Pants and Coats.

Just some thinking I've been doing on Viking underwear.

It was considered illegal to wear clothes that belonged to the other gender, and this applies to underwear as well. This is learned from a couple of sagas.

(I'm going to say right now that I can't point out specific sources because my memory is not that good. If you don't like what I say, do your own research.)

In one, a lady wanted to divorce her husband so she could marry her lover, so she made her husband a shirt (of the undershirt kind) that had a really big neckline like a woman's (that is implied). In another, there's a comment like, "She must be wearing men's gusseted pants under the dress because of the way she jumps on a horse." This is the one I'm interested in.

The argument that I've heard, based on that story, is that men's pants had gussets, and women's pants didn't have gussets, which restricted movement enough that one couldn't just jump on horses. Which doesn't make sense to me--why would the Vikings have underwear that restricts movement? I know that many cultures have had that, but I think the Vikings were more practical.

So at Great Western War last year, I went to a class on early-period garb, and we talked mostly about Viking clothes, and this horse-jumping story came up. I asked, if women's pants didn't have a gusset, then how were they made so that the woman could move? The teacher said that they were probably just open in the crotch. I was like, "okay," but it still didn't make sense to me, because that wouldn't restrict your movement. It would be just as easy to wear as gusseted pants.

I forgot about it for a while after that. But I eventually thought about it again. And I was like, open-crotch pants would make the act of jumping on a horse pretty easy, but... I wouldn't want to jump on a horse if there's a chance that my nethers are going to be sitting directly on a horses' dirty, sweaty back. (or a dirty saddle; I don't know). Even if you have 3 dresses on over the pants, if you're jumping onto a horse, you're not taking the time to arrange your clothes carefully to make sitting safe.

And then I realized, THAT's a pretty good reason that a woman wouldn't jump on a horse while wearing proper women's pants, but it would be much safer to do with men's pants.

At this point you can argue, if the argument leads to crotchless pants, maybe they just didn't wear pants at all. To counter this, I submit that the next time it gets snowy and below freezing where you live, go ahead and spent the whole day outside with as many skirts as you want--but no pants. Just try it. It doesn't even have to be the whole day. Try it for a few hours.

This leads me to my next point: coats.

Unlike the underwear thing, the current interpretation of Viking coats is based on archeological finds. I believe it's mostly finds from Birka.

Here's their idea: It's a pretty wool coat with colors and trim and all that, and it's long, like to the knees or past. I'm fine with all that. What I don't like is this: it has a low, open neckline that clasps under the bust so that all their chest jewelry is visible, and it's open under that. Only one clasp.

Again, I charge you with the task of spending a significant amount of time in snowy, windy, sub-freezing weather, and see how long you make it in a coat that exposes your neck and chest.

"But you can wear the Skjoldehamm-type hood over your coat to protect your head, neck and chest!" the people say.

Well, yeah, you can, but that completely defeats the point of having that stupid low neckline, because the hood covers up all your jewelry.  (If you're not familiar with the style, the Skjoldehamm hood has a large mantle that comes down into points in the front and back, that's long enough to go past the bosom). It just doesn't make sense. You're wearing this style of coat for a specific purpose, which renders the coat half-useless, so you have to add another piece of clothing to make the coat worthwhile, except that the other piece renders the style of the coat useless. Again, I really want to believe that the Vikings were more practical than that. They lived in freaking Scandinavia and Iceland.

I work outside for several hours every day, and yes, that included almost every day this winter. If you were in Utah and recall this winter, there were basically a couple of months in there where the temperature never got above freezing. Every day I wore long woolen socks, woolen long johns under jeans, two or three shirts under a woolen sweater, and my freaking massive coat that is ankle-length, sleeves longer than my arms, two layers of wool and, of course, a hood, as well as the biggest scarf I own. I was comfortable. Not sitting-by-a-fire warm, but not I'm-going-to-die cold.

I may be making a huge assumptive leap, but I imagine that winters in the Viking countries were similar. A low-cut coat, in that weather, is downright nonsensical.

Now I'm not denying that these coats existed. If there's archeological evidence, I can't argue against evidence. I can argue against interpretation of evidence. A housecoat, a spring and fall coat, yes. That's a great use for a coat in that style. That's not how I've seen anyone interpret it, though. Seems that people really do think that these coats were the outdoors in winter coats.

Here's the other thing. The evidence for these coats are found in graves. I don't think they buried people wearing their outdoors working coats. I don't know. It just doesn't make sense to me. That also lends the question, if the low-cut coat was actually a ceremonial garment and that's why they were buried in it.

I'm sorry that this is a strange and rambling post. I'm at work, and I'm really tired, and it's really warm and bright in here, and this keyboard is hard to type on because the spacing is different than my home keyboard so I keep hitting the wrong letters. So I'm feeling a little too befuddled to edit this post properly. You're lucky that I'm fixing the typos. And I probably even missed some.

I hope know one finds this posts and thinks that I'm trying to be scholarly and trying to prove that my ideas are RIGHT and everyone else is WRONG. I'm just saying that there are some ideas that don't make sense to me, especially in regards to what I've experienced.