Sometimes there simply wasn’t time to be so choosy—such as when half of your house had disappeared under a landslide. A block of turf needs three weeks to a month to dry out properly, and house building or repair was always on the to-do list beneath making hay. It was an eve-of-winter chore. “If you’re in a hurry,” said Sirri, “you pick the turf you have. You just do it. If you’re lucky it will last for decades. Or if not, just for two years.”
The shape of the blocks you cut also depended, to some extent, on time. The best walls are made of klömbrahnaus, “clubshaped hunks.” One end is fat (called the neck), the other is thin and tapered (the tail). “The tail goes inside the wall, and you see the neck,” Sirri explained. Each hunk is about a foot in length—but the wall is three to six feet deep. You built an inside stack of turfs and an outside stack, and filled in between with rubble. Old turf—the torn-down wall—was often used, along with gravel, clay, or dirt. You packed the rubble down firmly, “trampling it with a horse or a heavy man.” Sirri said, “When you can’t see the sign of your foot, it’s done.” Every few courses, a long straight piece of turf would be placed lengthwise across the rubble, to tie the two stacks together.
The faces of a wall built this way have a distinctive herringbone pattern. “It’s good-looking and it’s very strong. If the weather is not very wet, you have walls like that standing for eighty to a hundred years,” Sirri said, “and I know much older walls made this way. Gudny saw klömbra in the walls of the longhouse that was found in Keldudalur, under the churchyard, so we know the people of Gudrid’s time knew this technique.”
Lazy housebuilders, or those in a rush, however, didn’t always use it. They cut the simpler, diamond-shaped snidda, without the lagging tail. “If you weren’t too clever with building, it was easier,” Sirri said. “Klömbra is bigger and it’s very heavy. Snidda is much easier to carry about. But the turf that’s fastest to cut and easiest to build from is also the one that falls down first.”
Finding, cutting, drying, and stacking the turf was only half the work of building a Viking longhouse—and not even the half that determined how big a house you would have. “When you start to build a house,” Sirri told me, “you first look at the timber you have.”
Although it looked like a low green hill—a hobbit hole—a Viking house was actually a wooden house tucked inside a man-made mound. The turf walls blocked the wind and kept in the warmth, but what held up the roof was a post-and-beam wood frame. The inside walls and ceiling were also wooden, the thick paneling sometimes intricately carved. A house in Laxdaela Saga had “glorious sagas carved on the wallboards and the rafters. They were so well done that people thought the hall looked more splendid when the tapestries were not hung up.” The householder, Olaf the Peacock, had cut the wood he needed in the king of Norway’s forests.
Gudmundur Olafsson believes that’s where many of the Icelanders’ house timbers came from, that emigrants—whether Vikings fleeing the king or those of their descendants who moved to Greenland—literally pulled up stakes and brought the posts and beams and paneling with them.
Gudmundur is the chief archaeologist at Iceland’s National Museum in Reykjavik. Although he has been excavating Viking houses since 1972, he is disinclined to speculate; he often answers a question with We don't exactly know yet.
For six summers he worked in Greenland, excavating a Norse farm that had been discovered in 1991 when two reindeer hunters spotted a stick of wood protruding from the bank of a glacial river, close to the inland ice pack. Greenland is as treeless as Iceland; as one account of the discovery remarks, “the sight of large pieces of wood is not an everyday occurrence.” The hunters called the authorities.
The stick was part of a Viking woman’s loom. What now is a barren plain of sand had been, from Gudrid’s day to the fourteenth century, an attractive Viking farm site, with grassy pasture, wet meadows, and a meandering oxbow river. Its name is long forgotten. The archaeologists, digging through yards of sand to uncover eight layers of houses, called it the “Farm Beneath the Sand.” Each winter the river dumped a new load of sand onto their work site. All summer, while they dug, it threatened to wash their work away. In the seventh year it succeeded; the site no longer exists. But in those six years, archaeologists learned more about a Norse household than they ever had before.
