This month's HSM challenge is Silver Screen - make something inspired by a costume from a movie or TV show. My original plan for this challenge was to make an Egyptian bead dress (a historicized version of a costume Theda Bara wore in Cleopatra), but in order to get that done in time for the deadline I would have to have started sometime around July. I didn't. So I've had to scale back my ambitions and find a less time-consuming project. The idea of taking something blatantly, egregiously unhistorical and turning it into something actually attested in the archaeological record really appeals to me, and that was always what I wanted to do for this challenge, but as I say I ran out of time. Then one day I was flicking through my copy of The Viking Way while I waited for some code to compile, and I came across the Hedeby masks. And I remembered that episode of Vikings, where the French emperor Charles and his daughter Gisla have those outstandingly unhistorical masks. Vikings gets a lot of flak generally for its historical inaccuracy, and for good reasons. I understand the process and the considerations involved, but I find Vikings hard to watch because it departs so far from reality. As far as those masks go I'm not aware of any historical reality behind them and I have no idea why the writers chose to give the characters masks*, but the vikings did have masks and I thought a historically accurate viking era mask would be a fun little thing to make. As always with Vikings, the reality is much more interesting, and much stranger, than the TV show. In reality, viking masks looked more like this: Reconstruction of a 10th century viking mask made from felt. This mask is based on a 10th century one from Hedeby. The original appears to represent a sheep and I tried to make mine look like a sheep too, but I should probably point out here that we do not know for sure the Hedeby mask was meant to be a sheep. It's a bit ragged now and may have been bent a bit out of shape, but it certainly looks like a sheep. Here is the original Hedeby mask: From page 172 of The Viking Way by Neil Price. The masks found at Hedeby were probably used in rituals relating to the god Odin. It's a standing joke in archaeological circles that any object whose purpose isn't immediately apparent must be a ritual artifact, but in this case we can be reasonably confident the masks were associated with worship of Odin. There's a good discussion of this in The Viking Way, and we actually have a 10th century description from Constantine VII of a dance that involved animal skins and masks. The original Hedeby mask has a fuzzy nap, made by brushing the surface of the felt with some kind of a stiff brush. My version also has a nap made by brushing the felt surface in the direction the sheep's fur should go. The Challenge: Silver Screen. Fabric: A piece of felt 25 cm by 25 cm, which I made from the wool I had left over from my Borum Eshøj belt. It's easy enough to make felt from yarn if the yarn is thick and made from real wool; you simply un-spin the yarn and felt the resulting strips of un-spun fiber. Pattern: The Viking Answer Lady provides a gridded diagram of the Hedeby sheep mask. I played around with it to make a pattern that takes into account the shape of the surviving fabric and is bilaterally symmetrical, as the mask would have been originally. Year: Somewhere around the 10th century. Notions: Linen thread to sew up the nose and help shape the head. How historically accurate is it? I think it's very accurate. Maybe even 90% as the pattern is directly based on a 10th century artifact. The felt I made is wool, but it may not be exactly like wool used in the viking age. I'm not sure about that. I made the felt with soap and a sushi mat, which of course isn't the authentic viking way. I don't know how they made felt, but I do know how cloth was fulled in the middle ages and I therefore suspect the felting process involved urine. There's a limit to how far I'm prepared to go in the pursuit of historical accuracy. Hours to complete: Two, including making the felt and messing around with the pattern. First worn: I tried to take some photos of me wearing the mask, but this was not a success as it turns out the eye holes on the original aren't quite in the right place for me to see out of them. Total cost: Effectively $0 since the wool was left over from a previous project. This piece of felt would have used a couple of dollars' worth at most. *If this was Fargo or perhaps Game of Thrones I would be inclined to think the masks had a symbolic significance, but Vikings is not that clever.