SCA, Inc. members are eligible to apply for a 10% in-store discount card at Joann Fabric and Craft Stores!
To apply, first make sure your membership in SCA, Inc is current. If you are a non-member SCAdian, you do not qualify. You must keep your membership current to maintain your discount card. You can maintain, update, or apply for SCA, Inc membership here.
Next, print off a copy of SCA, Inc's IRS 501(c) (3) tax exempt letter. You can find it here in .pdf form.
Next, fill out this form at joann.com. Be sure to click on the Non-Profit Discount Card button or your application will be rejected. "The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc" will not fit in the Organization Name box. Use "Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc".
That's it!
Wait 4-6 weeks for your card to be mailed to you. When you recieve your card, take your printed copy of the tax exempt letter to your closest Joann store and have them activate your card before purchase. You must have the letter and a state-issued ID. You will also need to bring your SCA, Inc blue or white membership card as well.
Have fun!
-Jorun
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
"Thinking About Female Images in Viking Art" by Cathy Raymond
Cathy's blog is here.
This is the post I'm reading and pondering right now.
Just a few thoughts on aprons
So here's something to think about. In the post comments, a poster writes that the Anglo Saxons and Franks weren't known to wear aprons (at least in any extant finds or contemporary artwork). However, in Viking Age Norse art there are quite a few images that suggest (in a very stylized way) the presence of aprons.
Another commenter on the post points out that Venetian courtesans wore aprons as a disguise to blend in with the local goodwives, but that it eventually became symbolic of their status.
Follow me in this musing
Most modern people think of the apron as simply a utilitarian item (and an increasingly uncommon one, or one associated with pre-feminist Western life). An apron is virtually unnecessary in a world where modern people dress in very accessible, affordable, easily washable fabrics and have access to washing machines and dryers that remove 90% of the work of laundering.
Your shirt got dirty? Throw it in the wash.
Your shirt got stained and you can't get it out? Send it to Goodwill or throw it away and buy another.
However, in a world where your clothing has to travel from the back of a sheep to a spindle to a loom to a needle to get to your body, you want to protect the precious fabric that it took you a year or more to make if you include the husbandry of the sheep.
That's where an apron comes in. A linen apron makes a lot of sense to me, even if the linen or flax had to be imported to the more northerly Scandinavian regions. Linen is much easier to wash, bleach, and replace. Linen has a nearly as intense process from ground to cloth as wool, but the fiber itself is easier to care for once it's made and it doesn't depend on a food source to grow.
Linen, unfortunately, does not last as long as wool when buried with a decomposing body. Very few examples of linen are found in the extant record for the Viking Age. Cathy Raymond suggests that they could have just decomposed before the find was dug up. This seems a likely possibility.
So why would Norse women/goddesses be depicted wearing aprons?
I've got to go back to symbolism.
We already know from the record in the Sagas and some of the written laws that women had a much more equal and vocal footing in a marriage and in society than their Christian contemporaries and their eventual progeny as Christianity spread into the far corners of Europe.
So what if the pagan Norse symbolized womanhood or wifery with the apron as the symbol? The female head of the household would be ultimately in charge of many, many important responsibilities on a landholding, many of them messy and guaranteed to ruin a fine wool gown.
Any good pagan worth her salt will wish her representations of her goddesses to reflect the world she lives in. A responsible wife needs an apron to run her household and maintain her wardrobe, well why wouldn't a goddess? Thus we see the images of goddesses women in art as wearing aprons.
It's possible, then, that the Anglo Saxons and Franks, used aprons but never attached any symbolic meaning to them and so never represented them in their art.
Like the Venetian courtesans, aprons from utility to symbolism.
-Jorun
This is the post I'm reading and pondering right now.
Just a few thoughts on aprons
So here's something to think about. In the post comments, a poster writes that the Anglo Saxons and Franks weren't known to wear aprons (at least in any extant finds or contemporary artwork). However, in Viking Age Norse art there are quite a few images that suggest (in a very stylized way) the presence of aprons.
Another commenter on the post points out that Venetian courtesans wore aprons as a disguise to blend in with the local goodwives, but that it eventually became symbolic of their status.
Follow me in this musing
Most modern people think of the apron as simply a utilitarian item (and an increasingly uncommon one, or one associated with pre-feminist Western life). An apron is virtually unnecessary in a world where modern people dress in very accessible, affordable, easily washable fabrics and have access to washing machines and dryers that remove 90% of the work of laundering.
Your shirt got dirty? Throw it in the wash.
Your shirt got stained and you can't get it out? Send it to Goodwill or throw it away and buy another.
