The women who wove the Viking world

When we think about the Vikings, we tend to picture men: warriors sailing across the North Atlantic, traders carrying silver between continents and explorers establishing settlements at the edge of the known world. What we rarely consider is the immense quantity of cloth that made any of this possible, or the women who produced it. Viking ships may have been built and sailed by men, but without the clothing, tradeable fabric and enormous woollen sails created by women, they would not have travelled very far. Producing that material required extraordinary labour.

Clothing one person could demand weeks of spinning and weaving, while a single ship’s sail might consume around 90 fleeces, 12,000 hours of spinning and another 60 days at the loom. Women worked together inside buildings known as dyngja, semi-subterranean spaces associated with textile production. From these dark, protected rooms emerged clothing that preserved life, cloth that carried economic value and sails that propelled ships across oceans. To those excluded from the process, the transformation of raw wool into Viking wealth must have appeared almost magical.

That connection between women, weaving and supernatural power runs throughout Norse mythology. The Norns spin, measure and sever the threads of human life, while female practitioners of seiðr carry iron staffs resembling the distaffs used during spinning. The most horrific example comes from Njáls saga, where a man in Caithness watches twelve Valkyries weaving the outcome of a distant battle. Human entrails become their thread, severed heads their loom weights and arrows their shuttles. As the women weave, warriors live or die.

This is a very different way of understanding Viking society. Women were not simply waiting at home while men made history. They controlled a process upon which households, trade and overseas expansion depended, while pagan belief connected their work with prophecy, fate and death. The warrior may have stood at the prow and received the glory, but the power carrying his ship across the sea had already passed through the hands of women.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.