Tracing Textile Production from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages: Tools, Textiles, Texts and Contexts

Ingvild Øye traces textile production in western Norway and the North Atlantic from the early Viking Age into the Middle Ages, bringing together tools, surviving textiles, written evidence and archaeological context. Clothing is only part of the story: textiles also expressed status and affiliation, served domestic and commercial purposes and, in the Viking period, supplied the sails essential to maritime expansion.

Much of that history survives in tools rather than finished cloth: objects placed in graves, equipment left at workplaces and finds scattered across farms and towns. Øye reads these traces alongside texts to ask who made the fabrics, how work was organised and what changed as rural Viking-age communities became part of a more urban medieval world. The materials may be modest, but they reveal the labour and skill behind things people used every day.