The Viking Hondbók

A VIKING HOME

Down on the Farm

During the Viking Age, most Scandinavians lived in small villages made up of six to eight farms—towns were relatively rare. Each farm had a longhouse as the main dwelling, surrounded by outbuildings like stables and storehouses and enclosed with a fence. Blacksmith shops, a fire hazard, usually stood at the edge of the property.

A typical longhouse had curved walls and an arched roofline like an upturned boat—everything comes back to ships for the Vikings. Walls were made of thick timbers sunk into the ground with planks or wattle, with daub in between—no windows. The thatched roof rested on wooden beams. Often the building was divided in half, with stalls for livestock at one end and the family’s living area at the other.

MODERN VIKINGS

Home Decor

Inside, the only light came from hazy fish oil (pleasant, I know) or tallow lamps, smoky central and cooking fires, and the hole in the roof that all the smoke was supposed to escape through. Can’t imagine it was super effective.

Built-in benches along the walls served as seating, storage, and beds, with long, narrow wooden tables. Needless to say, privacy was hard to come by, although the husband and wife might have a closet bed with shutters that closed. Wealthy royals occasionally had large, decorated wooden beds. Most people slept under heavy woolen blankets and possibly down comforters. For additional storage, wooden chests and boxes came in handy, some elaborately carved and some with clever iron locks. The lady of the house kept all the keys on a ring on her belt as a symbol of her status.

VIKING FAMILIES

All in the Family

A Viking household was made up of a married couple and their children, with servants for wealthy families. Vikings, like other groups in the Viking Age and Middle Ages, might have anywhere from no children to ten or even twelve—and, oh yeah, no separate bedrooms. Can you imagine?

Childhood in the Viking Age was mostly an apprenticeship for adulthood. Archaeologists have found children’s toys, including dolls, ships, swords, and small animal figures. But many toys could also work as teaching tools for adult tasks: a spinning top might teach a child the motions of spinning wool into thread, and a wooden sword could be used for training.

Vikings mostly educated their children by having them help with chores and grooming them to perform adult tasks. Children might tend the fire or gather firewood, help with cooking, pick berries, or take care of animals. In the poem “RigsÞula,” a myth about the creation of the social classes, only the upper-class children of the nobleman named Jarl learn to read and write runes.

Coming of Age

Life was hard in the Viking Age, with a high infant mortality rate and women at great risk of dying in childbirth. If parents could not afford to support a new child, infanticide, or leaving a baby out to die, was legal into the 1200s. With life expectancy hovering around a mere forty to forty-five years, children who survived grew up quickly. Boys could inherit at age sixteen, and girls could marry as young as twelve. They were considered adults as soon as they were married.

THE LOOK FOR MEN

You may imagine Vikings outfitted in nothing but fur and leather, but archaeological evidence shows that most clothing was made of woven wool and linen fabric, with silk trim on fancier pieces.

THE LOOK FOR WOMEN

Even rich Viking women lived active, outdoorsy lives, and the layered look was a practical solution that also offered plenty of opportunities for decoration. As with men, fur and leather played a much smaller role with women than pop culture leads us to believe. Working our way outward, here’s a breakdown of the four main layers:

Local Color

Homegrown ingredients like the root of the madder plant and the leaves of yellow flowering woad dictated many of the colors in a Viking woman’s wardrobe.

For more on dyeing techniques, see Weaving and Sewing, here.

MODERN VIKINGS

FARMING THE FJORDS AND FJELLS

Most farms focused on livestock: cows, sheep, horses, pigs, and some poultry. Farmers valued their animals for milk, wool, and work (plowing and riding) more than for meat—in fact, many poorer farmers would only kill and eat an animal as a last resort when facing starvation.

Pork became more popular with richer farmers over the course of the Viking Age, as they converted more fields from grazing land to grain crops. Pigs can forage in the woods and eat kitchen scraps, which means they need much less pasture space.

Women and men both tended animals, but the outdoor work of plowing, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and threshing fell to men. Since “fertilizing” meant spreading human and animal dung over the whole field, the women were probably glad to let them have it.

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