Architecture, Society, and Ritual in Viking Age Scandinavia. Doors, Dwellings, and Domestic Space

Abstract

In the late 1980s when Cornelia Weinmann (1994) worked on her PhD thesis on ‘Scandinavian housebuilding’ we lamented the fact that there was hardly any welcoming and straightforward Home & Living Magazine material in Old Norse texts. This was not just an ironic truth is was also the reason why it was interesting and indeed difficult to look into a culture that understood houses and their interior in other ways than we understand them today as archaeologists, ethnologists or modern human being. Although ‘This old house’ was first aired 1979, there simply wasn’t any swelling dream-house or housedream market and virtually none of the pseudo-tickling hyper-individual ‘who-lives -here?’ stuff that today’s real estate TV is made on. Thirty years later Marianne Hem Eriksen has turned this lack of a simple descriptive ethnography and the complexity of the house as architecture and a body into her point of departure and made the understanding of the door her analytical entrance into a partly forgotten world. Real estate TV is genuinely colonial: ‘We’ve travelled the countryside, found a house, the natives are gone, let’s go in and see if the premises suit you.’ Marianne Hem Eriksen’s approach as discussed in Part I is post-colonial : ‘There is a house. What does it mean to enter and leave the house and its rooms?’ Wisely, she avoids the descriptive ethnological approach to buildings and craftsmanship. Instead, supported by her database of Late Iron Age house remains, she focusses on the meaning of the architectural elements of the traditional Iron and Viking Age three-aisled long house with roof-supporting interior posts, trestles and purlins. Her analysis of the last 500 years of this tradition until the Late Viking Age as indeed Architecture is a theoretical and methodological choice. It turns out to be a prolific one because her focus is on the door, that is, on the transitional and/or liminal zone of any outer or major partition in the anatomy of a house. The door is the analytical tool that allows her to look at a variety of source materials in an inter-disciplinary approach, such as Archaeology, Architecture, Anthropology, Linguistics, History of Religion or the close reading of poetry, sagas and historical narratives. At the same time or rather consequently, it becomes possible for her successfully to analyse a number of cases in order to come to grips with the connotations of ‘the door’, ‘the house’ and its ‘space’. With this approach movement and usage becomes the important parameters trying to understand the interior as an ordered space in itself and the exterior as a meaningful situation in the landscape. The interior belongs to the formalized architecture of the house, the exterior belongs the architecture of the landscape. This means that wherever there is a traditional house, the architect, literally ‘the chief builder’ has created an ontology of the interplay between the closed