By Marianne Vedeler, Professor, Cultural History Museum, University of Oslo (UiO), and Lars Mytting, Author
This article was published in Forskersonen.no on November 23, 2022, and translated by Katherine Larson.
A battle is fought in a pictorial tapestry from Oseberg, 9th century. Drawing Stig Saxegaard.
For over 300 years, stories about the Hekne sisters have been an important part of oral tradition, but no one has found tangible evidence that they actually existed.
In the beginning of the 18th century, a priest named Stockfleth wrote in the Dovre church records that two conjoined sisters from a place called Hekne gave the church a tapestry that they themselves had woven. He called them a monster. Since that time the legend has lived on in Gudbrandsdalen.
The story of the Hekne sisters is connected to a very special form of weaving. Through their textile pictures, local artists brought forth central stories from the Bible as well as chivalric ballads. This manner of telling stories had deep roots in the oral traditions of the Middle Ages.
A Special Tapestry Tradition in Gudbrandsdal
A special form of tapestry weaving flourished in 17th century Gudbrandsdalen and certain other areas of southern Norway. These were tapestries woven in a technique that likely came from Flanders, but one that developed its own style in Gudbrandsdalen.
The characteristic manner in which figures and patterns were combined, as well as the use of color, make these textiles distinctive and easily recognizable. But it is not only the stories told by these pictorial textiles that make them a living and treasured expression of art.
In the past when stories were to be told in halls and dwelling places, pictorial textiles were well suited to evoke emotions. They showed highlights of the shared stories that everyone knew, and they also served as “memory cues” for the story teller.
A line runs from the pictorial textiles of the Viking Age Oseberg grave through the Middle Ages and forth to the Renaissance textiles from Gudbrandsdalen. Medieval sagas suggest that pictorial tapestries had a very special role in the story-telling tradition.
In the Lay of Gudrun from the Poetic Edda, Gudrun weaves all of her sorrows into the bloody story of Sigurd the Dragonslayer. In the Orkneyinga Saga, there is a scene in which two skalds compete over who can create the best descriptive verse from the stories depicted in the hall’s tapestries. In this case the weaver and the skald go hand in hand.
Weavers with Unusual Capabilities
In stories from the Middle Ages, weavers are not simply visual story tellers. They often have magical capabilities that can change the course of history. They can see into the future, but also cause ill fortune and sickness, rob people of their wits and strength, open mountains and gravemounds, and even commit murder.
After the Reformation it seems that the connection between magic and tapestry weaving remained. Written records from the end of the 16th century indicate that at least two of the women burned as witches during that time were associated with tapestry weaving. On the other hand, the Hekne sisters gave their fantastic tapestry to the church so that God would arrange their deaths to be at the same time. And God did in fact do this, writes Stockfleth. Even so there are several hints in the Hekne sisters’ legend that they had almost magical capabilities.
The Hekne Sisters Embodied a Warning
When the priest of Dovre church wrote down the story of the Hekne sisters, he devoted most of his narrative to describing the sisters’ unusual appearance. They each had a head, he says, but only one hand and one foot each. That he called them a monster [et monstrum] is a very important detail, since at that time the word had another meaning. It is derived from monere, which means to warn.
The birth of a malformed child was considered a warning from God, a message that should be meticulously interpreted and decoded. This was part of a common European notion. In early modern Europe, monstrous births found their way into everything from illustrative prints to books about miracles to medical works. These were extreme creatures, lying at the intersection between human and animal, between man and woman, between one and several. This points back to a pre-Christian symbolism of natural omens that was now interpreted in a new early modern understanding of the world.
The Stories That Kept Each Other Alive
For over 300 years stories of the Hekne sisters were an important part of the oral tradition in Gudbrandsdalen, despite the fact – or perhaps precisely because of the fact – that no one had managed to find tangible evidence that they ever lived. It is striking that many officials of the 18th and 19th centuries, among them Gerhard Schøning, found space to describe the Hekne sisters in otherwise succinct accounts of the Dovre area.
The textile is described in several old records, locally called the Hekne weaving or Hekne decoration. It is not an exaggeration to call this Gudbrandsdalen’s most legendary weaving. It eventually disappeared from the church and became – especially following the travels of antique dealers in the 19th century – an object shrouded by myth.
The description of the subject varies, as does that of the textile’s fate. It may have been sold abroad, perhaps purchased and brought back, possibly switched, or falsified or kept in secret. The stories about the sisters would never have been so enduring if they were not tied to a weaving that had disappeared, just as fascination with the weaving would never have been so strong if it had been made by a person with an ordinary life story.
What Was the Motif of the Hekne Tapestry?
The oldest sources give us no indication of the motif in the Hekne tapestry, but one of the most influential families of weavers in the area was convinced that it depicted the Biblical story of the Three Wise Men. Women in this family made two weavings with this motif, one in 1860 and another around 1931. This was long after the time when this special tapestry-weaving tradition flourished.
Tapestry from Gudbrandsdalen, 17th century, with the Three Wise Men motif. Photo: National Museum. Full record here.
The “new” tapestries are almost identical, and both are described by the weavers in family records as copies of the Hekne weaving, and with descriptions of the Hekne sisters. Thus the legend of the Hekne sisters lived on through new weavings.
Collective Wonder
The stories of the fantastic weavers from Hekne bring forth actors that otherwise are often silent or rarely seen in the sources. They give a glimpse of skilled craftswomen’s contribution to setting the stage for collective storytelling, and in that way incorporating a continental trend into a local tradition. In this context it makes little difference whether the incredible stories are “true.”
The legend of the Hekne sisters and the surviving tapestries from Gudbrandsdalen are sources of both wonder and new knowledge about the past. They are our common cultural heritage. What is more natural then to bring them forth in the light and look at them from several angles at the same time? Searching out the sources and discussing them with curiosity can provide an opening for both stories and research.
Marianne Vedeler holds a position as Professor in Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. Her primary area of research is the Viking Age and late medieval periods in Scandinavia.
Translated in April, 2023, by Katherine Larson, Affiliate Assistant Professor,
Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Washington, Seattle
Editor’s note: Lars Mytting wove the story of the Hekne sisters into his novel, The Bell in the Lake. Listen to a Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum bokprat [book talk] with the author and Dr. Maren Johnson, Luther College’s Associate Professor of Nordic Studies and Torgerson Center for Nordic Studies Director. View on YouTube.
For a more detailed investigation of Norwegian historical tapestry, storytelling, and the legend of the Hekne sisters, see Marianne Vedeler’s article: Gudbrandsdalen Tapestries and the Story of the Hekne Sisters.
October 2023; originally published October, 2022
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