New Year, Old Spindle

[Photo: Spindle whorl found at L'Anse aux
Meadows, Newfoundland.
Image from: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/whorl2461.jpg] 

This spindle is a most unusual spindle, one that tells a story and proves a story.  The picture on the left is the Norse spindle whorl found at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.  This is the oldest spindle whorl to be found in Canada and is over 1,000 years old.  According to two Icelandic sagas that talk about the Viking settlement at Vinland (now proven to be L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland), this spindle probably belonged to Gudrid (aka The Far Traveller), wife of Karlsefni, and mother of Snorri, the first European baby to be born in North America, and my great-great (27 times great) grandmother.
In 1960, Helge Ingstad and his wife Anne Stine Moe, an archaeologist looked for and found the Vinland of the sagas in Newfoundland. The site also proved that the Norse people had been to North America 500 years before Columbus.  It was the whorl (along with a knitting needle) that helped confirm that this location was indeed the Norse settlement that until then had been the Vinland of two Icelandic sagas. The Greenland Saga and Eric the Red Saga, which both spoke of Gudrid having lived in Vinland twice and the second time for three years where she gave birth to Snorri. At that time, only women spun hence the whorl indicated that a Norse woman had been there.  Gudrid was not the only woman to have been in Vinland, from the sagas we know that Freydis also lived there for one of the voyages.  She too most likely spun, but since Fredis had a reputation of being ferocious and a bit unlady-like, I like to think that this whorl belonged to Gudrid.
The whorl is made from soapstone and is very similar to the ones seen at the National Museum of Iceland in the picture here.

[Photo: Icelandic spindles in
 the Icelandic National Museum]

Eva Anderson in her dissertation research on Viking era textile production confirmed that the whorl weight and diameter of the whorl determines the rate and duration of the spin, the amount of tension and hence, the fineness or thickness of the yarn spun.  Often various whorl sizes would be found close together in Norse archaeological sites which reflect the variety of spindle tools needed for the variety of textiles produced.  From Norse archaeological sites, whorl weights range from 4-100 grams with 5-29 g being typical.  Whorl diameters range between 5-45 mm and the height of stone whorls is 5-20 mm, with a 7-12 mm hole.

The shafts of that era were almost always thinner at both ends and thickening in the middle.  Shafts would typically be 98-215 mm in length, with diameters from 5-13 mm, with 7-8 mm diameter most common (Andersson, 1999). 

In the museum (see the picture above) the spindles are displayed with the whorl at the top, but they were probably used as bottom weighted whorls.

See also:

• Historica Minute video re-enactment of Vinland and notes at http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10121
• Viking tools: http://www.stringpage.com/viking/spindles.html
• Parks Canada L’Anse aux Meadows Historical site: http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index.aspx
• Video of Nancy Marie Brown, author of "The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman" reading at Cornell University.