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Skadi, goddess of cold who walked before the light

The name of the first balaclava comes from a rough Norse figure. What the North really wore against the cold can be read in an 11th-century grave.

Skadi is no gentle goddess. In the Norse tales, she arrives with skis, mountains, the hunt, a kind of cold that asks no permission. She's often presented as a giantess, daughter of Thjazi, come to the gods to demand redress after her father's death.

The episode is strange, as often in the myths of the North. The gods offer her compensation. She must choose a husband seeing only his feet. She thinks she recognises Baldr, the fair one, and actually chooses Njord, bound to the sea. The marriage holds badly. He loves gulls and the shore; she prefers wolves in the mountains.

Illustration by W. G. Collingwood showing Skadi looking toward the mountains. — W. G. Collingwood gives Skadi a posture of longing: the sea and the marriage aren't enough, the gaze turns back to the mountains.W. G. Collingwood · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

The texts say almost nothing about her clothes. They show her on skis, bow in hand, and leave the rest to the illustrators. To know how people really faced the cold in the North of that time, you have to leave the myth and look at what the ground has kept.

Antique engraving of Njord and Skadi on the road to Noatun. — Njord and Skadi on the way to Noatun: the myth holds in that impossible movement between shore and mountain.Friedrich Wilhelm Heine, after Friedrich Wilhelm Engelhard · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

In 1936, at Skjoldehamn, on the island of Andøya in northern Norway, a peat bog gave up an 11th-century grave with an almost complete outfit, trousers included. The most striking piece is a hood: a few squares of wool twill sewn together, with a wide cape that falls to a point on the chest. It is one of the oldest examples of the hood that would later cover the whole of medieval Europe.

The Skjoldehamn outfit on display: pale wool tunic, belt and brown hood with a cape. — The Skjoldehamn outfit, 11th century, on display. Its caped hood is one of the oldest known in Europe.Justin Hall · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

At that time, nobody in Scandinavia knits yet. Mittens, caps and socks are made in nålebinding, a single short needle that draws the yarn through loop after loop. Warmth is built in layers: a wool tunic, a hood, well-covered hands and feet. Nothing spectacular, just wool put to good use.

Group at a Norwegian mountain farm, in workwear against a slope landscape. — The Nordic mountain as a working backdrop: covered figures, slope, useful material.Fylkesarkivet i Sogn og Fjordane · No restrictions · Wikimedia Commons

Folkovar gave the name to a balaclava, a distant cousin of that hood: a piece that covers the head, the neck and the lower face without erasing the gaze. The name only gives a direction: mountain, restraint, sharpness, old cold.

Close-up of a Selbu rose knitted in white on a dark green ground. — The Selbu rose ties Skadi to concrete Nordic knitting. The name comes from the myth, the motif comes from a situated textile tradition.Nils R. Barth · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

The motif stays Nordic too. It comes from the Selbu rose, an 8-pointed star knitted in Trøndelag, far more than from a Slavic symbolism or a generalised solar wheel. Precision avoids the big blur. A story often gains from knowing where it speaks from.

So the balaclava that bears her name can stay contemporary: Portuguese cotton, knitted in the Ave valley, pre-order, everyday use. It keeps a line from the North without imitating an archaeological object. That's exactly Folkovar's work: not to replay the past, but to keep the object from being empty.