THE VIKING LONGHOUSE

The Viking house was a single elongated hall of timber, sometimes over 80 meters long, where people, animals and stores lived under one roof. Walls combined oak posts with wattle and daub, and the roof was covered with turf: a thick layer of earth with grass that insulated from the cold and still crowns Icelandic farms. Windowless, with a single central hearth and no chimney (smoke left through a roof hole), the interior was dark, warm and fragrant with firewood and stable.

The most spectacular example is Lofotr, in Norway's Lofoten Islands: an 83-meter chieftain's house reconstructed beside its original site, now a museum (see Viking Links). There you see the typical layout: the hall with long benches for feasts and assemblies, the kitchen with its quern stone, byres at one end and box-beds at the other. The house was at once home, barn, workshop and throne room.

Raising it was a social act: setting the posts took the whole community, and inauguration feasts sealed alliances. When a chief died, his house was sometimes burned ritually or turned into a mound, as at Oseberg: the longhouse was not just architecture, it was the heart of Viking life.