NORWEGIAN SWEATER DETECTIVE
In a postcard-perfect valley in southern Norway, Annemor Sundbø nurtures her life’s work: old garments, paintings, and other clues to the myths and meaning woven for centuries into Norwegian sweaters. Now she’s trying to bring back the sheep that used to sustain this time-honoured craft. The Setesdal valley was once quite remote from the more populous Norwegian coast, with access to its interior possible only by means of a network of trails and footpaths. Today, the region’s unique culture preserves traditions in dress, dialect, poetry, and music that go back to the middle ages.
In 1983, Sundbø asked a local mill owner for permission to study weaving on his industrial machines. Instead, he sold her the mill, Torridal Tweed og Ulldynefabrikk. With it, she acquired 16 tons of cast-off wool sweaters, socks, mittens, and underwear destined to be recycled. The real treasure, however, were dozens of hand-knit traditional sweaters, she organised by pattern so that you could see how they had been modified by individual knitters. The iconic eight-pointed stars, for example, were treated differently sweater by sweater, and valley by valley.
Images: All photographs © Mikkel Aaland
The famous Setesdal sweater is probably the most recognised design within and beyond Norway. It is marked by a distinctive ‘lice’ pattern of white dots knit into a black background, and a neckline framed in colourful embroidery called løyesaumen and secured with a silver clasp. It is the Norwegian pattern most closely identified with a particular place and tradition, and Sundbø has become the country’s most respected expert of this design.
‘Because I was a knitter and a weaver, I could easily see how it was repaired, how it was reused a second time for something else. I could also read the feelings of the person who had made it, and I could read the techniques.’ Sundbø’s rescue of the sweaters launched a lifetime mission to discover, document and preserve the craft of artisanal Norwegian knitting while it is still in living memory. In valuing handmade work when the rest of the world was falling in love with industrialisation, she was well ahead of her time.
Video: In this episode of Norwegian Craft Traditions with Arne & Carlos, the pair meet up with Annemor, a distant relative of Arne's.
She has interviewed the oldest women and men she can find in remote Norwegian enclaves to find out what they wore, how they were taught to knit, and how they learned patterns. She has identified symbols that date back to pre-Christian mythology, and which tell stories that even the knitters no longer understand. She is a magpie, ferreting out historical clues in fairy tales, Viking sagas and burial mounds, etymological traditions, old paintings, vintage postcards, and even in the remnants of knitted sweaters used to insulate 19th century houses.
Sundbø has written seven books that document the cultural heritage of Norwegian knitting and textiles. One, Invisible Threads in Knitting (2005) won Norway’s Sørlandet Literature prize. An eighth, called Koftearven, historiske tråder og magiske mønster, is forthcoming. The books do their own share of weaving, bringing together a montage of stories about motifs, symbolism, folk beliefs, historical context, and technical invention. Her work, she says, explores the interaction between spirit, hand, and tools. The intensity of Sundbø’s obsession is contagious. She is nearly 71, with a short, practical bob of white hair, vivid blue eyes, and a smile that illuminates her face and immediately draws you in. In conversation, and in her writing, Sundbø makes it clear she is undaunted by academic experts, and unfettered by canonical precision. She gathers material widely and makes hypotheses that are radical, but she doesn’t cling to these ideas. She merely points to surprising and unexpected ways of considering a problem, and asks, could it be so? And then she laughs her big laugh.
In her teen years, Sundbø started using her great grandmother’s spinning wheel and a loom made by her grandfather. Over the succeeding decades, she travelled to Paris, where the widow of Isadora Duncan’s brother taught her how to use a drop spindle; to Denmark’s Faroe Islands, where she taught weaving and apprenticed under a farm-woman who was a wool expert; and went on to learn spinning and weaving in China, Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands, Zambia, Tanzania, and taught spinning in the Kalahari desert. When she returned to Norway in 1983, that is when she bought the factory in Setesdal, the country’s last shoddy mill, located in a valley that is an enclave of ancient, well preserved folk culture. It’s no surprise, then, that Sundbø’s rag-pile led her to write the definitive history of the Setesdal sweater. By this point, Sundbø has taught and lectured all over the world, and many of the sweaters and stockings and undergarments from her rag-pile collection have travelled with her. One sweater graced the cover of a fashion magazine in Japan, and her mittens were shown at the Nordic Heritage museum in Seattle. Another tattered sweater was used for an art project that drew international acclaim, making the British artist Celia Pym a finalist for the 2017 Loewe Craft prize.
In her loft exhibit, Sundbø points to the way that the various sweater designs shifted as different pairs of hands made different garments. ‘I tried to let the pattern from one sweater go over into the other sweater, so you can see how the tradition is travelling,’ she says. She points to a grey sweater, knit in a pattern I recognise from one I own that was knitted by my husband’s mother. ‘It has been repaired, and it’s not repaired the same on each side,’ she explains. ‘A sweater tells a sort of story, that they have been short of something, and they have changed the design.’
Today, Sundbø says, we consider crafts like knitting or weaving to be skills, embodying techniques that can be learned. We may even concede that art is involved, by which we mean that the work involves imagination, creativity, and inspiration. But Sundbø argues that even these definitions are missing something. In ancient times, she posits, textiles and the stories woven into them embodied a direct spiritual transmission from the maker to the recipient, a transmission that was both a literal and a figurative form of protection from danger and evil.
Written by Sarah Pollock.
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This story is an excerpt from “The Norwegian Sweater Detective,” which originally appeared in Craftsmanship Quarterly and was then published in Issue 96 Nordic of Selvedge. The full article with additional photos can be found at craftsmanship.net.
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