# Oseberg Tapestry Fragments > Unknown weaver or weavers, Vestfold workshop - c. 834 CE or somewhat earlier; the ship burial itself is dendrochronologically dated to 834 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/oseberg-tapestry-weavers/oseberg-tapestry-fragment-oslo/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-29 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown weaver or weavers, Vestfold workshop - **Date:** c. 834 CE or somewhat earlier; the ship burial itself is dendrochronologically dated to 834 - **Medium:** Tapestry weave (rosepath and other techniques) in wool weft, on a warp originally of plant fibre, probably flax, now largely perished - **Dimensions:** Surviving fragments range c. 16 to 23 cm in width; the original length or lengths of the woven pieces are unknown - **Object type:** Textile - **Period:** Norwegian, Viking Age, 9th century - **Current location:** Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo (Kulturhistorisk museum, UiO). The Oseberg ship and grave-goods collection is normally displayed at the Viking Ship Museum, Bygdoy, Oslo, which closed on 1 October 2021 for rebuilding and expansion as the Museum of the Viking Age, with reopening planned for November 2027. During the closure the museum has stated that visitors can see Viking Age exhibitions at the Historical Museum in central Oslo; some Oseberg objects, including the ship's original serpent-head post, have gone on temporary public display there since June 2025. No source consulted confirms that the tapestry fragments themselves are currently on public display anywhere; given their extreme fragility and their active use in the TexRec digital-reconstruction project, they are understood to be held in specialist textile conservation and study storage. - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary More than eighty fragments, none longer than a few tens of centimetres, are what remain of one or more woven tapestries buried in 834 CE with two women inside the Oseberg ship near Tonsberg, Norway. Excavated in 1904, the tapestries were the last part of the find to reach print, not properly published until Marianne Vedeler's 2019 monograph gave them, for the first time, dedicated study and a working fragment-numbering system.The surviving imagery includes an armed procession, what may be a battle, and a tree with human figures shown hanging in its branches, feet down, no ropes visible. Vedeler herself has floated Yggdrasil; other writers have reached for ritual sacrifice on the model of Adam of Bremen's Uppsala; Neil Price, whose own 2022 paper is the fullest recent English-language treatment, leaves the question open in his own list of things nobody yet knows. The weavers are unnamed and, on present evidence, unrecoverable, in contrast to the individually identified master woodcarvers from the same grave.The Museum of Cultural History's TexRec project is actively re-examining the fragments now, combining dye chemistry with machine-learning software that lets researchers manipulate high-resolution images of cloth too fragile to move. The home museum for this material, the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdoy, has been closed since October 2021 and will not reopen, as the Museum of the Viking Age, before November 2027; no source found for this record confirms where the tapestry fragments themselves are being kept in the meantime. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 834 CE-834 CE** Unknown weaver or weavers, Vestfold workshop tradition `[documented]` (manufacture) The ship burial in which the tapestries were found is dendrochronologically dated to 834 CE. The tapestries themselves could have been woven somewhat earlier and used before burial; no independent date for the weaving itself, distinct from the burial date, was found in the sources consulted. - **834 CE-c. 953-990 CE** Sealed within the Oseberg burial mound `[documented]` (interment) Placed among the grave goods of a ship burial containing two female skeletons, animals, a wagon, sledges and other textiles and wooden objects. - **c. 953-990 CE-1904** Sealed within the disturbed mound `[documented]` (disturbance) The mound was reopened and partially disturbed within roughly a century of the burial, an event dated by Bill and Daly's dendrochronological study of the intervention to the period 953 to 990, plausibly during the reign of Harald Bluetooth. Objects and parts of the human remains were removed at this time; no source consulted states that the tapestry fragments were specifically among the material affected. - **1904** University of Oslo excavation team led by Gabriel Gustafson `[documented]` (excavation) Excavated over the summer of 1904 at the Oseberg farm, Slagen, near Tonsberg, Vestfold. - **1904-present** Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo (successor to Oldsaksamlingen / Universitetets Oldsaksamling) `[documented]` (continuous institutional custody) Held by the university museum since excavation. Publication of the textile find was delayed for decades: a short paper by Bjorn Hougen appeared in 1940, and the full textile volume of the official excavation report was not completed until 2006. Marianne