The woman of the house has always been strong to fulfil her part in this civilizing influence with the implement which custom has awarded to her. Every man in the ancient East began his life under the tent or in the palace adorned by the hands of his mother and her maidens, and his home was made beautiful by his wife and his sisters and their slaves. There, as in mediæval homes, lessons of morality and religion, and the love and fame of noble deeds, were taught by the painting of the needle to the minds of the young men, who would have scorned more direct teaching; and the children felt the influence, as the women wove what the bards sang.
Alas! we have but few specimens of embroideries of which we know the history, earlier than the tenth and eleventh centuries.[10] Yet from the days of the books of the Old Testament and the song of the siege of Troy, down to the present time, the woman of the house has adorned not only herself and her dear lord, but she has hung the walls, the seats, the bed, and the tables with her beautiful creations.
Homer’s women were all artists with the needle. Venus seeking Helen,—
“Like fair Laodice in form and face,
The loveliest nymph of Priam’s royal race,
Here in the palace at her loom she found:
The golden web her own sad story crown’d.
The Trojan wars she weaved (herself the prize),
And the dire triumph of her fatal eyes.”[11]
This must have been intended for hangings.
Hecuba’s wardrobe is thus described:—
“The Phrygian queen to her rich wardrobe went,
Where treasured odours breathed a costly scent;
There lay the vestures of no vulgar art,
Sidonian maids embroider’d every part.
Here, as the queen revolved with careful eyes
The various textures and the various dyes
She chose a web that shone superior far,
And glow’d refulgent as the morning star.”[12]
The women of the Middle Ages were great at the loom and frame. From the Kleine Heldenbuch of the thirteenth century, Rock quotes these lines:—
“Who taught me to embroider in a frame with silk,
And to sketch and design the wild and tame
Beasts of the forest and field?
Also to picture on plain surfaces;
Round about to place golden borders—
narrow and a broad one—
With stags and hinds, lifelike.”
Gudrun, like the women of Homer, embroidered history—that of the ancestors of Siegfried.