A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry by Bloch R. Howard

Author:Bloch, R. Howard [Bloch, R. Howard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

Fragment of textile from Oseberg, Norway, buried ca. A.D. 950

© MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF OSLO, NORWAY

Unlike the Bayeux Tapestry, the Oseberg textile contains no writing and seems to tell no historically specific story. As with the Tapestry, however, its horizontal borders are filled with a geometric chevron design, and the central panel shows a frieze of knights, weapons and shields, birds and swastikas, and horses pulling wheeled chariots with cargo or passengers in procession. The Oseberg textile depicts either the migration of a people or the journey from this world to the next. The horses and chariots resemble Roman models and are themselves draped in places with textiles—cloth within cloth. The headdress, tunics, and triangular pantaloons, wider around the ankles than on top, have the appearance of those found on an Eastern frieze. The figures in profile as well as the overall array of figures in intersecting and overlapping planes evenly disposed across a vertical field so resemble an Egyptian hieroglyphic tableau that one wonders if the hanging buried with Queen Åsa, like the funeral cloths described by Ibn Fadlán, did not come from the Middle East.

A similar fragment of cloth was found in 1867 in the tomb of Haugen at Rolvsøy Norway Dating from around A.D. 900, it depicts a scene of five men and two women near a Viking ship.7 An eleventh- or early-twelfth-century linen, discovered in 1910 in Överhogdal, Sweden, is bordered on all sides by a geometric chevron pattern. Its colored embroidery, filled with animals, some distinctly reindeerlike, features images associated with Old Norse cosmology—Yggdrasil, the world tree, holding together heaven and earth; Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir—alongside Christian symbols, crosses on tops of buildings resembling a church. Like the Bayeux Tapestry, the Oseberg, Rolvsøy, and Överhogdal textiles, tjells, or “refills,” are woven with colored wools and are long and narrow, indicating that they, too, were intended to be hung around the walls of a home or, after Christianization, in a church. Other examples of Scandinavian textiles—that from Baldishol, Norway, with its mounted knight, and that of Skog, Sweden, with a church and horses—were woven sufficiently after 1066 that the traits they share with the Bayeux Tapestery could be the result of its influence rather than the reverse.

If the Bayeux Tapestry is most like Scandinavian textiles in its material form, its contents are most Scandinavian in the depiction of the sea and especially of boats. The Tapestry is a major source of knowledge about medieval naval archaeology. The vessels of both Harold’s crossing from Bosham to Normandy and William’s crossing from Normandy to Great Britain are Viking ships, though Viking sails were square, not curved and triangular. We know this from Icelandic sagas. King Harald’s big ship, like that of William in panel 98, is lined by a wall of shields atop the gunwales. “In the words of the poet Thjodolf”:

The doughty king of Norway

Lined his dragon longship

With a wall of living shields;

No foe could find a gap there.8

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