequivocally, to Sweden.

The Swedish homeland, like the grovt och grant title, may be a place of contrast--the cold, dark winter followed by the bright flowering of summer--but this record reconciles the two, bringing to mind the shifting contrasts of shade and sunlight through fluttering birch leaves. The rough and shiny are always there, as are, always, the dark and the light, but the whole is as graceful and lively as dancers as they step, bob, and twirl around each other, balancing on an unbreaking line between two extremes.

Alicia Björnsdotter and Emma Reid will appear in an interview on WFMU Transpacific Sound Paradise. It will air (via the internet) Saturday January 27, 2007, starting around 7pm EST, and I am told it will be archived for later listening.

Grovt och grant/Rough and Shiny is available from CD Baby.

On the not-so-mythical outcomes of drinking and toasting

If you read my earlier post On the mythical origins of drinking and toasting, you might appreciate this lighter treatment in the form of a video piece entitled Dinner for One. It's also known as The 90th Birthday Party or, in German, Der 90. Geburtstag. Originally written in England in the 1920s as a theater piece, it was recorded (in English) in 1963 by German television.

This short comic skit has become a cult classic in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Finland, German-speaking Switzerland, and South Africa. In some places it has, interestingly, become a New Year's Eve television tradition. (I've been told that Swedish TV started running it on New Year's Eve in 1972.) Combining slapstick with a sort of dignified pathos, it eventually arrives at a life-affirming conclusion.

I love this piece because it's fun to watch. I also love its tragi-comic read on the human condition, which at once recognizes the absurdity of, and the heroism involved in, persevering in the face of inevitable decline and death.

Weaving, War and Womanhood

In her history of textiles, Mary Schoeser has remarked that “…textile techniques and their terms readily become analogies for the mysteries of nature and the universe.” Both sides of the analogy are clearly linked with female endeavors and power.

In Greek mythology the three Fates, female figures in control of human destinies, are depicted as spinning, measuring and cutting the threads that represent individual lives. Norse mythology employs the same analogy, with the three (female) Norns depicted spinning the thread of life for the hero Helgi in the Poetic Edda. The metaphor that compares a human life with a length of thread is clear and understandable. The fact that the Fates and the Norns are female bears witness to the reality that women have traditionally been the spinners and weavers. The metaphor works particularly well, though, because there is an even deeper identification of women with the “mysteries of nature and the universe.”

Nowadays we are so far removed from the processes of spinning and weaving that we may well wonder, what’s the big fateful deal regarding these activities? In pre-industrial societies, textile production was an enormous part of life. It was parallel to food production in that both entailed harvesting or gathering as well as processing, and both must have been constant, ongoing activities. Children have watched their mothers doing these things for eons.

Food is undoubtedly a necessity, and clothing, even if not needed for warmth, is important for other societal purposes. Other textile items, including bags, baskets, fishing nets, sails, etc., are necessary tools. Through many generations, people—primarily females--developed and perfected the technologies and processes that allowed their families and societies to survive, adapt to varying conditions and prosper. Their successes rested on their knowledge of agriculture and animal husbandry, both of which could provide food and fiber.

(Am I wrong to credit women with all this? Jochens writes, “Although direct proof is scarce, few scholars doubt that women bore the chief responsibility for spinning and weaving in primitive societies, a conclusion supported by cross-cultural comparisons.” In addition, let me say that, even if my husband is normally in charge of the crops and/or the animals, what happens when he goes to war? Or goes on a trading or raiding expedition? Or travels far from home to participate in some sort of governmental assembly? Or simply has to work late at the office? If I want my family to survive, I had better know my husband’s business as well as my own!)

Thus women, through the ages, have been central to many essential activities. And let’s not forget the obvious: Because of their primary roles in childbirth and child rearing they are essential to life itself in a way that men are not. History and myth abound with stories of male raiders setting out to steal the neighbors’ women; evidence that women have felt the need to abduct men is scanty at best.

