Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Blaðsíða 248

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A pair of Hide Shoes
around the foot. At the back, a vertical seam formed the heel, exactly
as in the Leksvik shoes. H. C. BROHOLM has studied these types
of shoes in some detail, and he assumes that the thongs from the
strips of the front of the shoe were cross-laced through the holes at
the edge, the ends then being wound around the foot and tied above
the instep; he allows of the possibility of an additional lacing around
the ankle (ef. fig. 4).
As appears from fig. 3, there are no traces of perforated strips
on the Leksvik shoes. There is, however, a row of wide slits along
the entire edge of the shoe, and these would serve the same purpose
as the perforated strips when the shoe was to be laced on to the
foot by means of the thong. Whether the thongs of the Leksvik shoes
were tied around the foot as shown in fig. 4 it is impossible to say;
but the left shoe, whose thong is preserved in the slits, does not
suggest such a practice.
In the present context these various methods of lacing a shoe are
not, however, of great consequence. Far more important is the fact
that we are able to establish that the Leksvik shoes belong to the
numerous group of primitive hide-shoes which can, in the North,
be traced back to the dress of the Bronze Age at the end of the
second millenium BC. These must surely be said to represent the
most ancient form of footwear in our part of the world.
The use of hide-shoes was not confined to the North in the dis-
tant past, being common in many parts of the Germanic region. In
the northern and central parts of Germany (Sleswick-Holstein, Ol-
denburg, Hannover) and in Holland, some thirty to forty specimens
have come to light; a few of these were found in bogs together with
dead bodies, but the majority were isolated finds.23) Many of them
occurred in twos, but matching pairs are, oddly enough, rare. The
shoes from these finds vary greatly in the way they were laced, but
every one of them was made from one piece of hide, and they were
all attached to the foot by means of thongs passing through slits or
perforated strips.24) They all date from the early Iron Age. Even
though the shoe with a true sole made its appearance at an early
date, as we have seen, proving to be the kind of footwar likely to
be used also in the future, it seems to be beyond doubt that hide-