However, in a world where your clothing has to travel from the back of a sheep to a spindle to a loom to a needle to get to your body, you want to protect the precious fabric that it took you a year or more to make if you include the husbandry of the sheep.
That's where an apron comes in. A linen apron makes a lot of sense to me, even if the linen or flax had to be imported to the more northerly Scandinavian regions. Linen is much easier to wash, bleach, and replace. Linen has a nearly as intense process from ground to cloth as wool, but the fiber itself is easier to care for once it's made and it doesn't depend on a food source to grow.
Linen, unfortunately, does not last as long as wool when buried with a decomposing body. Very few examples of linen are found in the extant record for the Viking Age. Cathy Raymond suggests that they could have just decomposed before the find was dug up. This seems a likely possibility.
So why would Norse women/goddesses be depicted wearing aprons?
I've got to go back to symbolism.
We already know from the record in the Sagas and some of the written laws that women had a much more equal and vocal footing in a marriage and in society than their Christian contemporaries and their eventual progeny as Christianity spread into the far corners of Europe.
So what if the pagan Norse symbolized womanhood or wifery with the apron as the symbol? The female head of the household would be ultimately in charge of many, many important responsibilities on a landholding, many of them messy and guaranteed to ruin a fine wool gown.
Any good pagan worth her salt will wish her representations of her goddesses to reflect the world she lives in. A responsible wife needs an apron to run her household and maintain her wardrobe, well why wouldn't a goddess? Thus we see the images of goddesses women in art as wearing aprons.
It's possible, then, that the Anglo Saxons and Franks, used aprons but never attached any symbolic meaning to them and so never represented them in their art.
Like the Venetian courtesans, aprons from utility to symbolism.
-Jorun
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Theories of cultural transmission before the Silk Road between Europe & Asia may pan out?
Before the Silk Road cultures!?!
I happened across the "Trollen Braid" controversy on the Norsefolk Yahoo! list and was intrigued, so I did a little Google digging. I'll state beforehand that this isn't conclusive research (or even very professional at that) and to please not be spreading this around as fact.
However, you could use it to warn people away from claiming that Trollen Braiding Wheels, as they're now being called in the reenacting world, are period. They are probably not within the SCA period, and most of the information regarding the wheels themselves is a garbled, internets version of the "Telephone" game.
The files that intrigued me initially:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Norsefolk_2/files/Clothing%20and%20Textiles/Brenna/
If you can't see them, just sign up for the list. It's a really good hardcore medievalist list with very prominent members from the academic world and reenacting world. It's not SCA-exclusive, however, and they try to stay away from solely SCA-related discussion since not everybody is a SCAdian.
There is also a huge discussion in the archives regarding these files, so check that out too.
Googling:
I Googled and came up with this:
http://www.kelticos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=7632
This blog post that led to the abstract below.
http://textilesociety.org/abstracts_2002/Barber.htm
Abstract. If anyone knows where I can read the actual paper, please let me know.
Googling on the "Trollen"braid again:
The Trollen Braid:
http://www.robinsonhistorical.co.uk/images/Work%20Sheets/Braided%20Cord.pdf
A how-to, showing a marudai-like weaving board and similar techniques
However! (And there's always a however)
http://etimage.com/english/bearingdial/bearingdial.html
This site states that the wheels claimed by reenactors to be for weaving were probably for sea navigation. Personally, I'm apt to agree with them since one was found in Greenland (very difficult to navigate to, according to The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown), and they are not broken in half as reenactors have assumed.
Also, "Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby. Birka Studies 8" by Eva Andersson (the premier source for textile artifacts in that region for the Iron and Viking Ages), makes no mention of these wheels. I'm also apt to side with the expert, especially since one of the wheels was found at Haithabu (Hedeby).
And, the big name herself, Else Ostergard of the Danish National Museum, has said through (hearsay) conversation with a European reenactor [http://www.et-tu.com/soper/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=forum&board=open&op=display&num=105&start=30] that the disk was found in Trelleborg, Sweden rather than Trelleborg, Denmark (Trollen) and is probably 17th century in extraction. This hints that it is a post-our-era tool find as well as probably culturally transmitted from Japan or China along the silk road or through overseas trade routes rather than in earlier eras through casual contact and eventual cultural dissemination in the Eurasian deserts.
But that leaves out the braids themselves!
It could be some form of whipcording (what is often called Viking Battle Braiding or slyngyng similar in our community, also not very documentable in an extant tool sense, though the braid structures are, apparently, but I digress).
http://www.northernneedle.net/Research/whipcord.pdf
However, the much more practical and sedate method of fingerloop braiding is the more probable culprit.
http://www.stringpage.com/braid/fl/fingerloop.html
This site cites a book on Japanese fingerloop braiding and that brings it all back full circle!
