# The Overhogdal Tapestries > Unknown weaver or weavers, Harjedalen - Disputed. Radiocarbon results from three separate campaigns (1991, 2005, 2013) span roughly the 9th to the 12th century CE and do not fully agree; the most widely cited figure, from 2005 testing, is 1040-1170 CE. > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-overhogdal-weaver/overhogdal-tapestries-jamtli/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-12 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown weaver or weavers, Harjedalen - **Date:** Disputed. Radiocarbon results from three separate campaigns (1991, 2005, 2013) span roughly the 9th to the 12th century CE and do not fully agree; the most widely cited figure, from 2005 testing, is 1040-1170 CE. - **Medium:** Wool weft in soumak technique (snarjvav) on a warp of hemp and flax bast fibre, four figurative pieces; one further piece is a small non-figurative double weave (dubbelvav). Colored with dyes not chemically analyzed in the sources consulted. - **Dimensions:** Five separate woven pieces, individually roughly 1.6 to 2 meters long and 33 to 37 cm wide; published figures for individual pieces vary slightly between sources (for example the piece catalogued as Ia is given as both 184 cm and 164 cm long in different accounts) and are reported here as approximate for that reason. - **Object type:** Textile - **Period:** Nordic, transitional Viking Age to Christian Middle Ages - **Current location:** Jamtli, the county museum of Jamtland and Harjedalen, Ostersund, Sweden, displayed in a purpose-built room designed to evoke a Viking-age longhouse, lit to bring the figures out under firelight-effect lighting. - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary Five woven wool wall hangings, found stuffed among discarded boards in an outbuilding of Overhogdal church in Harjedalen, Sweden, in 1909, and largely ignored as a curiosity until an artist scouting for the new county museum recognized their age in 1910. Radiocarbon testing has since dated them to somewhere in the 9th to 12th centuries, with three separate studies giving different and only partly overlapping ranges, and the imagery -- rows of riders, ships, animals and a great tree, all generally moving left across the weave -- has been read by different scholars as Ragnarok, as the Christian mission that converted the region, and as scenes from the Volsunga saga.No consensus exists on any of these questions, including how many discrete pieces actually survive. What is not disputed is that this is among the oldest surviving figural wall-woven textile from Scandinavia, made at the hinge point between two belief systems, and that it was found doing duty as insulation rather than hanging on a wall. ## 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. - **9th-12th century (disputed)-1909** Unknown; findspot suggests long custody by Overhogdal parish church, but this is inferred, not documented `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, custodian or use is documented for the several centuries between weaving and rediscovery. The pieces were found stored among discarded boards in a church outbuilding, one fragment having been used as a child's doll blanket and another as plasterer's cloth beneath the pulpit stairs, indicating that by the time of discovery their original function and significance had been entirely forgotten locally. - **1909-1910** Overhogdal parish church (by findspot) `[disputed]` (rediscovery) Two documented accounts conflict on the sequence of discovery. One has Jonas Holm finding the bundle in the church sacristy woodbin during 1909 renovation work, with the artist Paul Jonze recognizing its significance in 1910. The other, given in Jamtli's own current public account and a local heritage source, has Jonze finding the bundle directly in a storage outbuilding during his 1910 visit, with no separate 1909 discoverer named. Both are recorded here rather than one being silently preferred. - **1910-1911** Overhogdal parish church; brought to public attention via Ellen Widen and the regional heritage movement in Ostersund `[documented]` (recognition and first public display) Ellen Widen, wife of the county governor, cleaned the textiles and championed them. Additional fragments, including pieces later found in use as a doll's blanket and as plasterer's cloth, were recovered by the weaving instructor Helena Oberg around 1911. The tapestries were shown publicly for the first time in 1911 as part of a church-history exhibition in Ostersund. - **1911-present** Overhogdal parish church (stated ownership); displayed at Jamtli, the county museum of Jamtland and Harjedalen, Ostersund `[documented]` (display) The tapestries are shown at Jamtli in a purpose-built room designed to evoke a Viking-age longhouse. Swedish-language sources state that formal ownership remains with the parish church rather than the museum, though no loan agreement or accession record was found in the sources consulted to confirm the legal mechanism. ## Open questions - Which of the two documented discovery accounts is correct: did Jonas Holm find the bundle in the church sacristy woodbin in 1909, with Paul Jonze recognizing its significance in 1910, or did Jonze himself find it directly in a storage outbuilding in 1910, as Jamtli's own current public account states? The sources consulted give both and do not adjudicate between them. - Why do the 1991, 2005 and 2013 radiocarbon campaigns give different, only partly overlapping date ranges, and is the divergence explained by the 2013 finding that different pieces of the group are woven from different bast fibres, meaning the pieces may not be contemporary with one another? - How many discrete pieces actually survive: four, as widely repeated summaries state, or five, as Swedish-language sources, Jamtli itself, and the 2013 fibre study all describe? Were the pieces catalogued as Ia and Ib originally one continuous weaving or always two separate ones? - Does the imagery depict Ragnarok, the Christian mission that converted the region, the Volsunga saga, or a genuinely mixed narrative drawing on more than one tradition at once? No scholarly consensus exists, and the leading candidates rest on identifying specific figures with specific named beings from written sources compiled at least a century after the tapestry's earliest plausible date. - What is the exact legal and custodial relationship between Overhogdal parish church, which is stated to retain ownership, and Jamtli, which displays the pieces? No loan agreement, deposit contract or accession number was found in the sources consulted. - What happened to the tapestry, or tapestries, between their weaving and their rediscovery in 1909-1910 -- a gap of some seven to nine centuries depending on which radiocarbon result is preferred -- during which no owner, custodian or use is documented beyond the circumstantial evidence of where they turned up? ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, "Overhogdal tapestries". Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a direct reading of Horneij (1991), Wikman (1996) and the Nockert/Franzen (1992) joint study. - [2] Wikipedia (Swedish), "Overhogdalstapeten". Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with primary museum and dissertation sources. - [3] Jamtli (Jamtlands lans museum), "Overhogdalsbonaderna - en av varldens markligaste textilskatter", official museum page. - [4] Nattidningen Svensk Historia, "Vikingavavar i varldsklass". - [5] Medieval Histories, "Viking textiles from Overhogdal". - [6] Skoglund, G., Nockert, M. and Holst, B., "Viking and Early Middle Ages Northern Scandinavian Textiles Proven to be made with Hemp", Scientific Reports 3, 2686 (2013), Nature Publishing Group. Peer-reviewed primary source for the hemp/bast-fibre identification and the associated radiocarbon data table. - [7] DiVA portal, bibliographic record for Sture Wikman, "Fenrisulven ranner. En bok om vavarna fran Overhogdal" (Jamtli Forlag, 1996). - [8] bynshistoria.info (local heritage site for Overhogdal village), pages on the village's history and on notable events, for the Paul Jonze / church-outbuilding discovery account. - [9] Wikipedia, "Georg J:son Karlin", for biographical confirmation of Karlin's role as founder and director of the Kulturen museum, Lund. Does not itself confirm his Overhogdal interpretation; that attribution rests on secondary summaries only and should be checked against Karlin's original publication. - [10] Wikimedia Commons category "Overhogdal tapestries" and individual file pages, consulted via the Commons API for licence and attribution verification of all images used in this record. - [11] Oscarsson, Ulla, "De gatfulla Overhogdalsbonaderna" ("The enigmatic Overhogdal tapestries"), Fornvardaren 32, Jamtli. The PDF was fetched but is a locked image scan; only its title, publisher and journal issue could be independently confirmed, not its internal text, which should be read directly before further claims are drawn from it. --- 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.