I had thought about reflecting on the World Cup this week – I live with a devoted football fan and have been dutifully following World Cups with him for 40 years. But I think that I will instead use the Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey that was released this weekend for my inspiration. After all, as my mother used to say, there is no use crying over spilt milk – Wednesday was a disappointing end to an excellent run for the England team.
How on earth, you might ask, if you do not know the story, can I link The Odyssey with yarn? Well, the answer is very easily. Because at the heart of the story, and playing a very large part in the film, is Odysseus’s wife Penelope (acted superbly in my view by Anne Hathaway), and her weaving. Odysseus was away fighting at Troy for 10 years and took another 10 to return to his kingdom, Ithaca. He left Penelope behind him to look after the kingdom and their baby son, Telemachus. As the years passed, and it seemed that Odysseus would not be returning, dozens of suitors turned up in the Royal Palace, hoping that Penelope would choose one of them so that they could take the throne. They exploited the rules of hospitality so that she was obliged to wine and dine them every night and they generally behaved very badly. In desperation, Penelope told them that she would make her choice once she had finished weaving her father’s funerary garment – but every night she would unravel the work she had done in the day so that the weaving would never be done.
I am not going to tell you what happened next. If you do not already know, I recommend you see the film, which I enjoyed immensely, or better still, read the poem. Mary Beard is currently doing a readalong of The Odyssey on her podcase Instant Classics which I should imagine would be very interesting and which I would be doing if I had the time. Emily Wilson’s version is supposed to be a very good translation, but there are lots of different options around.
Spinning and weaving were vital skills, and predominantly a female occupation in the Ancient World. Both were a major part of the labour that a typical woman, no matter her class, was expected to do. We know this because both feature in mythology – for example Athene was the goddess of weaving, and we have the story of Arachne, who dared to say she was a better weaver than Athene and ended up transformed into a spider. They feature in literature – such as the story of Penelope, and we have plenty of images on Greek vases. The Greek philosophers referenced spinning and weaving – using them as metaphors, for example Plato directly compares weaving to ruling a state. There is even archeological evidence in the form of spindle whorls and clay loom weights.
The fibres that were spun were most likely wool and flax (for linen). The way in which the fibres were processed has not changed very much since then – the wool was cleaned, carded and made into rovings that were stored in a clay vessel called an epinetron. These vessels were frequently associated with the start of a young woman’s marriage and were highly decorated often with wedding scenes, showing the importance of such tools in a woman’s life. The roving was then wrapped onto a distaff (elakate), which was held under the arm and then it was spun on a spindle (atraktos). The typical spindle is still used today in the form of a drop spindle which consists of the thin staff of the spindle itself and a weight, or whorl that allows the spindle to be suspended from the hand and to spin longer for each spin.
Once the thread was spun, it could be threaded onto a loom (histos). The loom is likely to have been in the home and typically would have been a standing loom which consisted of a wooden frame, probably set up like and easel with upright back legs and an angled front coming towards the weaver. The warp threads (stemon) which are the backbone of the fabric, would have hung from the top bar of the loom, weighted and kept taught against the angled bottom bar by clay loom weights. The weft thread (kroke) would be woven through the hanging warp using a shuttle (kerkis) and then beaten tighter using the wooden spatula called a spathe. Once the fabric was completed, the cloth would be cut down from the loom and submerged in urine, to treat it with ammonia, a process which both cleaned and thickened the cloth. Less is known that we would like about the finished products. Artistic depictions imply that patterned cloth and tapestries were common, but no patterns survive, probably because of the relative lack of literacy amongst women and the oral tradition of the skill that would have been crucial to women’s knowledge.
Again and again, I am struck by how important the creation of textiles has always been and how little women are given credit for it. I am not sure that much has changed, to be honest. Even now spinning, weaving, knitting, crocheting, embroidering are skills that are disparaged as being ‘granny’ or ‘hippy’ interests and it is often men who take the credit for the more industrially created textiles. I like to think that it is changing, but these things do tend to run in cycles. We are offering a drop spindle workshop here on 5 September if you are interested in mastering this ancient skill – I am certainly going to be there. In the meantime, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the film and/or the poem!
