The first time someone explained the symbolism of Aran stitches to me, I believed it without question. Cables for the fisherman’s rope, diamonds for the net mesh, each family’s pattern distinctive enough to identify a man lost at sea: it was a coherent, beautiful story, carrying the hush of something almost ancient, as if the salt and wind of Galway Bay still clung to every stitch. The wool, too, was left unwashed so that the natural lanolin would protect against the Atlantic weather. This tradition, in the telling, reaches back to ancient Celtic craftsmanship, encoded in the fabric for centuries before anyone thought to write it down.
It is a very good story, but as far as anyone has been able to establish, it is largely a twentieth-century invention. The symbolism attached to Aran stitches appears to have been constructed and promoted from the 1930s onward, beginning with a German textile historian named Heinz Edgar Kiewe, who encountered the sweaters in a Dublin shop in 1936. The tradition of family patterns, the ancient Celtic connections, the mythologised wool: none of it has much documentary support. Alice Starmore, who wrote the most rigorous study of Aran knitting in 1997, concluded that the sweaters in their modern form probably date from after 1946, and that they owe more to the Scottish gansey tradition than to anything uniquely Irish. She also found that the story was in circulation before the sweater in its modern form existed.
Aran is the most elaborate case but not an isolated one. Fair Isle has a story too: Spanish sailors from the Armada, shipwrecked on the island in 1588, taught the locals their distinctive colourwork technique. Outside influence has been seen in the design of the patterns (Moorish or Arabic connections have been proposed), and the story has been repeated often enough to feel like established history. The difficulty is that there is no evidence for it before the 1850s, two and a half centuries after the Armada, and the story is disputed even by people on the island itself. It is now more commonly thought that the tradition came from closer to the Baltic (Estonia, Lithuania, Finland), through trade rather than shipwreck. The Spanish Armada story is a better story: livelier, more dramatic, with a touch of swashbuckling bravado that neatly flatters the national imagination, but it is almost certainly a later addition.
Iceland is a more muted case. The lopapeysa (the yoked sweater that has come to feel synonymous with Icelandic identity) is often treated as much older than it is, as though it has always been there. The yarn it is typically made from, Lopi, now almost synonymous with Iceland in the minds of knitters, was developed only in the early twentieth century from earlier preparations of carded wool. The sweater style itself came together from a magazine pattern a couple of decades later. In this case, there is not as much false history surrounding it. Instead, it is a relatively recent tradition that has slowly been woven into a broader narrative of national continuity.
Even the gansey, a fundamentally practical and workmanlike sweater tradition, has accumulated its own embellishments. The pattern on a gansey, it is often said, was specific enough to identify a fisherman drowned and recovered from the sea. Of all the fishing-sweater myths this is probably the most persistent, and also the least supported: historians of the tradition have been looking for a documented case and have not found one. Some have traced it to J.M. Synge’s 1911 play Riders to the Sea, where a body washed up on a beach is identified by a distinctive mistake in his stocking; by the early 1960s that detail had migrated, in print, to the gansey and Aran sweater. Patterns were certainly distinctive in places, and in small fishing communities a familiar garment might sometimes have helped. But as the tradition spread, patterns were copied and shared across regions, and any identifying function they had would have blurred quickly.
Of the four, only the Aran story continues to circulate at full strength. The Armada story is actively disputed by Fair Isle people themselves; the lopapeysa was never quite false history in the same sense, but a recent tradition; the gansey myths are routinely debunked, yet never quite vanish. The Aran symbolism story was promoted by a commercial export industry from the start, and new audiences still come across it as if for the first time.
None of this is unusual in the history of folk objects. But why do sweaters, arguably more so than any other textile or even garment, so often come with such fanciful, even lurid, folklore?
Part of the answer is that a sweater looks as though it should mean something. The surface of a densely patterned Aran or Fair Isle garment is visibly structured, full of decisions: cables, colours, repeating motifs arranged with obvious care. A surface like that is easily read as a text, with a meaning waiting to be found. Plain grey jersey has very few origin myths, whereas a garment that looks as though it might be saying something makes people want to know precisely what it says.
Nation-building accounts for another part of it. In almost every case where the mythologising is most intense, there is a community that needs the object to carry more weight than the object can carry on its own. The Aran sweater’s mythology developed in the decades after a hard-won Irish independence, when the country was actively shaping its own national culture as one distinct from its coloniser across the water. The Fana sweater, worn in Norway under German occupation during the Second World War, became a silent symbol of resistance: a garment that could communicate what it was not safe to say out loud. The lopapeysa consolidated around Icelandic identity during the mid-twentieth century, following independence from Denmark. In each case, the sweater was taken up as a symbol at a time when a community was defining its identity.
Commercial motives mattered too, particularly in the Aran case. A sweater with an ancient story attached to it sells differently than one without. Kiewe was promoting his mythology at the same time as Irish cottage industries were trying to build export markets, and it is not difficult to see how a romantic story about ancient Celtic craftsmanship would serve that purpose. This is not straightforwardly cynical: many of the people who repeated the stories believed them, but the commercial convenience was still there. It is, when all is said and done, great marketing.
I think these myths are worth correcting, but I do not want to dismiss them either, because they are evidence of what we want from the objects we make. A sweater associated with a family, a tradition, a place or a history is a different thing to wear from one that is not. The desire for that connection is genuine, even when the story behind it is not, and the Aran sweater is no less remarkable because the symbolism of its stitches was largely invented in the twentieth century: the knitting is still extraordinary, and the craft is still real.
The stories grew up around these garments because the garments were so spectacular that they seemed to deserve them. Pick up a sweater you are proud of and it is easy to see why: the weight of it, the density of the stitches, the hours of work held in the wool. That was probably always enough on its own.
Further reading
Alice Starmore, Aran Knitting (1997). Examines the sweaters in the National Museum of Ireland directly and traces the tradition’s origins.
Alice Starmore, Book of Fair Isle Knitting (1989). Covers Fair Isle technique, pattern structure, and historical context.
Sheila McGregor, The Complete Book of Traditional Fair Isle Knitting (1981). A comprehensive survey of Fair Isle patterns and motifs, with material on where the designs actually come from.
Gail Ann Lambert, The Taxonomy of Sweater Structures and their Origins (MS thesis, 2002). An academic study classifying sweater construction types and tracing their documented origins across traditions.
Pierce Kehoe, The Knit of a Nation?: How Irishness was marketed to the world by the Aran sweater (1950-1980) (MS thesis, 2019). Examines how Aran sweater marketing constructed and reshaped ideas of Irishness for global consumers.
Gansey Nation, “Popular Gansey Myths” (ganseys.com). A myth-by-myth analysis of the gansey tradition written by a Wick historian and archivist.
There is a certain amount of that with Salish or Cowichan sweaters as well. See Priscilla Gibson-Robert's book.
Please tell me you've heard of the Loose Ends project? It demonstrates so well what you're saying about the value of the work involved in creating pieces like these. Their updates regularly bring a tear to my eye.
https://looseends.org/