The way the above page is written is some reason to suspect (so that I don't get caught in an endless loop of trailing down sources of everything, I'll just propose it and stop there), that fingerloop braiding is documentable to the Medieval period in Europe, and not the earlier Iron or Viking Ages--Pre-Silk Road.
To sum up my thoughts on the tl;dr:
Since it's possible to create the structures of these braids in several ways (from top down on kumihimo marudai and the so-called Trollen disks to bottom up with whipcording and fingerloop braiding) it's reasonable to make a preliminary case, as without publishing or claiming authenticity, that the artistic and practical uses for these braids were known to cultures in Europe and Asia through their contacts in the Pre-Silk Road era. It doesn't necessarily mean that this was the transmission method--it could be that these things developed naturally in fiber cultures.
-Jorun
I happened across the "Trollen Braid" controversy on the Norsefolk Yahoo! list and was intrigued, so I did a little Google digging. I'll state beforehand that this isn't conclusive research (or even very professional at that) and to please not be spreading this around as fact.
However, you could use it to warn people away from claiming that Trollen Braiding Wheels, as they're now being called in the reenacting world, are period. They are probably not within the SCA period, and most of the information regarding the wheels themselves is a garbled, internets version of the "Telephone" game.
The files that intrigued me initially:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Norsefolk_2/files/Clothing%20and%20Textiles/Brenna/
If you can't see them, just sign up for the list. It's a really good hardcore medievalist list with very prominent members from the academic world and reenacting world. It's not SCA-exclusive, however, and they try to stay away from solely SCA-related discussion since not everybody is a SCAdian.
There is also a huge discussion in the archives regarding these files, so check that out too.
Googling:
I Googled and came up with this:
http://www.kelticos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=7632
This blog post that led to the abstract below.
http://textilesociety.org/abstracts_2002/Barber.htm
Abstract. If anyone knows where I can read the actual paper, please let me know.
Googling on the "Trollen"braid again:
The Trollen Braid:
http://www.robinsonhistorical.co.uk/images/Work%20Sheets/Braided%20Cord.pdf
A how-to, showing a marudai-like weaving board and similar techniques
However! (And there's always a however)
http://etimage.com/english/bearingdial/bearingdial.html
This site states that the wheels claimed by reenactors to be for weaving were probably for sea navigation. Personally, I'm apt to agree with them since one was found in Greenland (very difficult to navigate to, according to The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown), and they are not broken in half as reenactors have assumed.
Also, "Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby. Birka Studies 8" by Eva Andersson (the premier source for textile artifacts in that region for the Iron and Viking Ages), makes no mention of these wheels. I'm also apt to side with the expert, especially since one of the wheels was found at Haithabu (Hedeby).
And, the big name herself, Else Ostergard of the Danish National Museum, has said through (hearsay) conversation with a European reenactor [http://www.et-tu.com/soper/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=forum&board=open&op=display&num=105&start=30] that the disk was found in Trelleborg, Sweden rather than Trelleborg, Denmark (Trollen) and is probably 17th century in extraction. This hints that it is a post-our-era tool find as well as probably culturally transmitted from Japan or China along the silk road or through overseas trade routes rather than in earlier eras through casual contact and eventual cultural dissemination in the Eurasian deserts.
But that leaves out the braids themselves!
It could be some form of whipcording (what is often called Viking Battle Braiding or slyngyng similar in our community, also not very documentable in an extant tool sense, though the braid structures are, apparently, but I digress).
http://www.northernneedle.net/Research/whipcord.pdf
However, the much more practical and sedate method of fingerloop braiding is the more probable culprit.
http://www.stringpage.com/braid/fl/fingerloop.html
This site cites a book on Japanese fingerloop braiding and that brings it all back full circle!
The way the above page is written is some reason to suspect (so that I don't get caught in an endless loop of trailing down sources of everything, I'll just propose it and stop there), that fingerloop braiding is documentable to the Medieval period in Europe, and not the earlier Iron or Viking Ages--Pre-Silk Road.
To sum up my thoughts on the tl;dr:
Since it's possible to create the structures of these braids in several ways (from top down on kumihimo marudai and the so-called Trollen disks to bottom up with whipcording and fingerloop braiding) it's reasonable to make a preliminary case, as without publishing or claiming authenticity, that the artistic and practical uses for these braids were known to cultures in Europe and Asia through their contacts in the Pre-Silk Road era. It doesn't necessarily mean that this was the transmission method--it could be that these things developed naturally in fiber cultures.
-Jorun
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