Ibrahim Al-Tartushi, a tenth-century Arab traveler and merchant visited the Norse town of Hedeby in 950AD. He wrote “there is also an artificial make-up for the eyes, when they use it beauty never fades, on the contrary it increases in men and women as well.” One might well question whether this liner might not have been used in the manner of a football player’s eye black to shield the eyes from the intense sun especially seeing that Hedeby was a coastal town and many of them spent time on the water. Ibrahim ibn Yacoub seems insistent on the idea that it was used for cosmetic purposes, leaving us with an image of tenth century Viking men à la Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. They are depicted using kohl in this way in History Channel’s Vikings.
Constantinople had a very cosmopolitan environment, with people of many nations passing through and living there. Among those more exotic to the native Byzantines were the Varangians, people of Scandinavian or Scandinavian-descended Russian heritage. They brought many trade goods, including amber, honey and furs. According to The Russian Primary Chronicle, the Rus invaded Constantinople in 907 and as part of the payoff agreement, the use of the public baths was agreed upon.
The Norse made extensive use of saunas. Among the Rus, their bathhouses were called banyas. An Old East Slavic illuminated manuscript, the Radzivill Chronicle mentions the banya in the in the story of Princess Olga’s revenge for the murder of her husband, Prince Igor, by the Drevlians in 945 AD. When an emissary from the Drevlians came to Olga with an offer of marriage, “… Olga commanded that a bath should be made ready for them and said, ‘Wash yourselves and come to me.’ The bath-house was heated and the unsuspecting Drevlians entered and began to wash themselves. [Olga’s] men closed the bath-house behind them and Olga gave orders to set it on fire from the doors, so that the Drevlians were all burned to death” Incidentally, Olga was the grandmother of the Prince Vladimir who was given Basil II’s sister Ann in marriage in exchange for six thousand Varangian troops and a promise of conversion to Christianity. While the Varangian inhabitants of Constantinople and indeed most of the common native people as well, were unlikely to make use of the extensive cosmetics that highborn women such as Theophana would use, cleanliness was nevertheless highly valued, weakening the popular image of the medieval Scandinavian as dirty and unwashed.
The Abbot of St. Albans write with no little chagrin of the Danes who settled in England that “thanks to their habit of combing their hair every day, of bathing every Saturday and regularly changing their clothes, were able to undermine the virtue of married women and even seduce the daughters of nobles to be their mistresses.” Apparently even Anglo-Saxon women were crazy about a sharp dressed (Danish) man.
In The Serpentine Key, Freydis washes her hair in water scented with lavender flowers and this is a scent that Sven always associates with her:
Freydis placed the basket she had been carrying on the table. It was filled with meadow rue. There was almost little enough room for them both in the small space and she pushed past him, her hair smelling of lavender. If he had not known better, he might have thought he had never left Rodnya. A feeling like longing overcame him, drowning his senses in memories, threatening to make him forget why he was here.
Then as now, cleanliness was appreciated and enjoyed and we see that those who came before us, were perhaps not as smelly as we may have supposed.
Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 794-1241 by John Haywood
Face Paint: The Story of Makeup by Lisa Elridge