What was Helen weaving?
We’ve all heard of Helen of Troy or perhaps, Helen of Sparta, and we all probably know her for her beauty, being the face who had “launched a thousand ships”. Those who are vaguely familiar with Homer and Greek Antiquity may also add that she, a Queen in her own right, had allegedly “caused” the Trojan War as those ships were after all launched so as to get her back from Troy after Paris had abducted her. This account of the story however undermines her agency, her voice and her telling of her own story. Beyond the role she played in starting the decade-long war, an often-overlooked aspect of Helen’s role in Homer’s epic poem was how her first appearance therein shows her engaged in the act of weaving a “double-folded cloak of crimson” no less.
[Iris] came on Helen in the chamber: she was weaving a great web, a double folded cloak of crimson, and working into it the numerous struggles of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaeans, struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god.
The Iliad, Book 3
As such, even though the discourse surrounding Helen emphasizes her beauty and how she must be possessed, they obscure how she is a skilled weaver who is both able and willing to use her skills as the ekphrasis — being, the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device — here suggests.
If this has yet to change your perception of Helen, perhaps we can also consider how the cloak Helen is weaving is a work of tapestry such that she herself, is also telling her own version of the story through the cloak she weaves. As Helen takes on the position of a bard working in a visual medium as opposed to oral verse, we see within the words of The Iliad a hint towards a gap in the myth being Helen’s own untold story of the Trojan War which remains elusive for it is a textile artefact that must be seen and felt in order to be understood. Considering how Homer who tells the story of the Iliad is also supposedly blind, the impossibility of grasping Helen’s story through words alone is further emphasized.
To find out more about Helen and the importance of her needlework, you can check out an updated version of this article at my substack.
