Viking Age Longhouse

The Viking Age longhouse was the main farmhouse of Scandinavia between about the 8th and 11th centuries. It was a long timber building in which people lived and, in many cases, cattle were kept at one end. Because the timber walls and roofs have rotted, Viking Age houses are known from post holes, wall trenches and a few burnt or waterlogged remains. Full-scale reconstructions at open-air museums show a range of possible roof coverings.

Form

Viking Age walls were often built in a curved, bow-sided plan, so that the ridge line also curved. Houses used earth-fast construction, with load-bearing posts set into the ground, which required good-quality oak. The chieftain's house excavated at Tarm in western Jutland had three or four rooms, with cattle kept at one end.

Roof coverings

• Reed thatch: many reconstructions in western Jutland, Denmark, are thatched with reed, which was plentiful there.
• Straw: craftsmen's houses reconstructed from finds at Hedeby, in Schleswig, around 900 CE, have timber-framed walls filled with wattle and clay and roofs of straw.
• Wooden shingles: the reconstructed longhouse at Ribe VikingeCenter, based on an estate at Gammel Hviding of about 980 CE and following the Trelleborg-Fyrkat house type, is 35 m (115 ft) long and 8 m (26 ft) wide. It used 160 oak trunks and about 5,000 hand-made roofing shingles.
• Turf: where timber was scarce, as in western Jutland, some walls and fences were built of turf. For the turf-roofed traditions of Norway and Iceland, see the entries on sod roofs and the Icelandic turf house.

Windows, where present, were filled with stretched parchment-like skin on frames, and doors and gable boards were sometimes painted with ox blood and pigment.

Reconstruction sites

Bork Vikingehavn in western Jutland rebuilt a chieftain's longhouse excavated at Tarm, on a farm plot of about 100 by 100 m (330 by 330 ft) used from around 700 CE for about 300 years, together with sunken huts, Hedeby-type houses and boathouses. Ribe VikingeCenter rebuilt the Hviding estate. Such reconstructions are partly evidence-based and partly conjectural: Ribe notes, for example, that no late 10th-century barns have been excavated, so its thatched barn is an informed guess.

Significance for roofing history

The Viking Age longhouse links the aisled timber houses of earlier prehistoric Europe with medieval farmhouses and the turf-roofed buildings of the North Atlantic. Its variety of coverings shows that the same house type could be roofed in different ways according to local materials and the owner's status.