A Norse Bag of Holding: The Haithabu/Hedeby Bag

Items from Hedeby interpreted as bag handles

The What/When/Where

Various Norse archaeological sites, most notably Hedeby and Birka, have produced wooden items that have been widely interpreted as the handles for a kind of bag or purse. Hedeby was a Norse trading center on the border between modern-day Finland and Germany, and was in use between the 8th and 11th centuries. Birka, also a trading center, was located on the island of Bjorko in modern-day Sweden, and was active from about the middle of the 8th century to about the late 10th century.

I've seen many wonderful plausible recreations of Hedeby bags online, often constructed by European reenactors, which made me want to make one myself. My project owes a great debt to L. Brodrick, whose website Europa Reenactment provided most of the information I used in attempting to create a plausible interpretation of this bag. The premier research resource for the bag handles, Die Holzfunde Von Haithabu, by Florian Westphal (2006), wasn’t available to me, but several images from the book were available online.

No extant intact bag has been found in Norse/Viking context, although at least one of the handles included textile fragments at the time of its discovery. It was this particular bag handle that I chose to recreate.

From Die Holzfunde Von Haithabu

The Handles

Handles found at Hedeby ranged from eighteen to fifty centimeters long, about a centimeter thick, give or take a few millimeters (.7mm-1.3mm), and about three to five centimeters tall (Westphal in Brodrick). They were made from maple or ash (Brodrick). My bag’s handles are made from maple, and are about twenty-two centimeters long, half a centimeter thick, and six centimeters tall.

I arrived at these dimensions by comparing the handle I wanted to recreate with the handle below it as pictured in Die Holzfunde Von Haithabu (see illustration above). A similar version of that handle, found at Birka, was pictured elsewhere at about thirty centimeters long. The width of the wood I purchased for the project dictated the width of my handles.

Hedeby Museum, Photo by L. Brodrick

Bag handle found in Birka in 2014

I obtained a pattern for the handles by printing out the scientific illustration of the bag handle I wanted to recreate and scaling it to the appropriate dimensions. I then traced it onto the maplewood.

Pattern and tracing

A woodworker in period would have used a saw, chisels, and rasps to shape the wood, all of which tools and more were found in the Mastermyr tool chest, a Viking-age find, discovered in the 1930s in Gotland, Sweden (Arwidsson and Berg). While I did use a power drill instead of an auger to drill the holes for the purse strap and to create openings for the coping saw where needed, the rest of the process involved only hand tools.

I used a coping saw to cut out the handles and all the rest of the shaping and smoothing was done by hand with coping saw, files and chisels, which in form are all remarkably similar to those in the Mastermyr find.

Rough handle compared to handle with preliminary smoothing/shaping

Handle Detail

I used modern sandpaper for the final smoothing (instead of sand in a cloth, as a period woodworker might have used), and made and applied a beeswax and walnut oil polish to seal the wood as a Viking-plausible finish. Period wood finds tend to have lost the finish, or have it destroyed during the process of preservation, so much of what we think as plausible for Norse wood finishing would be speculative in nature. 

Before and after finishing

The Viking Answer Lady writes “As a wood finish, only "drying oils," which eventually dry to a hard and protective finish, are normally used. Examples include linseed oil and walnut oil.” Since I had the latter on hand and because there are some potential fire hazards with linseed oil, I decided to use the walnut oil. I also wanted to use beeswax to help seal the wood.

While bees were not found everywhere in the Viking world, they were found in Sweden as well as England, and beeswax is a known wood polish so I felt it wasn’t out of the question to use it. I heated the beeswax in a double boiler, added the oil, and mixed it well. The resulting polish darkened the wood slightly and added a light sheen. It also makes a nice moisturizer!


The Bag Strap

For the bag strap, I created a whipcord, or four-strand plait. I briefly considered creating a tablet woven strap, but I decided that based on the shape of the strap holes on the extant handle examples, a round cord or rope was far more plausible. Also, a flat woven strap would interfere with the opening and closing of the bag. I referred to Ásfríðr Úlfviðardóttir and Meadhbh inghean ui Aonghusa’s class notes, available online (see Bibliography/Resources). I used gifted hand-spun wool yarn to make the cord using a ceiling hook and wooden bobbins.

