Keeping the cold out, first
The North never had the luxury of choosing between warm and beautiful. People knitted to get through winter, the rest came after. The local answer holds in two strands: you knit with two colours at once, letting the resting strand run behind the work. That doubles the thickness and traps a layer of air, which does the real work against the cold.
You find this gesture from the Norwegian glove to the Icelandic sweater, in a thousand variants. The motif is not just decoration: wherever two strands pass, the stitch is doubled, so warmer. So the design is loaded where the body is exposed, at the wrists, the back of the hand, around the neck. The pretty and the useful pull the same way.
The wool is often kept raw. Little or not dyed, still a touch greasy with its lanolin, it repels water and smells of sheep. An honest material, a yarn that has kept something of the animal, far from the smooth, odourless fibres spun today on the production line.
The Selbu rose
It all started with a pair of gloves. Around 1857, in Selbu, a village of Trøndelag, a young girl named Marit Emstad came to church with mittens knitted in black and white, sown with a large eight-pointed star. The story has no doubt been smoothed by time, but the motif took hold. The village took it up, then the region, then the country.
It is called the Selbu rose, the selburose. An eight-pointed star, built stitch by stitch on the grid of the knit, growing or tightening according to the room you give it. Easy to describe, long to get right: one stitch off, and the star limps.
From a village sign it became the sign of a whole north. You find it on gloves, caps, sweaters, right down to logos and commemorative coins. It is that star, not an invented decoration, that the Skadi balaclava takes up. A frank borrowing from a living tradition, this time knitted in cotton.
The bunad, brought out for high days
Step up towards dress costume and you meet the bunad. Every Norwegian valley has its own, with its cut, its embroidery, its colours. To a trained eye, a bunad tells where you come from almost as well as an accent.
Beware, though, the idea of an unchanging costume come down from the mists of time. The bunad as worn today was in large part reconstructed in the early twentieth century, from old garments, rediscovered embroidery and a little patriotic momentum. Hulda Garborg and Klara Semb did much to put it back on people's shoulders.
That doesn't make it false. It is brought out on 17 May, the national day, for christenings and weddings. It is passed on, taken in to fit, set off with the family silver. A garment kept a whole life, often longer than a life. The exact opposite of the disposable.
The lopapeysa, younger than it looks
The big Icelandic sweater with its circular yoke, the lopapeysa, has all the air of a Viking heirloom. It is nothing of the sort. It appears in the mid-twentieth century, around the 1950s, when Iceland was looking for a garment both national and saleable to visitors. The object is recent; the material goes back far.
For Icelandic wool is a thing apart. The island's sheep, isolated for a thousand years, gives a double coat: a fine warm down beneath, a long water-shedding hair on top. Spun without too much twist, it gives lopi, that slightly loose yarn, light and lofty, which holds warmth without weight.
The yoke of stars or snowflakes turning around the shoulders is therefore only half an ornament. Two strands, two colours, a double thickness right where the wind strikes. And often the shades owe nothing to dye: they are the greys, browns and creams of the sheep itself.
Sweden and Denmark in Sunday best
Further south, the cold bites less and costume breathes. In Sweden, almost every parish had its folkdräkt: a plain or striped skirt, a laced bodice, an apron, a cap. Dalarna, around Rättvik and Leksand, kept the liveliest, still worn at Midsummer when people dance around the flowered pole.
These costumes nearly slipped away in the nineteenth century, before they were gathered and recorded, rather like the neighbouring bunads. The painter Anders Zorn, a son of the region, did his part by dressing his Dalarna models in them. Without that eye, half these skirts would have stayed in the attic.
Denmark, flat and turned towards the farm, left soberer costumes: dark wool, linen, white caps, measured embroidery. Always the same logic of the farming North. Something solid for every day, an embroidered piece brought out for the feast.
The Faroes: wool for their only gold
Lost between Scotland and Iceland, the Faroe Islands have a saying that tells it all: wool is the gold of the Faroes. On these rain-battered rocks, where almost nothing grows, the sheep was long the only wealth and its coat the only protection.
Hence a tradition of dense, patterned knitting, cousin to the Icelandic but with its own designs and its stitch notebooks handed from hand to hand. The Faroese sweater even had a recent second life, seen on the shoulders of a television detective. Proof that a garment of necessity can become desirable again without denying itself.
The festive costume, for its part, plays silver on dark cloth: a bodice laced with chains, worked buttons, a shawl over the shoulders. As everywhere in the North, the precious is placed where it counts, in small quantity, on a ground of wool that must first keep you warm.