“The permafrost makes all the difference,” Gudmundur told me. “When you come down to the floor layer, you can smell the cows and sheep.” The stumps of the roof-bearing posts, preserved in postholes, were a bit under six inches across, about the size of sturdy fence-posts. They had been reused again and again as the house changed shape over the centuries. Just as in Iceland, the great hall favored by the first settlers had given way to a warren of small, interconnected rooms, presumably to save on firewood. But the earliest house on the site gave Gudmundur a queasy feeling of déjà vu.
“It was almost the same size as Eiriksstadir,” Gudmundur said, “a little wider, but the same length. We have no idea who lived at the Farm Beneath the Sand. It was not by the sea, but far inland. It was probably not anyone important. But it has led me to conclude that the people who went to Greenland with Eirik the Red were the same sort of farmer: middle-class farmers who wanted to get bigger, who wanted this opportunity to get rich. I think they lived quite similar a lifestyle as they had in Iceland.”
And they lived in quite similar—even exactly similar—houses.
“If you’re moving to Greenland or a new place, and you want to be a more important man, why wouldn’t you build a bigger house than you had at home, if you had the means?” Gudmundur said. “I think the reason they are building the same size of house is that they took all the timber with them on the boat.”
Gudmundur knows just how to do that. He helped design a Viking longhouse that was built in Iceland and then taken apart and shipped to Greenland. It was set up near Eirik the Red’s farm at Brattahlid to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the Norse settlement in Greenland. He showed me a photograph of a standard 20-foot shipping crate about half full of lumber—a precut Viking house kit. “This is all the wood for one house. It took a couple of months for the carpenters to make it, but only a couple of days to take it down and pack it. And it took up so little space on the boat.”
It was the second Viking house kit with which Gudmundur had been involved. In 1997 the Icelandic National Museum was approached by a committee of citizens from western Iceland who wanted to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary of Leif Eiriksson’s discovery of Vinland by reconstructing the house where he was born in the Dales. There was no question here of discovering the house, as John Steinberg had discovered Gudrid’s house at Glaumbaer. “It has never been lost,” said Gudmundur. “According to the local traditions, this was the site where Eirik the Red lived. The sagas are very much alive with the local farmers. They know their saga heroes.”
Eiriksstadir was first excavated in 1895 by Thorsteinn Erlingsson, an Icelandic poet. Archaeologists of his day had no feeling for turf. As Sirri had told me, “It was just turf and they threw it away. They dug down until they reached the foundation stones.” As a result, Eiriksstadir was well and truly ransacked. Most of the information a modern specialist would read in the turf—such as when the turf was cut and whether it was long-lasting klömbra or the lazy man’s snidda—was lost. In Thorsteinn’s drawings and descriptions, Eiriksstadir is square. The house is divided longitudinally into two parallel rooms, with an offset door connecting them.
“In 1938 Eiriksstadir was revisited by the state antiquarian, Matthias Thordarson,” said Gudmundur. “He discovered there was no room in the back. It was a landslide that had formed the depression. So that’s what we knew in 1997.”
Gudmundur told the committee he would have to reexcavate the ruins before he could help with the replica. In his experience, the Vikings in Iceland before the year 1000 built two kinds of houses: longhouses and pit houses. A longhouse, or skáli, was a single rectangular room with a longfire
, a narrow hearth running longways down the center. Earthen sleeping benches flanked the fire. The walls were slightly bowed out in the middle. The door was off-center, on a long wall close to one end. Longhouses are generally about 65 feet long and 20 feet wide.
Most longhouses had a pit house nearby. The much smaller pit houses—about 13 by 10 feet, roughly square, and sunk 18 inches into the ground—had benches along three walls, a fireplace in one corner, and no apparent doorway. People may have come down by ladder through the roof, which was not high: The rafter tips rested on the ground.