Vedeler's dedicated monograph on the tapestries appeared in 2019. The Viking Ship Museum building at Bygdoy, where the ship and grave goods are normally displayed, closed on 1 October 2021 for rebuilding as the Museum of the Viking Age, with reopening planned for November 2027; some Oseberg objects have been shown temporarily at the Historical Museum in central Oslo since 2025, though no source consulted confirms the tapestry fragments themselves are among them. The fragments are currently the subject of the TexRec digital reconstruction project, active as of 2024-2026. ## Open questions - How many fragments actually survive: institutional sources say over 80, some press accounts say over 100, and some pieces remain folded and unseparated, so no single count is final. - How many original tapestries the fragments belonged to: Marianne Vedeler has suggested at least three, but cautions the true number cannot be confirmed from fragments that cannot always be matched to one weave. - Whether the tree on Fragment 4 depicts ritual human sacrifice comparable to Adam of Bremen's account of Uppsala, or something else: Vedeler raises Yggdrasil cautiously, Irina Manea argues the sacrificial reading explicitly, and Neil Price leaves the question open in his own listing of unresolved points. - Whether the tapestries were made specifically as grave goods for this burial or were valued textiles from earlier household or ceremonial use, repurposed for the funeral: not established by any source consulted. - Who wove them: no individual is named or identifiable, though technical evidence suggests more than one hand worked on a given piece. - How the museum number 2029 b2, recorded for the photographed fragment used as this record's lead plate, relates to the museum number C55000 recorded for the wider Oseberg ship and grave find: this record could not resolve the relationship through a direct search of the unimus.no university museums portal. - Where the fragments are physically held and what condition they are in during the multi-year closure of the Viking Ship Museum: no source consulted states this explicitly beyond a general assurance that the collection is being cared for. ## Sources - [1] Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, 'TexRec - Virtual Reconstruction, Interpretation and Preservation of the Textile Artefacts from the Oseberg Find' (project page). - [2] Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, 'New knowledge about Viking tapestries from the Oseberg Ship' (2024). - [3] Bjorn Kvaal, 'Piecing together Viking tapestries from the Oseberg Ship,' Norwegian SciTech News / NTNU (22 August 2024), reporting on Davit Gigilashvili et al., 'Toward Solving a Puzzle of Fragmented Archaeological Textiles,' Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 68, no. 4 (2024), DOI 10.2352/J.ImagingSci.Technol.2024.68.4.040407. - [4] ScienceNorway, 'Nine men who may have been sacrificed - modern technology aims to uncover more from the Oseberg Viking tapestries' (2024), quoting Marianne Vedeler and Davit Gigilashvili. - [5] Neil Price, 'Performing the Vikings: From Edda to Oseberg,' Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift (RvT) 74 (2022): 63-88, drawing extensively on Marianne Vedeler, The Oseberg Tapestries (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2019). - [6] Unn Pedersen, 'The Oseberg ship burial: commemorating leadership and joint effort,' Viking Special Volume 3 (2023): 211-230. - [7] Marianne Vedeler, The Oseberg Tapestries (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2019). Cited at second hand through Price 2022 and ScienceNorway 2024; flagged for direct consultation by the editor. - [8] Wikimedia Commons file and metadata, File:2029 b 2 oseberg tekstilfunn.jpg. - [9] Wikimedia Commons file and metadata, File:CfO0164 museum no. C55000 1 Osebergskipet utgravning (Oseberg ship excavation 1904. Photo Olaf Vaering, Kulturhistorisk museum UiO Oslo, Norway. License CC BY-SA 4.0).jpg. - [10] Museum of the Viking Age, 'The Textiles in the Oseberg Find.' - [11] Museum of the Viking Age, 'The Viking Ship Museum' (closure and reopening status). - [12] Blooloop, 'Norway's new Museum of the Viking Age to open in 2027.' - [13] Museum of Cultural History / Historical Museum, 'The Serpent's Head Exhibited for the Very First Time.' - [14] Wikipedia, 'Oseberg tapestry fragments.' Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with Vedeler 2019 and the KHM catalogue directly. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Oseberg ship.' Tertiary source, used only for cross-checking excavation-level facts already sourced elsewhere; flagged for replacement. - [16] Irina Manea, 'The puzzle of the Oseberg tapestries,' Shield of Skuld (Substack essay). - [17] Wikimedia Commons file and metadata, File:A wooden cart from the Oseberg burial mound (from around 800), Norway. Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway (Vikingskipshuset pa Bygdoy) 2011.jpg. - [18] Wikimedia Commons file and metadata, File:Oseberg tekstil - no-nb digifoto 20160713 00139 NB MIT FNR 17869.jpg. - [19] Wikidata, Q25055791, 'Oseberg tapestry fragments.' --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.