Those crazy Vikings. When they weren’t out conquering, pillaging, and committing general bad-assery, they were hanging out in their warm hobbit-like homes in Iceland. While the boat-looking longhouses we all think of when picturing a Viking building were the main dwellings back in Scandinavia, almost all homes in Iceland were made literally from the land.
These turf houses were built both out of necessity for warmth and lack of proper materials. Wood from birch trees – the most common tree in Iceland – is too weak to hold up an entire home, so it was used as a frame onto which the turf was then packed. Eirik the Red and his compatriots mastered the art of building homes from the materials at hand. But this wasn’t just about digging up clumps of dirt and throwing them onto your frame. A good turf home builder knew that you not only had to dig down a few inches to find the good stuff but you had to be near a bog where the ground is riddled with roots from a certain bean plant.
Many details factored in to how long your house would stay up. Depending on the weather, time of year, and amount of water and roots in the soil, they could stay standing for anywhere from 3 years to 3 decades. While only foundations from Viking Era homes survive, turf homes were a common practice for over a millennium.
The majority of homes in Iceland were made from turf until the 1940s, when concrete was introduced. Today, recreations can be found all over Iceland and at the Norse Settlement in North America at L’Anse aux Meadows.
Photos and information courtesy of: Wikipedia, Hurstwic, and my current read The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown.
As always, if YOU have an idea for a Historical Thursday, let me know at: thereifixedit@gmail.com
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Got to visit one of these settlements this summer on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada in a small town called l’Anse Aux Meadows. Not only do you see the archealogical remains of the settlement, but they have recreations (the first picture is one of them). They also have staff re-enacting the daily life as a Viking settler.
As ‘brutish’ and ‘barbaric’ most people think Vikings to be, I’m surprised at how innovative and strategic these people were.
Vikings were very smart, and had very good tools to do so. Vikings were actually just the soldiers of Scandinavia and set out to be explorers.
they were more than that. they were also traders.
this has to be one warm house.
in it’s own way, it is a ‘green’ house. using basic tenets of nature to keep warm in the winter. cool in the summer
inb4 bad puns.
(Happy to oblige, Dave)
Building these must be such a pain in the grass.
Oh, you!
Hay! That was terrible.
Nice fail, bro.
A couple years ago, we traveled to Iceland. One of the
most famous turf-house museums there is it Glaumbauer.
http://picasaweb.google.com/Blainesville/IcelandJuly2008#5273738289407462850
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_turf_houses
That is so cool. Wish I could see the interior.
I don’t want to see a turf war here.
Definitely a very hedgy design concept.
Home Sweet Haystack
“Honey! Go mow the roof!”
“But I’m watching the game!”
Better to do the book-burning away from home!
Gotta love Newfoundland!!
These look like my buildings in Minecraft.
Only one was ever built with a fireplace.
Actually it wouldn’t be very flammable at all. It’s basically made of earth, which tends not to burn. Besides, thatched cottages have fireplaces, and their roofs – being dry, dead grass – really DO burn.
I wonder if the sod houses in the American Midwest got the idea from Iceland. Those involved more sheet metal and baleing twine though.
Sheet metal and baling twine weren’t used for the ones mentioned in the Little House on the Prairie books. The Ingalls family loved in a sod house for a while.
If I remember correctly Pa Ingalls traded his ponies for the dugout house on Plumcreek (and a pair of oxen, one of which broke out one day and walked over the grass roof of the house). Laura and Mary could not understand the seller of the house because he spoke Norwegian or Swedish. So, Scorpion 451, they may have shared the same tradition. There are sod houses in Norway too.
That must be how they got the little Ingalls…
Mr. Frodo, sir — are you there?
Were Vikings the source of the term “turf war”?
looks like the teletubbies house…
It’s a hobbit house! =D
General bad grassery…
vikings used stuff like this alot even some places they made a combo of longhouses and turf houses where they covered the roof with eart and then grass began growing. there have even been found evidence that they might even might have had stuff like grain up there. even to this day a few houses uses the same princip with earth on the roof
also consider there aren´t a lot of wood on iceland. so building of earth would be the only substainable option
i’ve always thought it’d be cool to live in a house like that. i’ve seen modernized versions as well, they look pretty spiffy. the norwegian in me loves them, hehe.
Man, I sure do love being from Iceland
I’ve actually stayed in one of these over night
FYI: “Dug-outs” were a common housing in rural America well into the first half of the 20th century.
…Does this mean that Hobbits were Vikings? Actually I’m descended from Vikings.
Actually, Vikings regarded themselves as farmers, not pillagers…
Incredibly to think about how quickly my nation evolved. My grandmother was born and raised for quite a few years in a house like these but I, 48 years younger, have almost all the luxuries one could imagine !
Iceland missed out on the industrial evolution and only began fully after World War 2. That´s a pretty quick evolution !