I do love the internet.  We get wrapped up in "academic quality comes from peer-reviewed books" and then a wonderful museum posts good photos of some of their most popular exhibits.

(photo from the National Museum, Denmark.)

Here's the fragments of the Hagendrup skirt that I wanted yesterday, with both cord remains and metal embellishment.  The metal is much longer than I expected, but the tubes are located in a different place, too.

Re: what the metal is: I've found descriptions saying both copper and bronze.  I don't know what bronze was, in more detail than "copper + tin", but I'm thinking now that if bronze, it was heavy on the copper content, which would account for the green.  From my point of view as object maker, copper is a better answer, as I can get copper sheet easily, and bronze is harder to find.  Also it will turn green, which solves my dissatisfaction with the "but brass looks different from bronze" issue.  I'll see if I can exchange the brass tubing on Saturday.

The caption on the Museum site doesn't tell me much about what precisely we're really looking at:

I en egekistegrav fra Hagendrup ved Holbæk fandtes rester af en snoreskørt med små bronzerør på.

(although many pages on the museum site have English variations, this one doesn't seem to.  I am still puzzling through the site map.  From Babylon: "In a egekistegrav (some sort of grave) from Hagendrup near Holbæk were found remains of a snoreskørt (string skirt) with small bronzerør on.")

Barber's Prehistoric Textiles describes it thus:

"The scraps from Hagendrup, for example, show a very narrow waistband in which the threads of the skirt fringe are secured by only three pairs of warp threads after they pass over the heavy cord at the top (Thomsen 1935, 192-94 and fig. 22)."

Without Thomsen, I'm guessing that we're looking at the waist of the skirt, since that top edge looks finished.  The location of the Olby tubular decorations supports this idea:

So, going back to Egtved:

If one were going to embellish this skirt with metal tubing, Hagendrup and Olby support putting it at the top, just below the waistband.  Olby seems to have stacked embellishment, as if there's two metal bits on each cord, which I like the effect of, paired with the 'sun' belt plate.  It's kind of like 'sun+sky'.  I suppose the same sort of cord link around the loops might be used to divide the embellishment rows.

This makes me feel so much better, in terms of wearing the thing.  I really didn't look forward to the "experiment" of wearing a skirt with metal sharp bits that I'd sit on, or swing against my legs.  Securely wrapped around the pelvis, the potential for abrasion is much less.

This does mean I need to figure out how to do the knots at the bottom though – which I want to learn anyway, for belt tassels.  Barber has a detail photo, which I think I can follow.

I am also glad that although I have warped, I hadn't started weaving yet.  I need to solve the loops – they almost look wrapped.  They're definitely heavier than just the fold in the fringe cord.