Perhaps because of their traditional occupations—giving birth and feeding and clothing the next generation with the bounty of the earth-- women were thought to play a particularly large part in the natural cycle of life and in the connection of humankind with nature. In a situation where the natural world was little understood and felt to be capricious or frightening, this connection might be especially valuable. Indeed, in the historical Germanic and Norse world, this seems to have been the case.



Tacitus reminds us that among the continental Germans, women were particularly regarded as prophetesses and sages. In Snorri’s Heimskringla we continually meet with priestesses, prophetesses and wise women who move the action along with their premonitions and insightful words. In the Eirik the Red’s Saga, Thorkel, the head of a household in Greenland, wishes to know when his district will recover from a difficult season, so he engages a prophetess to provide answers. In the Voluspá the god Odin himself summons a dead prophetess from her grave to obtain information about the destiny of gods and men.

Of course, the natural cycle includes both life and death. The Fates not only spin the thread, but they also measure and cut it when life is through. So we would expect to see female figures involved in the bloody realities of both birth and death.

Norse mythology famously features valkyries, female agents of fate responsible for choosing those who will die in battle. In the Norse poem Darraðljóð, a group of twelve valkyries are depicted weaving a gruesome tapestry using warriors’ entrails as warp and weft to the refrain, “let us wind, let us wind, the web of war.” (One wonders if Dickens had this poem in mind when he created that infamous knitter of the French Revolution, Madame Defarge!) Jochens observes, “In effect, Darraðljóð pursues to a logical conclusion the image of the Norns, who were female figures in control of the thread of fate.”

Valkyries bring to mind the Greek goddess Athena, at once a goddess of war and of the “women’s arts” of spinning and weaving. She was also, incidentally, the goddess of wisdom. Athena figures into Homer’s depiction of Penelope, who uses her weaving and her wits to control her own fate. Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, delayed ten years in returning home after the Trojan War. She insists she will not remarry until she finishes her weaving. Every day she weaves, but at night she secretly unravels her work, thus keeping her many suitors at bay until she receives word of Odysseus’s return from (of course) Athena.

Textile-related stories abound in Greek mythology. Arachne was a woman who bragged that her weaving was better than Athena’s. As a punishment, the goddess turned her into a spider. Though women may not have engaged in sports or war, their competitive instinct could be strong and their anger potent! And speaking of potent anger, Medea, one of the most powerful sorceresses of Greek mythology, took revenge on her unfaithful husband and his new bride by giving the bride a beautiful, magic robe that burned her alive when she put it on. (I don’t know that Medea wove the robe herself, but she clearly masterminded and engineered its magic.)

These stories are interesting in part because they move beyond the supernatural, fleshing out real women’s activities, roles, and emotions. They attribute motives and generate narrative where there was only mute production (and reproduction). Textiles become not only a symbol but also an instrument of women’s creativity and fate. As women’s handiwork is transformed into works of mind, heart, and soul, we encounter a wonderful, telling paradox: the intangible attains immortality while the tangible is doomed to disintegrate.

References

Anonymous. “Eirik the Red’s Saga” (translated by Keneva Kunz) in The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Anonymous. “The First Lay of Helgi the Hunding-Slayer,” in The Poetic Edda. Translated by Lee M. Hollander. Second edition, revised. Tenth paperback printing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Anonymous. “Voluspá,” in The Poetic Edda. Translated by Lee M. Hollander. Second edition, revised. Tenth paperback printing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Modern Library, 1996.

Jochens, Jenny. Women in Old Norse Society. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. Translated by Richard Aldington and Delano Ames and revised by a panel of editorial advisors from the Larousse Mythologie Générale edited by Felix Guirand and first published in France by Augé, Gillon, Hollier-Larousee, Moreau et Cie, the Librairie Larousse, Paris. New Edition 1968. Ninth Impression. U.S.A.: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, 1974.

Schoeser, Mary. World Textiles: A Concise History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Tacitus’s Germania is cited in Jochens, Jenny. Old Norse Images of Women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.