Viking Hairstyles: A Response to "Reenactorisms: Viking Fashion That Isn't Viking"

give me a viking with hair long beautiful hair totally naked otherwise hello crooks and all welcome back jimmy here so one of my videos last year kind of blew up a little bit which is i think where a lot of you guys may have come from so hi thank you and i kind of got a load of similar questions on that video that were all relating to a similar theme and that theme is viking hairdos and specifically the actual evidence that we have for viking hairdos so we're going to take a little look at that today before we jump straight in i want to say thank you to all my new patrons on patreon we've just started a discord server and we've got like 50 people on it already so it's great fun hop on over there if you're interested uh i'll put a link in the description and you can find out more information so dear maria thank you very much to you and i also want to say that i'm not going to be doing phrase of the week for this video instead what i'm going to do is do some sort of occasional videos about welsh welsh language and welsh language learning okay that's enough hair so one of the main questions that i got quite frequently was have you heard of the soybean knot and the answer to that is yes of course i've heard of the sweaty and not i did a video about reenactorisms and viking hairstyles and the first place everybody always goes to is the swepian knot the swepian knot if you haven't heard of it is are not attributed to the germanic tribes specifically the swepe in the roman imperial period and we actually have evidence for it that's quite widespread we have bronzes like this and we have carved stones like this and we actually have two preserved bog bodies with and not hairdos and we have one that is a complete skull with the full head of hair and we have one that is basically a wig it's just the hair which is kind of kind of sad and i really hope that the archaeologists who found that didn't put the hair on but i feel like they definitely did i really hope they didn't i would have the soybean knot is absolutely not an undercut um there's this idea because in my other video i criticized the like shaved sides of the head ragnar from viking's hairdo as a re-enactorism which it is and people are saying oh but what about the and knot that's shaved sides of the head it's not it's not it's not an undercut at all you don't need an undercut for the sweaty or not in fact all of the evidence points to people not using an undercut and the preserved head that we have i think it's the ostopy man doesn't have a shaved head he has male pattern baldness his hair is thinning he has really thin hair on the sides of his head so rather than this being a perfect example of this viking age hairdo it's actually a first and second century germanic celtic hairdo that was recognized by the romans and doesn't involve you shaving your head at all so sorry i wish we had evidence of it in the viking age i really do because i think it's a pretty neat hairdo i think it's fantastic that you can just tie a knot in your hair and leave it there it doesn't require anything else it just needs you to have long hair you tie it up in a fancy cool knot and you just sort of pop it on the side of your head seems really practical so the next thing that i'm going to address is the actual evidence of hairdos from the viking age now we do have evidence from the viking age of hair and i don't just mean people owning hair i mean the way that they wore their hair the overwhelming evidence for it is either long hair just worn long sometimes in a plait or just a short hairdo of some sort it's difficult to tell a lot of the runestones that we have to use as our evidence are people in profile with no facial features no details at all they're just a flat silhouette almost of a person sometimes with a pointy beard sometimes without a beard sometimes with what looks like long hair really difficult to tell i mean try and figure out the hairdo from this for goodness sake but two of the places people have been sort of frequently telling me oh but we've got evidence of the ragnar hairdo from these places are one the gospel stone so let's look at that so the gospel stone is from cumbria in the northwest of england and it is a large cross the gosforth cross i should call it it's a large christian cross that also has elements of norse mythology on it and norse religious images including loki bound in chains which is from one of the norse religious stories loki in this image we seem to see him wearing some kind of the hairdo now it's difficult to tell because once again this is a very very simplistic image he seems to be wearing his hair platted to me that is somebody attempting to draw platts when i was a kid and i tried to draw plaits i would do like a sausage outline and then sort of do a criss-cross in the middle this doesn't have the criss-cross but it looks to me like plats what it doesn't definitively show is a man with a top knot and the very top of his head left unshaven that's not a ragnar hairdo guys come on i mean maybe it's bound with ribbons at various points maybe it's even guarded with ribbons down the ponytail but it's not that for sure it's not that what it does show is the combination of christian and norse religious elements in one place which suggests a great deal of cross-cultural contact and harmony between the pagan and the christian really quite nicely dispelling that whole pagan versus christian argument that the racists love to use so much thanks actual vikings so the next piece of evidence people have been really pushing as a response to my video is the inch monarch the inch manic stone is a really difficult one it's really cool one but it's a really difficult one because it's a childlike scroll i'm not being harsh here i've got an actual picture by a nine-year-old child of the bayer tapestry that