Interior Textiles in the Viking Age: Pillows, Bedding and Wall Hangings: Beðr, ver og húsbúnaðr

Interior Textiles in the Viking Age brings together specialists in textile archaeology to examine the fabrics that furnished Scandinavian domestic interiors: pillows, bedding, wall hangings and related household textiles. Edited by Eva Andersson Strand, Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Ulla Mannering and Marianne Vedeler, the volume shifts attention away from clothing toward the material experience of rooms and sleeping spaces.

Much of the surviving evidence comes not from houses but from graves, where pillows, bedding and cloth-wrapped objects accompanied the dead. The contributors set these finds beside references to furnished rooms in Old Norse writing, later surviving wall hangings and visual evidence on objects such as picture stones. Together they ask how textiles made a home comfortable, expressed status and sometimes carried stories in their patterns.