How do I know flax was used in Scandinavia? There is evidence of flax production from Birka and Oseberg. Both flax and hemp were cultivated in the Malaren Valley in the Iron and Viking Age (p 71 of “Tools, Textile Production and Society in Viking Age Birka” by Eva B. Anderson in M. Gleba, C. Munkholt and M.-L. Nosch (eds), Dressing the Past. Ancient Textiles Series 3, Oxbow Books, 2008). Linen textiles were found in Viking Age graves in Birka, even though linen does not survive well in grave sites.
Last summer, I planted some flax seed in my little garden. I don’t think I planted it early enough, or thick enough, but by the end of the summer I was able to harvest enough for a single stook. According to friends who have grown and worked with their own flax before, one should pull it out by the roots to maximize the length of fibre, I left the stook to dry for a week, then rippled it (pulled off all the seeds and leaves).
Next I brought it into the house and retted it in a tub of water in my living room for about a week. It was covered so it didn’t smell too bad. But the water was definitively getting scummy by the end, so there are no pictures. After that, it was time to dry the stalks for around four days. According to the instructions I found on the Richter’s Herbs website (where the seed was purchased), the stalks could be dried outside, even if it was damp. It was pouring rain, not merely damp, so I dried the flax in the storeroom in my basement.
The next step was processing the flax. During the Viking Age wooden clubs were used to break up the stalks and release the long fibres used for spinning (Tools, Textiles p. 72 shows pictures of flax clubs from Oseberg). I didn’t have such a mallet, so I used a regular hammer and a piece of wood.
The next step – at least in relatively modern times is scutching – with a wooden “knife” to scrape away the remaining bits of stem and bark. I completely missed this step because I didn’t have such a knife, though I did use my fingers to pull away as much as I could. This image from The Weald and Downland Living Museum and shows a 16th C re-enactor scutching flax.
Then it was time to hackle or comb the flax.
heckle for preparing flax. From Norse settlement in Jarlshof, Shetland, ca 850-1000 (National Museum of Scotland)
I used one of my reproduction wool combs and it did a decent (though not perfect) job.
Finally, it was time to spin. I used a drop spindle I had previously made of wood with pewter whorl that my friend Sylard the Blacksmith had made (I don’t have the exact source for his spindle whorl, but there are over 600 decorated metal spindle whorls from the early Middle Ages available in the British Museum’s on-line catalogue alone) and dampened the fibre by wetting my fingers in a bowl of water as I spun. This is a trick I learned from the woman who taught me to spin linen a few years ago. The fibre seems to glue itself together and is quite smooth as a result. I have absolutely no evidence for this practice, beyond tradition and the fact that it works.
The fibre had been attached to a smoothed stick (aka a distaff) and tied in place with ribbons. This left my hands more free to focus on getting the right twist. Distaffs are well documented in later period, such as this image from the Luttrell Psalter:
However, there is less evidence from a time when most evidence comes from the archaeological record, and this is basically just a stick. There is, however, one extant example of what is almost certainly a distaff. Found in Staraya Ladoga, Finland, in 1950, it has Viking Age runes on it (https://www.khm.uio.no/english/research/publications/7th-symposium-preprints/kusmenko.pdf). The fir stick is dated to the mid 9th C, and is on display in St Petersburg at the State Hermitage Museum.
Two other examples, 2nd and 3rd from the bottom, come from the 834 AD Oseberg ship burial (http://www.unimus.no/photos/khm/34372/?f=html).
The final step was to ply my linen. I almost always spin by flicking my fingers clockwise to produce an S twist fibre, so the easiest way to ply is to take the two ends and twist them together in a Z twist (counterclockwise).
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