The Fisherman Sweater: A True Story Better Than the Legend
The Fisherman Sweater: A True Story Better Than the Legend
The legend says the stitches named the drowned. The truth is younger, and it is warmer.
The Story Everyone Tells
Every winter someone tells the same story about the fisherman sweater. Each family on the Aran Islands had its own pattern. When a boat went down and the sea gave a man back, his sweater told the village whose son he was.
It is a beautiful story. It is also not true.
The seed of it is a play. J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea was first staged in Dublin in 1904. In it, a drowned man is known by the dropped stitches in a knitted stocking. It was a stocking, not a sweater. Over the next half century the stocking grew into a sweater, and the sweater grew into a whole system of family patterns.
Much of the rest came from one man. Heinz Edgar Kiewe ran a yarn shop in Oxford. He saw a likeness between Aran cables and old Celtic knotwork, and he gave each stitch a meaning. He put it all in a book called The Sacred History of Knitting, published in 1971. Historians have since shown there was never a clan system. The patterns were shared and traded between knitters the way good ideas always are.
What Really Happened
Fishermen across the British Isles wore the gansey through the 1800s. It was a close, dark knit made to turn the wind on an open boat. The Aran sweater grew out of that tradition. It came out cream instead of navy, and the cables ran over the whole body.
The heavily patterned sweater we know appears on the islands in the early twentieth century. In the early 1930s the Irish craft champion Muriel Gahan had island knitters make one for an exhibition, and people began to notice. A yarn company in England published Aran patterns in the 1940s. Vogue ran an Aran pattern in the autumn of 1956. By the end of that decade the Clancy Brothers were wearing Arans on stage in New York, and America wanted one.
That is the better story. A knit born at the edge of the Atlantic made its way into winter wardrobes all over the world in about thirty years.
Why Wool Owns the Cold
The cable is more than decoration. Crossing the stitches makes the knit thick and dense, and that bulk holds still air. Still air is what keeps a body warm.
The wool does the rest. Each fiber has a natural crimp, like a spring, and the crimp holds small pockets of air. Wool can also take on a good deal of moisture from rain or sweat before it feels wet against the skin. On a gray Seattle morning in January, that is worth more than anything written on a tag.
Ours
Our Cable Knit Fisherman Wool Sweater is 100% merino wool from the Rocky Mountains, in navy. It is worsted spun at a 5 gauge, so the knit is bulky and soft at the same time. It is knit in northern Japan. The cable is a Black Bear Brand design, and our heritage green label sits at the back of the neck.
When Yousuf Karsh photographed Ernest Hemingway in Cuba in 1957, the writer wore a heavy knit sweater. It became one of the most famous portraits of the century. A sweater like that takes on the years and keeps them. So will this one.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Cable Knit Fisherman Wool Sweater
The Black Bear Brand Factory Store
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