is better quality than this stone yes like this does not show an undercut this is a toddler's scroll of big bad man with big bad hair like this is big bad man hair it's it's like wild hair because this is a scary man taking a monk away it's actually more interesting because what it shows us about the christian monk here he's clearly a member of the celtic church with a house shrine carried on his wrist and he's being taken away by three men in mail to ships presumably norse raiders but equally they might be not norse readers it doesn't say that they're norse we're just assuming that but hair wise i'm kind of more interested in the monk than the vikings because the vikings have got big wild wavy hair but in terms of celtic christianity the celtic tonsil is one of those really big interesting debates that we still don't really have an answer to what did the celtic tonsil look like how was it applied who wore it mystery absolute mystery i'm sure you guys have got your own theories feel free to share them in the comments so the next piece of evidence that people have been promoting in response to that video is this head from a cart from the osseberg grave the aussberg ships amazing if you haven't been to see it i highly recommend it's fantastic it's a double female inhumation two women were buried in this massive ship with tons of grave goods they had beds they had furniture there's a car there's tapestries there's embroidery there's loads of tablet weave there's absolutely tons of stuff there's cannabis seeds and it's just an amazing assemblage fantastic thing like i can't emphasize enough how cool this is that we found this this is the head that people have been talking about and to me that's a beardy man wearing a hat and people have been trying to convince me that it's hair but i think that's a hat like it goes around and it's a hat to me and even if it is hair it's separate to the ponytail that's shown carved on the back so what is it a wig on top of his ponytail is he just like captain picarding it above here and he's got a ponytail at the back i'm like that's a what it's not a realistic depiction he's got a beard and a ponytail maybe a hat maybe hair it's hard to tell it's super difficult to tell but once again what it doesn't depict is the soccer it's not the ragnar do i'm sorry it's just not ragnar's got enough room for a stupid dragon head tattoo right above his ear and like that's not something supported by any of what we've just seen so one of the other things that people were saying is oh this is a warrior's haircut it's a warrior haircut for warriors for real men and yet all of the depictions we have of warriors don't show this hairdo that's not this hairdo that's certainly not this head that's absolutely not this hairdo and in case anybody thinks that this video is just me dumping on man buns i've got one right now [Music] okay i don't hate the ragnar hacker i think it's a pretty badass haircut if you're in a metal band i just don't like it when people claim that it's based on solid historical evidence when it's not that's my problem with it i don't have a problem with people wearing it i don't have a problem with viking reenactors wearing it i have a problem with the fact that it is a modern hairdo that has been popularized and is now being claimed to be completely historically accurate which it isn't and you can't claim that nothing that we do as re-enactors is completely historically accurate at all this sword too short blunt made of the wrong kind of metal this shield plywood this helmet wrong kind of steel nearly twice the size of the original because my massive dome nothing we do as historical reenactors is ever a hundred percent accurate ever and especially things like nuanced haircuts did a viking at some point wear the ragnar haircut sure why not do we have evidence that it was a particularly popular haircut from the period absolutely 100 not no we don't nobody can make that argument and not be lying one of the other things that people have been saying and this is a fairly regular one is they have been quoting elfrick of ancient now alfreck of ancient was an abbot in the end of the 10th century and early 11th century and he actually wrote some manuscripts that we still have fragments of he wrote part of the book of genesis in one of the preserved books that we have which is really kind of cool because this guy lived a thousand years ago and we've got some of his work preserved one of the things he also did was he wrote a letter and his letter is to a man called brother edward not his brother edward as some people have said on the internet brother edward he's a monk he's a monk writing to another monk come on guys in this letter it's claimed by a lot of people some of the people who've been commenting on my previous video that alfrick and this is how you spell his name was writing a letter complaining about the vikings on their hair that is not what is happening here at all what is happening here is alfreck abbott of ancient is writing to brother edward a fellow monk possibly another abbot don't know complaining about anglo-saxons wearing danish style hair he's not even talking about the danes he's talking about anglo-saxons these youngsters today wearing danish haircuts with their bad necks and their blinded eyes what does that mean well bad neck is fairly obvious they don't have hair on their neck but i don't know about you but i grow hair on my neck right here so does he mean that they're shaving their beards completely does he mean that they're shaving up to here does it mean that they're shaving all the way up to the crown hard to tell it's from a thousand years ago oh yeah also this is from the very end of the 10th early 11th century so this is absolutely not the start of the viking age it's like middle to end of the viking age and he's not talking about vikings and he's probably referencing danish fashion in the