Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1943, Page 134

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LE NORD
from the time about iooo we find pole-holes from a large number
of quite uniform houses built of oak timber in stake construction.
The house-form is a very regular ellipse with cut-off ends; in
the middle of the floor is the fireplace.
In the Scottish Isles the settlements in the Viking Age were
essentially different from those of the other Norse countries; for
here we find no lay-outs of farms consisting of a single dwelling
surrounded by stables and outhouses, but the settlement consists
of many uniform dwellings built close together in village-like
communities. This perhaps is due to the fact that the Orkneyites
were not first and íoremost cattle-breeders, who must necessarily
live apart, but traders (and pirates?), who found their advantage
in living close together with their large staffs of servants. As the
houses are now known from the modern excavations, especially
at Jarlhof in the Shetlands and Brough of Birsay in the Orkneys,
they are characteristic long-houses with curved walls. In the
longitudinal axis of the houses there is a pavement of flagstones
and a fireplace, sometimes with a stone-edged trench below it, as
it is known from an Icelandic site and from the hall of Brattahlíd,
the Greenland farm of Eiríkur the Red. Another detail found in
both the Scottish and the Icelandic sites, is a small box built of
flagstones, which is sunk into the ground near the outer door,
but the purpose of which has not been satisfactorily explained.
From the above brief survey it appears that the houses of
the Viking Age had an astonishingly uniform character in the
districts connected with the Scandinavian countries. We cannot
here discuss the origin of the type, only it may be pointed out
that the large undivided room, the hall, was known in Scan-
dinavia before the expansion of the Viking Age, and therefore
it cannot be England, which from the early Middle Ages and
ever since has always considered the hall as the central part of
the house, that has taught us to appreciate it, while the opposite
influence is not unimaginable.
In Iceland as elsewhere the large hall as the only dwelling-
room soon became insufficient, and therefore the plan was ex-
tended by the addition of more rooms, a kitchen or “fire-house,”
as it is still called in Iceland, a living-room and various store-
rooms. The best preserved house of this type was excavated in
1939 at the farm of Stöng in the Thjórsár Valley. While at the
farms of the hall type we found the layer of ashes from the
volcanic eruption of 1300 about half a metre above the floor,