CHAPTER SEVEN

FARM AND VILLAGE IN

THE VIKING AGE

Jan-Henrik Fallgren

D

espite the fact that the sources concerning the Viking Age settlement in Scandinavia
are actually poorer than for the settlement from older periods of the Iron Age, you
can nevertheless nowadays state that the general character of the Viking Age settlement
in Scandinavia in most aspects was a continuation of how the settlement was formed
and organised earlier during the three immediate preceding archaeological periods. The
same is also valid in most cases for how the settlement was localised in the landscape.
Any larger structural changes of settlement do not occur during the Viking Age. In
the main areas of agriculture, medium and large villages dominated. In the woodlands,
and in fjord and mountainous areas, there were, on the contrary, mainly smaller units:
hamlets and solitary farms (Hvass 1988 ; Kaldal Mikkelsen 1999 ; Lillehammer 1999 :
13 ff.; Myhre 2002 : 132 ff.; Ethelberg 2003 ; Holst 2004 ; Fallgren 2006 : 80 ff.). In
certain regions, however, some important architectonic changes of the old three-aisled
longhouses took place during the course of the Viking Age. And in other parts of
Scandinavia this old type of house construction came, completely or partly, to be
replaced with an entirely new building type, the one-aisled house with roof-supporting
walls.
The predominant type of building in Scandinavia had, since the early Bronze Age,
been the three-aisled construction of the longhouses, where a number of posts, put in
pairs, supported the roof instead of the walls. The tunstall (part of the gable that
connects the roof with the walls) was consequently not yet known in Scandinavia. The
walls in these houses could be wattle and daub, deal walls anchored in furrows, or made
of earth, turf and stone, according to what the local conditions could best provide. In the
same way the material for roof-covering shifted – straw, turf or wood – according to the
natural environment of each region. The lengths of the houses of the Viking Age varied
from 5 to 50 metres. The longest house excavated to date, however, is 80 m long, found
at Borg in Lofoten in the northern part of Norway. The houses were as a rule separated
into different rooms, which had different functions. The longer the houses, the more
rooms and functions inside. These multi-functional houses could contain stable,
kitchen, storerooms, rooms for entertaining and for living. The width of the houses was
usually between 6 and 7. 5 m.
From the end of the ninth century, or at the beginning of the tenth, a new type of