No Wool, No Vikings -- The fleece that launched 1,000 ships. [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-long/no-wool-no-vikings

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Wool provides warmth even when it’s wet. The key is kink: wool fibers have regular crimps. When they’re spun into yarn, the kinks don’t quite match up, trapping pockets of insulating air. The fibers themselves have an outer layer of tiny scales coated with lanolin, a waxy substance that repels moisture and preserves the air pockets. The scales overlap like shingles, locking and tangling together, making the surface even more water-repellent.

And wool has another advantage for people who spend weeks or months at sea. It doesn’t need much cleaning. As Norwegian textile archaeologist Lise Bender Jørgensen told me in an email interview, airing and a bit of rinsing might be all the cleaning it needs, even after weeks at sea.

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All that wool! It took land and farming skills to raise the sheep that supplied the wool, and a support network of (mostly) women whose spindles and looms produced the cloth. Textile archaeologist Jørgensen says the introduction of sails must have greatly increased the demand for wool and grazing land. Norway-based historical textile researcher Amy Lightfoot has even speculated that the demand for pastureland might have driven the Viking expansion as much as the gleaming temptations of stolen treasure and legitimate trade. Clearly the classic image of wild-haired Viking warriors isn’t the whole story.

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Until recently, many historians thought that what we’re doing—sailing into the wind—was impossible for Viking boats with their square sails; they believed that the boats could only sail with the wind behind them. However, Langeland and others have demonstrated that square sails can indeed sail into the wind, if not as efficiently as triangular sails. But what about woolen sails? Surely woven wool would leak too much air for efficiency. How did the Vikings turn wool into functional sailcloth?

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The piece is long, but worth the time. A fantastically fun bit of history.