Early archaeologists thought the pit houses were saunas. Today some think they were housing for slaves—as at Sveigakot in the north—or temporary quarters for traders: Two to four people could live in them. “These houses are found all over Northern Europe,” Gudmundur explained. “They were probably quite easy to build. They don’t need much material. These were the first buildings you put up when you came to a new country.” Gudmundur believes the pit house became the women’s weaving room once the longhouse was built. “We find loom weights, small knives, and other artifacts connected with women in them.”
At Eiriksstadir, Gudmundur found both a longhouse and a pit house. Charcoal pieces from the longfire were dated, using the carbon-14 method, to between the years 900 and 1000; Eirik had presumably lived there around 980, so it could be his fire. But Gudmundur also found a second fireplace. It was hard to tell which was older because the floor layer had been dug away by the earlier excavations. He found three possible doors: two offset, front and back, and one in the center. He could not be sure where the western gable was; the end wall was indistinct, and the foundation stones may have been scavenged when a telephone pole was erected close by.
“There had been an earlier building destroyed by a landslide,” Gudmundur told me. “Then it was put up again. It’s quite small, but not the smallest longhouse we have found. Probably Eirik had no choice. He was living there on the mercy of his mother-in-law. He had no land. This house site was just on the border of the next farm. He was probably always in conflict with the neighbor because his sheep were grazing on the neighbor’s land.”
The basic floor plan Gudmundur arrived at shows one room, a great hall 41 feet long and 13 feet wide in the middle, narrowing at both ends. There is a central longfire and both a front and a back door—a good idea since Eirik the Red had so many enemies. What Gudmundur calls “a hypothetical reconstruction” of Eirik’s house was built on the site in 1999. He explained, “If we did it again, it wouldn’t look exactly the same because our knowledge improves with every reconstruction. We discussed what we knew about every little detail in the house—and what was possible. How big the posts should be. How high the roof should be. Sometimes we had to compromise, because the archaeologists didn’t always agree with the architects.”
The beds, for instance, are too short. The earthen benches along the walls on both sides of the longfire were boxed with wood and covered with furs and blankets to make comfortable seats by day and double (or triple) beds by night. Each bed was separated from the next by a footboard joined to the posts that hold up the roof. The length of the beds at Eiriksstadir, said Gudmundur, “was a compromise after long discussion. We had to speculate about the posts because the early excavations had destroyed the evidence. But they had drawn a map of where they had found stones that had supported the roof posts, so our house is based a little on that. We archaeologists wanted narrower posts. To get them we had to shorten the beds. The engineers wanted to be sure the roof wouldn’t fall in. It’s calculated to hold the maximum weight of snow. I don’t think that was a problem for Eirik.”
He paused. “All things considered, I think this is probably the best reconstruction of a Viking Age house that I’ve seen.”
I took Gudmundur’s advice and went to the Dales to visit Eiriksstadir. It was the weekend of the yearly Viking festival, Leif’s Holiday, very much a family event. There was ring dancing and folksinging. A man worked a furnace and made trinkets out of nails. A woman sold bone flutes. Another played hneftafl or “tables,” the Viking board game, beating all comers. A Greenlander sold walrus-ivory amulets. Other merchants hawked felt hats, cured skins, and soap. A man turned four sheep carcasses on spits over a fire. Wearing special straps around their waists and legs for their opponents to grip, boys and girls competed at glíma, or Viking wrestling. A group of young toughs tried to lift huge stones. (The smallest of three was marked 75 kilograms, or 165 pounds.) Young and old in Viking garb competed in a sort of tug-of-war: A long rope was tied in a loop and laid behind the necks of two contestants; the goal was to pull each other forward past a bone marker.
A Viking tent with carved wooden tent-poles was filled with reproductions of Queen Asa’s housewares from the Oseberg ship: A Viking reenactor was living inside. The seven-footlong bed was full of rumpled furs and blankets.
Up the hill, Eirik the Red’s house looked tiny from the outside, an earthen hovel. Inside, it was snug.
