Shake your pompom

Some can rock a bobble hat, others will always resemble Where's Wally, but still this knitted creation belongs on every hat rack, says Harry Pearson

- Harry Pearson

JENS MARTIN KNUDSEN is known to football fans around the world as the goalkeeper of the tiny Faroe Islands when the team pulled off one of international football's greatest acts of giant-killing, defeating Austria 1-0 in the 1990 European Championships. It wasn't the goalie's string of brilliant saves that attracted the world's attention, however, but rather what he was wearing on his head: a knitted woollen hat. Mr Knudsen has gone down in sporting folklore as 'the bobble-hat 'keeper'. That hat, homespun and a little goofy, epitomised the romance of the sporting underdog.

That one of the most celebrated modern exponents of the bobble hat should be a Scandinavian is fitting, as the first person we can confirm wearing one is Freyr, Viking god of peace and pleasure, as he appears on a little 11th-century statue unearthed in Sweden in 1904. Freyr's hat is tall and the pompom is only the size of an acorn, but one imagines it kept the Norse god's head warm when he was galloping alongside the fjords astride his pet boar, Gullinbursti.

Wool hats such as the one Freyr is sporting were made using a technique called nålbinding, in which the threads are formed into a tube and then pulled shut at one end. To cover the gathered seam, an adornment was added sometimes a tassel, but more often a small ball made from mixed offcuts of wool. The bobble hat was born of necessity.