How the Vikings Really Lived

Most Vikings were not raiders but farmers, traders and craftspeople. A look inside the long house where their lives took place.

The image of the wild Viking with a horned helmet is a 19th-century myth – born on the opera stage, not in the real North. The vast majority of people in the Viking Age were farmers, craftspeople and traders whose lives revolved around the farm, livestock and the seasons.

The Longhouse

At the centre was the longhouse: a building up to thirty metres long, made of wood, wattle and clay, often roofed with turf. In the middle burned the hearth, whose smoke drew out through an opening in the roof. Here people cooked, ate, wove and slept – and in winter people and livestock often shared the same roof, which provided warmth.

Work All Year Round

Men ploughed, fished, forged and built ships; women ran the farm, wove, brewed and managed the stores – they held the key to the chest, a mark of their standing. Children helped from an early age. Life was hard, ordered and strongly shaped by the community of the kin.

“He must rise early who has few workers, and go to see to his work himself.”Hávamál 59, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)

Craft and Beauty

Even in daily life people loved beauty: artfully decorated brooches, carved utensils, engraved pendants. It is exactly this delight in the decorated everyday object that we keep alive in our workshop.

Life on the farm

Most people of the Viking Age were not warriors but farmers. Life took place on the farm, centred on the long dwelling house, the longhouse, in which people and often also livestock lived under one roof. Everyday life revolved around the hearth fire.

What came to the table

People ate what farm and surroundings provided: grain porridge and bread from barley, milk, cheese, meat and fish, along with berries, cabbage and onions. They drank beer and milk, at feasts mead. Twice a day a warm meal came to the table.

Clothing and craft

Clothing was of wool and linen, often in strong colours dyed with plant dyes. Women wove on large warp-weighted looms; men worked wood, iron and leather. Almost everything needed was made by one's own labour on the farm.

Work through the year

Life followed the seasons: sowing in spring, hay and grain harvest in summer, slaughtering and storing in autumn, craft and repairs in the dark winter. Whoever wanted to survive the winter had to use the summer.

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