I am reading about Northern Europe Triebes in 1200 BC, it is being metioned that the Druids or Elders were using a Ceremonial cloak that was exepionaly well made and that the question arised on how they were woven?
The other thing was the colour of said cloaks, it is described as a “Royal Blue” of great beauty, what kind of dyes were available to do it?
Thanks
Are you reading a scholarly work, or fiction? What are the sources it is based on?
What knowledge we have of Northern Europe in this time (IANAA/H) is based on archaelogical finds, and I don’t know if any finds include fabric dyed blue. If it did I expect the technique would also exist in more civilized lands, so maybe someone knows if there were blue dyes available at that time further south and east.
Woad is blue and can be used for dying. This page about it’s history says it was introduced to Europe between 5 - 10 thousand years ago…
Welllllllll… there are very few remaining actual garments in the world from prior to about 500 AD, I can think of probably 10 or so offhand from Northern Europe, many of them from bog burials or other random acts of Lady Luck [though with the thawing glaciers, more interesting organic remains have been turning up, but the time one has to actually discover and conserve them is microscopic, in many cases a matter of days before they corrupt to nothing usable.] The 2 best Celtic sites, Vix and Hochdorf did not have fabric organics [hm, bark and some fragmentary leather as I remember] If you want to go Eastwards, there have been some digs where fabrics were preserved - the Cherchen all the way over near modern China dud use blue in their fabrics.
And as to the dye, woad was in common use in Europe, indigo in common use in the far East [very specifically Japan.] Since we are discussing druids, it would be woad.
By the Bronze Age, there were a variety of weaving techniques in use in Northern Europe. The warp-weighted loom was popular throughout the region through the Bronze and Iron Ages and beyond.
Woad (Isatis tinctoria) was the go-to source of blue dye for prehistoric Europeans, having been widely used from the Neolithic onwards. Crushed, young leaves of the plant were fermented, yielding a durable, blue color. As an example, the famous salt mine site of Hallstatt, Austria, yielded blue-dyed textiles preserved from around 1300 BC
Note that we do have some clothes from just that period in Northern Europe. Men wore kilts, I guess you could call them, and cloaks of wool - most likely woven on the warp-weighted loom, as Toxylon has said, since they’re not too narrow or piecedwork AFAICT. Also funky felted acorn hats.
The women, on the other hand, dressed like hippies. Sexy, sexy hippies.
I saw a piece of Iron Age wool cloth at a bog body exhibit. I don’t remember the date on it, but it was at least 2000 years old. I was surprised by how fine it was; woven of very light thread, and comparable in weight to wool suiting material today.
The northern European trio of dyes were weld (yellow), woad (blue), and madder (red). The woad plant produces the same dye molecule as indigo, just in smaller quantity, so it creates the classic denim-blue hue.
Isn’t woad also what the Picts used for their skin painting?
While the literature indicates that they painted themselves, there is no proof that they used woad. There were other mineral blue pigments they might have used.
They were just as likely, from what we know, to have been tattooed as painted, and apparently woad is not a good tattoo pigment.
Thanks everybody for the information and especialy for the additional details…
Not necessarily. Could also have been a mineral dye, that is to say powdered blue rocks ; or something insect-, snail-, mussel- or mollusc-based.
Here’s an example of the latter - from Judea, I hasten to add, but :
a) it’s very possible that dyes were traded between the Med. market and the North Sea market as early as that (dyes were, throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages and well into the modern era, one hot good. Fortunes were made trading teeny tiny pots or bags of colour. Vanitas, vanitatum et omnia vanitas, eh ?) and
b) they might have had local equivalents in terms of sea-thingies.
Or mushroom-based! Sarcodon Squamosus (grows in pine forests in northern Europe) is famous for yielding blue color if properly treated (preferably last year’s, rotten specimens).
The finest kind of textile in ancient times, at least in Scandinavia, was made from nettle fibre. Linen was somewhat cheaper, and wool was the usual garment stuff.
