Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1981, Síða 250

258
A pair of Hide Shoes
In the account of Ragnarok given in Gylfaginning, we read:28)
»The wolf devours Odin, and that is his bane. But immediately
afterwards, Vidar appears and steps with one foot into the lower
jaw of the wolf; on that foot he wears a shoe made from leather
which people cut away from the toe and the heel when making shoes,
therefore these scraps must be cast aside if one intends to come to
the aid of the gods.«
This is, in fact, a very precise description of the process of making
hide-shoes. Looking at the diagram of the Leksvik shoes, we can
see that it is characteristic of this primitive method of cutting that
notches are cut for the heel and the toe, so that the hide could be
shaped to enclose the foot.
We meet a distinctive kind of hide-shoe in the ancient provisions
governing the venerable ceremony for the legitimation of natural
children:
»Then he must ... kill a three-year old ox and flay the skin off
the right fore-foot (viz. hind-foot!) and make a shoe of this and
put the shoe beside the ale-vat.«29)
Such shoes made of the hide from the hind-feet of cattle and other
animals must surely be very ancient. The bulge on the hide would
form th tip of the shoe. In O.N. such shoes were called fítskor, and
corresponding types of shoes in more recent times went under names
such as fetasko, fitasko, fete, fetling and fítjung. At the beginning
of the Middle Ages, hide-shoes ceased to form part of the normal
dress worn in the cities and by the upper social strata. But plain
people in the countryside must have continued to wear hide-shoes
of various kinds throughout the Middle Ages; in some country
districts, in fact, hide-shoes were still worn until the present day.
Informants from several districts of western Norway (Hardanger,
Voss, Sogn), eastern Norway (Telemark, Hallingdal, Valdres) and
from Nordland mention hide-shoes.30)
In H. J. WILLES’ well-known description of Seljord,31) dating
from the latter half of the eighteenth century, we read that in winter
the men of this district wore hide-shoes made from untanned hides,
with the flesh side in and the fur out. They wore hose without feet,
using a kind of foot-cloth instead: a peculiar parallel for the cloths