A little book arrived in the mail yesterday.....

[Andrea L Redden]

.....and I've left the bastard at home haven't I, damn it!

Still.....it's called Att datera Textilier, it was written by Margareta Nockert and Goran Possnert and it's mainly in Swedish with an short English summary at the end. It's about the carbon-14 redating of a pile of Scandinavian textile finds. The one I'm excited about ,since my group does Hiberno-Norse Dublin 1008AD, is that the Skjoldehamn find from northern Norway has been redated from being considered early 15th century to a firm C-14 date of between 995-1029AD. It's the only surviving complete set of clothes from the Viking Age. Mammen was shredded by the peolple who dug it up looking for bling and Viborg's just a shirt.

Yeeeeee-hah!

I've ordered the original 1938 article on the find from the British Library. When I know what that's going to cost me I'll hopefully be able to afford the 1988 one as well.

Andrea

[the_power]

Sigh. Maybe there'll be an english translation someday...

Do you speak Swedish, or did you buy it for the pictures ? I usually *read* the articles, see...

John

[Seathrun]

Great, let me know if the 10-11th c stuff is useful I have friends who read swedish.
Seth

[brendan]

this sounds really cool...and it means I could have a complete set of uber authentic Viking kit to annoy people with!



Brendan

[Aislinn]

Can you post the ISBN for the book please? And any information about the article.
A complete set of clothes would be great to study.

[Andrea L Redden]

Hello All!

No I don’t speak Swedish but the book isn’t about the textiles them selves. It’s about the process of carbon 14 dating (if I’ve understood the pictures & diagrams in the first half of the book correctly) and the results of the carbon 14 dating of a group of famous and/or disputed archaeological textiles. It’s only 120 pages long and honestly the last dozen pages of English summary and bibliography gives you everything that’s going to be useful to a reenactor anyway. The Skjoldehamn find has been pushed back to 995-1029AD from late 15thC, the Asle mitten pushed forward to 1470-1650AD from 300-400AD and the Overhogdal wall-hangings 890-1030AD from 12thC + others.

I bought it from http://www.bokus.com who were very helpful. It cost me SEK209.04 = AUD37.72 = EUR22.20 including airmail to Australia. The first Swedish online bookseller wasn’t anywhere near as helpful and refused to send books outside Sweden. The ISBN is 91-7844-620-1 and it was published in 2002 by Gidlunds Forlag.

The two original articles on the find are listed here http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-ca ... olha2.html and I’ve ordered a photocopy of the first one from the British Library as, unfortunately for me, no library in Oz subscribes to “Viking”.

Andrea