"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