| As in many other cultures, textiles and textile production figured significantly in the everyday life of the Anglo-Saxons. The literary result of this important craft was the use of textile imagery, in particular, textile metaphor in Old English literature, including the following: peace-weaving, death-weaving, fate-weaving, creation- and water-weaving, word-weaving, and spider-weaving. While the occurrence of textile metaphor in the Old English corpus has been noted in the past, this study is unique in that it seeks first to analyze and reconstruct the material culture of textile production among the Anglo-Saxons from archaeological and textual records as a crucial step in understanding the full range of Old English textile metaphors and what they might have meant to the Anglo-Saxons.;This study is also unique in that it compiles the Old English textile metaphors and analyzes their resonance in direct relationship to the material culture of textiles. In the dissertation, I compile a number of the significant analogues which may or may not have influenced the development of textile metaphor in Old English literature. This dissertation argues that textile metaphors and images in Old English literature are linked by a common resonance which may be the product of an understanding of the material culture of textiles of Anglo-Saxon times as a visual analogue. The examination of Old English textile imagery has interesting implications for textile imagery which occurs in great profusion in virtually all cultures which have cotidiarian contact with textile production. |