dane lore a lot of christian danes in the danelaw so what he's actually probably referring to is a forerunner of this the really famous norman haircut from the buyer tapestry it's an embroidery but still whatever so this was made around 1070 in england and it depicts a norman haircut that to all intents and purposes is bare neck fringe at the front so blinded eyes right they've got a kind of front fringe shaved all around the neck up to the back kind of shaped sides but also shaped everywhere else they've just got a hair island they've got a hair island that is a very niche podcasting reference very impressed if anyone gets that in the comments i will give you a pint i will buy you a pint if you get that reference so i think that what al frick of ancient is actually referencing here is the sort of late danish early norman hairdo that becomes more popular in the 11th century that we see on the bayer tapestries right he's probably not talking about the ragnar haircut why would this be the ragnar haircut that doesn't make sense and this is where i do something that i never ever ever expected to be doing in one of my videos i'm going to compliment vikings check out bjorn's hair bare neck and blinded eyes isn't it damn it i hate that they did so well on this haircut it's a norman haircut it is a norman haircut and yes the normans were descended from the norse that's where the word norman comes from north man nor man it's not a difficult leap but they are not norse by the time of the bio tapestry and people need to stop saying that they are speaking french they are christian they have a bishop in their army so just stop and don't at me with that garbage i hate to say it but yeah they kind of nailed that one unfortunately the rest of the hairdos don't even get started take it away in vikings are pretty much fantasy but it's a fantasy show and it's got a supreme cheek calling itself any kind of history i'm gonna move on now from what people have been saying in response to the video to kind of the next stage which is okay so where do we find out more well go to the primary sources every single secondary source on this is going to be weakened somehow because it's a secondary source if it's a later anglo-saxon description it's biased against the norse if it's the sagas it's a christian icelandic 13th century fictionalized history book if it's modern re-enactors they're modern re-enactors they're 21st century people and 20th century people they're not vikings they wear their hair how they want 99 of the time and 99 of the time it's probably not authentic to the period i mean my hair's probably not authentic to the period right now and it's a very very conservative version of the ragnar haircut small c conservative oh god i'm not a tory please don't think i'm a tory look at the primary evidence and make your own interpretations i'm i'm not saying that you can't wear your hair how you want a reenactment once again wear your hair how you like you're a modern human being the thing that you should be really striving to make as accurately as possible is your general impressions your clothes your kit your accessories your hair is part of your body and you have complete autonomy over that as far as i'm concerned you can have dyed pink half shaved with a pixie cut on the other side i don't care i will tell you your hair is badass it's just somebody's hair guys come on chill out and ask other people what they think there are plenty of knowledgeable people out there if you're on the discord for my patreons throw loads of primary sources into there we've got a great discussion going on the discord right now it's a really cool community so absolutely join in join into the discussion and throw in your opinions no judgment just your interpretation interpretation is what this is all about that's the whole point of historical reenactment having said that if you do try to make your hair as authentic as possible and if you have inauthentic hair and you cover it up at events under your own steam good on you for trying to make yourself look as immersively authentic to the period as possible that's a really really cool thing to do and i really appreciate people who do that i mean i try to do it i never wear nail varnish when i'm in kit at an event i always try to make my facial hair and my hair at least look sort of authentic it's cool people are more likely to take photos of you like that as well so you know it's your absolute hurt for the cameras like i am breathed a lot of water in that it's not the rona one of the other big things that people wanted to talk about in terms of my other video was the combat gloves the viking combat gloves saying that you need gloves of some sort to take part in viking reenactment combat and i agree i think everybody should wear some kind of hand protection i'm a musician i play the cello so i do not want to damage my hands irreparably doing my hobby so please don't think that i'm saying don't wear gloves in combat wear gloves in combat but also own the fact that they are not authentic you can make them more authentic by making leather mittens and then lining them uh you can even put metal inside the leather be very careful make sure it's not going to make direct contact with your hands consult an armor i don't know about you guys but i feel like that's probably enough talking about viking hair for one video so thank you so much for joining me own ipob and until the next time who will emma draw bye for now this helmet see this yarm helmet i'm gonna get it blackened

Channel: The Welsh Viking

Views: 164,820

Keywords: Vikings, Norse, Anglo Saxon, Viking hair, Vikings hair, Welsh Viking, Reenactorisms, Reenactorisms: Viking Fashion That Isn't Viking, Norsemen, Norse culture, Norse history, medieval fashion, Viking fashion, Norse fashion, Ragnar Lothbrok, Aelfric

Id: CdQx_jI9-T8

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021