headgear in Ireland

[Morcant]

Women tend to cover their hair in the middle ages. Now I don't know exactly when the custom was set. On 6th century sources for exemple we see both covered and uncovered hair.

[oleg]

Madonna in "Virgin and Child" dressed in similar way as in other iconographic sources.
Attached should be ivory carving 400-500 AD from Europe.

[Seathrun]

The Royal Irish Academy has a book on Headwear in Dublin. Great source on female head covering for the viking age. It is an even better source on fabric arts for the time.
Seth

[Andrea L Redden]

This hood was found in the Orkney and is early medieval.

It's definately pre-Viking. They've recently carbon dated it. 250-615AD. http://www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/search_item/index.php?service=RCAHMS&id=2980

The only Viking one I know of is from Skjoldehamn which is from the island of Andoya in Northern Norway and has also been carbon dated lately: 995-1029AD. It's made of two rectangles and two squares.

Viking Age hood from Skjoldehamn

Skjoldehamn-hood.JPG (10.16 KiB) Viewed 1011 times

Everything else seems later. The earliest pictorial representation I could find of a hood as a separate garment was about 1160AD.

Andrea

[brendan]

I think that there are some issues in calling the Skjoldehamn hood Viking i.e. It is from that time period and a similar geographic area, but is from a quite different culture. I say this based on discussions on the Hastings forum back in 2005 so don't have primary/secondary references to support my statement!