A house as long as a small ship, a fire down the middle, smoke drifting under the roof and, in winter, the livestock right next door: this was home for most people of the North. Let’s look honestly inside – at what the excavations prove and where the movies mislead.
Say “Viking house” and most people picture a warm hall full of drinking horns. The reality was usually humbler, darker and far smokier – but no less remarkable. Its heart was the longhouse (Old Norse langhús), a narrow, elongated building that remained the basic form of Northern dwelling for centuries.
Longhouses were, as the name says, above all long. Small farms managed with five to fifteen metres; large steadings and chieftains’ halls reached thirty, forty, in exceptional cases over seventy metres. The width stayed modest – rarely more than five to seven metres, because the roof had to be carried across that span. The result was a tunnel-like hall, often gently bowed: a little wider in the middle, tapering towards the gables. A single great room served as dwelling, kitchen, workshop, sleeping quarters and – depending on region and season – as byre. The floor was usually of stamped clay, kept clean and renewed again and again; in wealthier houses the living end also had timber boards. People entered not through the gable but through low doors in one of the long sides – often with a small porch in front that kept the cold out and the warmth in.
Better a house, though a hut it be, / A man is master at home; / A pair of goats and a patched-up roof / Are better far than begging.Hávamál, stanza 36 – trans. Henry Adams Bellows, 1923 (public domain)
This famous stanza of the Hávamál captures the Norse sense of self: a farm of one’s own, however poor, meant freedom and dignity. The longhouse was not merely shelter but a marker of status and the centre of the family.
The load was usually carried by two rows of stout internal posts holding up the roof ridge – the classic post-built frame. The outer walls often did not bear the full weight but simply enclosed the space. Depending on the region they were made of wattle-and-daub (upright rods, woven horizontally and plastered with a mix of clay, straw and dung), of upright split planks (stave construction) or – in the timber-poor North – of thick banks of turf and grass sods. In Iceland and Greenland the walls were built almost entirely of stacked turf; this insulated superbly against the cold but lasted only a few decades before the farm had to be rebuilt.
Because timber and turf rotted, the longhouse was no building for eternity. A house often stood only a generation or two, then was raised anew on the same or a neighbouring spot. The famous village of Vorbasse in Jutland literally “wandered” across the landscape over the centuries, because the farms were rebuilt a little further along each time. For archaeology this is a stroke of luck: each building phase left its own pattern of post-holes, so one can read how farms grew, shrank and changed over generations.
The roof rested on the inner posts and a timber frame of ridge and rafters. For covering, people used whatever the land offered: reed and straw where it grew, wooden shingles in wooded districts, and turf over a barrier layer of birch bark in the far North. Such a sod roof was heavy but insulated well and grew together with the surrounding grass. Windows in the modern sense barely existed; a few elite farms had small green-brown glass panes to let in light, but that was prestige, not standard. Everyday life took place in half-light.
The heart of the house was the long-fire (Old Norse langeldr), a drawn-out hearth along the central axis of the room. Here people cooked, here they gathered, here warmth and a little light came from. There was no chimney – the smoke rose and drifted out through an opening in the ridge. That meant the air was sooty at head height, acrid smoke hung under the roof, and the walls blackened over time. People therefore sat low on the benches, where the air was clearer. Beyond the fire, light came from soapstone lamps burning fish oil and from resinous pine splints; fine work was daytime work, done at the door or outside. If possible the fire never went out entirely: people banked the embers under ash overnight, so that no laborious relighting with fire-steel and tinder was needed in the morning. The long-fire thus set the rhythm of the day – it warmed, cooked, gave light and was the point around which everything gathered in the evening.
The plan and construction of longhouses are well secured by hundreds of excavated post-holes, wall trenches and hearths – from Vorbasse and Hodde in Denmark, through Borg in the Lofoten Islands, to the turf farms of Stöng in Iceland and L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. The distinctively bowed walls of the ring-fortress houses (Trelleborg, Fyrkat, Aggersborg) can be read straight off the foundations. The long-fire and the flanking wall-benches appear in the record as a band of ash along the central axis and as low earth or stone packings against the long walls.
Along the long walls ran raised earthen or wooden benches – the set. They were seating by day and bedding by night; people rolled up in wool blankets and furs. Ornate beds with carved posts existed only in wealthy homes (the famous Oseberg and Gokstad beds come from elite graves). Chests served both for storage and as seats, the upright warp-weighted loom leaned against the wall, and in the corner stood storage vessels, a hand-quern and a cauldron. Furniture in the modern sense was scarce – the room was workshop and dwelling in one, and much hung on the wall or under the roof, where the smoke kept vermin away. In well-off houses woven hangings adorned the long walls; they were not only ornament but also kept out the draught. The master’s high-seat usually stood on the place of honour, flanked by the carved high-seat pillars to which special meaning was attached. Otherwise thrift ruled: whatever one owned had to serve a purpose, and the cramped space was used right up under the ridge.
In many regions – especially along the North Sea coast and in the harsh North – people and animals shared the same building. Such byre-dwellings had the living quarters with the long-fire at one end and a partitioned byre with stalls at the other. This was no sign of poverty but shrewd practice: the body heat of the cattle helped through the winter, the beasts were safe from raiders and cold, and the manure was easy to clear. The number of stalls in the byre end even tells archaeologists roughly how much livestock a family kept – and thus how wealthy it was. On farms with more space, byre, store and workshop stood as separate outbuildings around the dwelling: a raised storehouse against mice, a pit-house for weaving, a smithy at a safe distance because of the flying sparks. A “farm” was rarely a single house but a small cluster of buildings – a holding that largely supplied itself.
The glittering mead-hall of the sagas really did exist – but as the exception, not the rule. Great halls such as at Lejre on Zealand or Borg in the Lofotens measured over forty, sometimes eighty metres; here a chieftain feasted his retinue, here feasts, blót and banquets were held. The houses of the royal ring-fortresses from the time of Harald Bluetooth had their own strictly geometric form: equally long Trelleborg-type houses with sharply bowed walls, grouped in exact order around a courtyard. Yet for the great majority, home was no splendid hall but a smoky, cramped longhouse in which family, servants and often the livestock lived close together.
To enter a longhouse was to step from the outside into half-light, smoke in the nose, the long-fire the brightest point in the room. It was cramped, it was loud, it smelled of animal, turf and cooking pot – and it was, by Northern standards, warm and safe. That is exactly what made it the centre of life: here people were born and died, wove and forged, ate, told stories and slept. The longhouse was not the romantic hall of the screen but something more solid – the real home of a whole world.
The warm, wood-panelled, torch-lit drinking hall with its long feasting table is an image from film and television. At best it describes the chieftain’s hall on a feast day – everyday life in the longhouse was smoky, dark and cramped, the fire lay on the floor, not in a fireplace, and there was no chimney. The colourful, lush-green turf farmstead (“burstarbær”) of the Iceland postcards also misleads: this building type with its characteristic rows of gables belongs largely to modern times, centuries after the Viking Age. Viking-Age turf farms were plainer and lower. And the notion that everyone resided in grand halls fails on the numbers alone: the great hall was the privilege of a few; most people lived – often with the livestock – in a plain longhouse.
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