The Eigg Vararfeldr
- ardbeagcrafts
- Feb 17
- 2 min read
I had the pleasure of warping up my crystal loom for a vararfeldr inspired by a fragment of fabric discovered in a Viking grave on the island of Eigg. The grave find suggested that the Viking buried would have been wearing a great shaggy pile cloak, fastened with a large horseshoe brooch, over a woollen tunic girded with a leather belt. The grave has a sword in its scabbard and an axe, as well as a sickle, suggesting that the Viking had high status as a warrior, but was also a farmer and landowner.
The fragment of pile woven fabric was only 6x4cm at the largest, but it told archaeologists a lot: its warp thread was incredible fine, with thick, soft yarn for the weft. Instead of the long, curling locks used in Icelandic vararfeldr, this cloak used short tufts of Shetland-type wool, which were slightly twisted but not spun, and placed frequently in front of the weft at about 4 tufts per cm.
When I craft varafeldir using long Icelandic locks, I typically knot around 15 locks across the weft. For this cloak, however, I needed to attach approximately 130 locks. The weaving also required breaking down each lock into fragments, allowing for the tufts to be inserted into each row. I dedicated several hours each day exclusively to this cloak, and only managed to make two inches of progress daily. It was a true labour of love, which gave me something of an idea of what a valuable status symbol such a cloak would have been on Viking-era Eigg.
As I delved into the project, I was struck by how the style of the weaving was driven entirely by the shorter Shetland-type wool, which would have been local to the Isle of Eigg during the original cloak's crafting. The natural adaptations of sheep which had evolved to withstand the specific challenges of the windswept Shetlands not only inspired weavers to create facsimiles of their fleeces, but also informed how those cloaks were to be woven at every step of the way.
