“When great Augustus ruled the World and Rome,
The Cloth he wore was spun and wove at Home,
His EMPRESS ply’d the Distaff and the Loom.”
Richard is borne out by another authority, who states that “Cæsar Augustus wore clothes made by his wife or daughter.” The hapless Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, Tarquin’s nephew, and Consul of Rome in 509 b.c., “was found spinning when her husband visited her from the camp.” Gracious pictures these, of haughty Roman matrons, wives of consuls and emperors, spinning and weaving their husbands’ togas. It is not often that we get such cosy and homelike thoughts of Rome, whose very name recalls naught but flashing legions and the clash of swords on brass.
And the women of the north, where the family was the unit of society and the village was a cluster of homesteads knit together by the ties of kindred—was the spinning-wheel heard in this land of our own ancestors? In the poetic diction of the Norsemen, with its expressive double substantives, we find that the maiden is called the “linen-folded,” that is, she who is clothed or draped in linen. In the saga called “Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue,” it is written:
“Dead in mine arms she droopeth,
My dear one, gold-ring’s bearer;
For God hath changed the life-days
Of this lady of the linen.”
She who was folded in linen was the maker of that linen; and the beautiful flowing draperies of Norse and Saxon women and the tunics of the men are as true witnesses to their homely occupations as the drapery of the Greeks. Was it not the doom of the warrior maiden Brynhild, the disobedient Valkyr, to become a woman and sit by the fire and spin? For the rough nature of the North revolted from feminine occupations, and this warrior daughter of Wotan saw in spinning only deep humiliation and disgrace. Thus the ancient northern literature is also full of pictures of the women spinning their household linen, spinning their wedding linen, spinning the linen of husbands and sons. Noble ladies in the halls of earl and thane, wives in the lowlier homes of simple freemen, and in the cots of peasant and thrall—they all spun and wove for the needs of the home. What music-lover can ever forget Wagner’s picture of the northern maids of later days assembled in a spinning-bee to spin the wedding linen for one of their number? The merry hum of the wheels so exquisitely copied by orchestra and chorus, interrupted now and then by Senta’s plaintive song of the supernatural lover who has drawn her thoughts away from her betrothed,—surely this spinning-chorus from the “Flying Dutchman” will live as long as music lives, and will remain a representative instance of this beautiful northern custom.