thefallingdream:

So here it is. Remember how I said I have a lot of feelings about archaeology and handbags? Well, this is the particular handbag I was having a lot of feelings about at the time. This is a reimagining of a Viking age frame bag, generally referred to as a Hedeby bag (although the frames have been found elsewhere the Viking world).

This one is fancy af, it’s wool, linen, and silk, in period-expensive colours and weights, fully lined, even though I actually believe that these bags would’ve been more utilitarian, unlined and made of plain undyed linen, but that’s not an argument I’m especially well positioned to make right now and anyway I wanted a pretty Viking handbag for Moesgaard. Also this belt loop arrangement (you can sort of see in the second pic, the cord runs through loops along the side) is a concession to stitch-fascists, because I need evidence for eyelets, but I reckon it was eyelets, based on my experiments eyelets work the best. This bag is already going to be a cat among the pigeons though, it upends decades of accepted knowledge, so as it is I expect pushback from a certain type of douchebag (the ones who run on equal portions woefully outdated info and shit they made up, and try to enforce it). Hence I stuck with what I can support the most strongly, and begrudgingly conceded the rest for the time being.

I’m not going to dump all my evidence and results here, I’m working on a proper report that I’ll be releasing soon, but basically this is a bag that both fits the material evidence and IS USEFUL. It actually WORKS as a BAG. You can CARRY stuff in it. All kinds of stuff. This is not true of the conventionally accepted interpretation of the material evidence.

I don’t want to be an ass and like, pull an example from google image
search and shame some other reenactor who was only going along with what they’d been told, so if you want to compare this to
a conventional Viking age frame bag reconstruction, just google hedeby bag
and you’ll get the idea. And look I’m not blaming reenactors for the uselessness of the conventional interpretation,
this

is entirely academia’s doing.

Handbags are a very gendered item in our time, but they weren’t so in
the Viking period, because Vikings didn’t have pockets. In our time, a certain percentage of adults have no
concept of what
makes a handbag functional, simply because they have never habitually used one. It
was such a person who originally interpreted the Hedeby bag frames, and
IN MY NOT AT ALL HUMBLE OPINION, IN MY ACTUALLY VERY ARROGANT OPINION, they got it ass backwards. The simple fact is that women know a lot of shit that men just don’t even know that they don’t know and when women’s voices aren’t heard and respected in research and academia, as was very much more the case when the Hedeby frames were initially recovered and interpreted, the results suffer. This feminist rage part isn’t going
in the report of course,

the evidence will speak for itself or it won’t. But it does. I mean you can see how much it does. BECAUSE I KNOW HOW HANDBAGS WORK. BECAUSE, LIKE A VIKING, NONE OF MY CLOTHES HAVE FUCKING POCKETS.

Anyway those are some of my feelings about archaeology and handbags. And this is my fancy Viking handbag. It’s pretty damn good.