The architects had put in two wooden dividers, turning the single open room of Gudmundur’s excavation into three: a small entry room, with storage space for tack and farm equipment; the main living room; and a small pantry, with a grindstone and a food chest, at the back door. The two anterooms were rough, the turf walls exposed, and each had a loft. The great hall was completely paneled and very pretty in a blond Scandinavian way. Furs and skins hung on the walls and were draped over the wide wooden benches along the walls. Tools and weapons hung from pegs or on crossbars that ran from the posts. At the base of each post, a carved footboard divided the benches into sleeping berths—for children or midgets, but not six-foot-tall men. Gudmundur was right: The posts were too close together.
The longfire was small, just one stick of wood burning on a bed of coals, and the room was rather dark and smoky, though warm. Over the fire, on an iron chain, hung a big black pot full of soup, simmering slowly. As I sat on a bench by the fire, imagining Gudrid minding the soup, there was just enough room for the tourists to walk past my knees.
The ceiling was higher than I had expected. It made the lofts over the anterooms into usable space, but it seemed odd to send the fire’s heat away from the people.
“According to the sagas,” the docent told me, “houses were as tall as they were wide.”
Presumably that was an architect’s reading of the sagas. According to Gudmundur, the height of a Viking house was one of those things we don’t exactly know yet.
I told the docent, who was dressed in a pinafore gown with tortoise brooches, that I was working with an archaeological crew digging up Gudrid’s house in the north, at Glaumbaer.
“Then can you explain why the beds in this house are so short?” she asked.
A man listening in on our conversation replied, “Because Vikings slept sitting up.”
“That’s nonsense,” she said.
I had heard that theory, too, but I wasn’t sold. The sagas include numerous episodes in which husbands and wives were clearly stretched out full length.
But the docent didn’t call on the sagas this time; she stuck to the archaeological record. “Have you seen the bed in the tent down there? The one from the Oseberg ship? No way would they sleep in those big beds while they were traveling and then come home to a short bed.”
I repeated what Gudmundur had told me about the post placement and the snow-load problem, and she was reassured to learn that we don’t exactly know the size of a Viking bed.
But because of this theoretical reconstruction of Eirik the Red’s house, Gudmundur did know a few other things. For instance, it took the carpenters weeks to build the wall panels. Based on the wall panels found in Greenland, they were over an inch thick, planed as smooth as a ship’s strake, and then decoratively carved.
The crucial scene in The Saga of Eirik the Red, when Eirik’s temper snaps and he kills his neighbor’s sons in a rage—the murders for which he is outlawed from Iceland, forcing him to sail west in search of the land believed t
o be beyond—is due to a couple of these boards.
Chapter 6: Eirik the Red’s Green Land
The land called Greenland was discovered and settled by Icelanders. Eirik the Red was the name of a man from the Breidafjord. He sailed from there to Greenland and claimed the land around what is now called Eiriksfjord. He gave the land its name and called it “Greenland” because he said people would be more inclined to go there if it had a nice name.
—Ari the Learned, The Book of the Icelanders
GUDRID AND HER FATHER SAILED TO GREENLAND IN the year 1000. They carried along the posts and beams and wall panels and bench boards of their house at Hellisvellir, and most likely the timber frame from Arnarstapi, too, since Orm and his wife emigrated with them. The two households—around thirty people altogether—had their clothes chests and milk buckets and cooking pots and seal-oil lamps, their looms and tools and tack and weapons, their fishing boats and the best of their livestock. They carried food and fresh water for a voyage expected to last less than a week.
They were not so lucky. Following the gentler version of Gudrid’s story—the one that doesn’t end in shipwreck—they were blown about the North Atlantic all summer, hafvilla, “bewildered by the sea.” Half their people died, including Gudrid’s foster-parents, and the survivors suffered miserably from fear and exposure in the open boat before they reached the southernmost tip of Greenland, just before winter, and found shelter with Eirik the Red’s cousin.
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