The Bag

I couldn’t find information on the textile fragments found with the handle (which may have been “cleaned” as so many textile remnants found with brooches and other finds have been), so I choose wool as the material for the bag itself.

Saami bag, provenance unknown

While some extant early medieval purses and bags are made from leather, these examples do not have a mix of textiles and leather. With one example similar to the Hedeby frames, a Sami bag, the leather is attached to the frame directly, without use of fabric loops. I felt that a wool version would be plausible, for its durability and as a means to make use of wool scraps or to reuse pieces of a worn-out garment. Also, woolen textiles are well represented in Hedeby’s archaeology (Jesch, p 17).

I made my bag from 100% wool, with a linen-blend lining. Both the outer bag and lining were handstitched, the bag with purchased handspun wool thread, the lining with commercially-spun hemp thread. I wanted to include a lining to protect the wool from the contents of the purse. Also, there is an extant example of a pouch found in Norse context with a possible linen lining: a silk reliquary pouch found with some fragments of linen inside it (Hall, p 88).

I chose a black wool with a herringbone pattern similar to that of a woolen fragment found in Jorvik (Hall, p 99-100). I used a handmade needle to stitch the bag, and used stitches found among Hedby/Haithabu textile fragments: a running stitch for the lining and a butted joining stitch for the bag (Baker, p. 12). The bag is stitched to the handle with the same wool thread I used to construct it.

Conclusions

The woodworking portion of the project was definitely the most expansive for me: I worked with tools and techniques that I never had before. This was my first wood project that went beyond simple whitling. I broke several coping saw blades while cutting out the handles. In previous projects when I started breaking saw blades, well-meaning friends would take away the saw and do things for me. I was especially pleased with the way the handles went from rough and primitive to smooth and even with patient filing and sanding. I was surprised by the physical demands of sawing, chiselling, and filing - a sore arm was the result!

Sewing the bag itself was well within my wheelhouse and went as expected. It was fun to learn a new cord-making technique for the bag strap and I’m looking forward to future applications of the technique and the cordage. I’d like to make a slightly longer cord for the bag in the future, in order to wear it cross-body more comfortably.

In future iterations, I’d like to start more from scratch with my materials - working with gathered maple wood and learning to hand weave in order to produce the cloth for the bag, maybe even spinning and dyeing the thread for it myself. I researched the cost of instruction and loom time at the wonderful Eugene Textile Center and found it prohibitive at the time of this project. I’m also hoping that I’ll have more practice with the wood tools, resulting in smoother, more even handles, with fewer tool marks.

The completed bag functions quite well. The handles serve to hold the bag closed, decreasing the risk of something in the bag falling out (something I’ve experienced with satchel-style bags). The structure of the bag worked exactly the way I’d hoped it would, adding capacity without adding additional bulk. It’s small, but it’s a good size for personal items that a Norse woman might have carried with her.

Bibliography/Resources

Arwidsson, Greta and Gosta Berg: “The Mastermyr Find: A Viking Age Tool Chest From Gotland”. Larson Publishing Company, 1999.

Baker, Jennifer: Stitches and Seam Techniques Seen on Dark Age / Medieval Garments in Various Museum Collections. Web resource: http://nvg.org.au/documents/other/stitches.pdf

Brodrick, L.: “Europa Reenactment” - Website: http://europa.org.au/index.php/articles/21-bags

Hall, Richard: “The Viking Dig: The Excavations At York”. The Bodley Head, 1983.

Jesch, Judith: “Women in the Viking Age”. The Boydell Press, 1991.

Úlfviðardóttir, Ásfríðr and Meadhbh inghean ui Aonghusa: “Four-strand Whipcord Braiding”. Website: http://www.medieval-baltic.us/whipcords.pdf

The Viking Answer Lady, “Woodworking in the Viking Age” http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/wood.shtml

Westphal, Florian. “Die Holzfunde Von Haithabu” K. Wachholtz, 2006.