A winter night in a Viking longhouse

Langeldr: Old Norse, the long fire, the hearth that ran down the middle of a longhouse. A winter night around the year 900 on the Lofoten islands, far north of the Arctic Circle, told to you, sixteen and born in the house: the Sun gone below the mountains for a month, thirty people around one fire, cod drying in the wind, a loom taller than a man, a traveller at the door and a poet who begins with the beginning of the world... Inside: a king's table on a scratched board, the fire of the sea, a silver arm-ring, the return of the Sun. Ottar of Hålogaland will be there too. Chapters: The house · The dark time · The hearth · The evening meal · The loom · The game · The guest · The story · The night · The return. Sources: archaeology of the Lofoten chieftain's houses, Ottar's account at King Alfred's court, the Hávamál, the Prose Edda. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

The fire in the middle of the house has not gone out for weeks.

It burns in a long stone-lined trench down the centre of the floor, low and red, and someone feeds it every few hours, day and night. Above it, the smoke rises slowly into the dark of the roof and finds its way out through a small square hole between the beams.

Outside, the snow is deep, the sea is black, and the Sun has not risen at all for nearly a month.

Embers of History. Episode four... a winter night in a Viking longhouse.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is the year nine hundred, or near it. You are in the far north of Norway, on one of the islands of Lofoten, well north of the Arctic Circle.

The islands rise straight out of the sea in steep grey mountains, white with snow from top to bottom. Between the mountains and the water lie narrow strips of flat land, a few fields, a few meadows, and here and there, on a low rise, a farm.

The house you live in is one of the largest in the north.

How do we know what life was like here? Mostly from the ground. Archaeologists have found the outlines of houses like this one, their hearths, their post-holes, the things people dropped and lost. And from a few written words... a little later, and from far away. Around the year eight ninety, a man from this very part of Norway, named Ottar, sailed to England and told the English king, Alfred, about his home. The king's scribes wrote his words down. He said that he lived farther north than any other Norwegian. He told them about his reindeer, his whale hunting, and the long, long winters.

The rest comes from the poems and the sagas, written down in Iceland two and three hundred years later. They remember a great deal. Not all of it is true. But they remember how people spoke.

Chapter one. The house.

You are sixteen. You were born in this house, and you have never spent a winter anywhere else.

It is a long house. Very long... longer than a ship, longer than most churches that will one day be built in this country. Its walls bow outward slightly in the middle, like the sides of a boat, and its roof is high, steep and heavy, covered in turf, so that in summer grass grows on it. Now it is buried in snow, and the snow keeps it warm.

There are no windows. The light inside comes from the fire, from a few small lamps, and in daytime, a little grey light from the smoke hole above and from the doors when they open.

Inside, the house is divided into rooms, one after another, along its length.

At one end, behind a wall of planks, is the byre, where the cattle spend the winter. You can hear them shifting in the dark, now and then, and you can smell them. Their warmth comes through the wall and helps to heat the house. In the coldest weeks, that warmth matters.

In the middle is the great hall, the heart of the house, where the long fire burns.

Along both sides of the hall run wide raised platforms of earth and wood, about a knee high, covered in planks and skins and woollen blankets. This is where everyone sits during the day, and where most of them sleep at night. The floor around the fire is beaten earth, swept and strewn with a little straw.

At the far end are smaller rooms... a room for stores, a room where the women of the house weave, and the private bed-closet where the master and the mistress of the house sleep behind a wooden door.

About thirty people live here through the winter.

The master of the house is a chieftain. His family has held this land for generations. He has a high seat in the middle of one of the long platforms, with two carved wooden posts on either side of it. When he sits there, everyone knows who he is.

His wife holds the keys to the stores, and nothing is taken from them without her knowing. She decides how much of the dried fish, the grain, the butter and the cheese can be eaten each week, so that it lasts until spring. In a house in the far north, that is no small thing. A careless winter can mean a hungry spring.

Then there are their children, their relatives, men who serve the chieftain, a few freed servants, and a few who are not free at all. Slaves... thralls, they are called... taken in raids or born to other thralls. They do the hardest work. They are part of this world, and the stories do not hide it.

And you, somewhere among them.

Chapter two. The dark time.

In the summer, the Sun never sets here. For weeks it simply circles around the sky, low in the north at midnight, and people work in the fields and on the sea at all hours. Children play outside long after they should be asleep, because nobody can tell them it is night.

In the winter, it is the other way around.

From early December until the start of January, the Sun does not rise above the mountains at all. Around midday, the sky in the south grows pale, then blue, then pink and gold along the edge of the sea... a long, slow dawn that never quite becomes a day. Then it fades back into darkness.

On clear nights, the sky is full of stars. And sometimes, high above the mountains, the northern lights appear... pale green curtains of light, slowly folding and unfolding across the sky, for an hour, or for a whole night.

What did people think they were? Nobody can be sure. The old poems say very little about them. Later, people in the north told many stories... that they were the spirits of the dead, or the reflection of great shoals of herring under the sea, or that you should never whistle at them. But those stories were written down much later. The Vikings themselves left us no word about the lights.

On a night like tonight, there is no reason to go outside unless you must. And yet the animals need feeding, water needs carrying, and the fire needs wood.

Wood is precious here. There are few trees on the islands, small birches mostly, and much of the timber for the house itself came by boat, from farther south, or from the trunks of trees that drifted ashore. So the fire is fed carefully... with wood, with peat cut from the bogs in summer and dried, and sometimes with bones and fat.

It burns slowly. It is never allowed to blaze. Just enough to keep the house warm, to cook, and to see by.

Chapter three. The hearth.

The long fire is the centre of everything.

It burns in a trench about as long as two men lying head to foot, edged with flat stones set on their sides. At one end, an iron cauldron hangs from a chain above the coals. In it, all day, something is simmering... a stew of dried mutton and barley, or fish, or the bones of last week's meal.

Near the fire stand stone pots, carved out of a soft grey rock called soapstone, which holds heat for a long time. Bread is baked on flat iron plates over the coals, or on hot stones... flat round loaves of barley, thin and hard.

There is no chimney. The smoke fills the upper part of the hall, in a grey layer below the roof, and slowly escapes through the hole above. The beams up there are black with soot. Everything in the house, after a winter, smells of smoke... the clothes, the hair, the blankets. Nobody minds. It is the smell of a warm house.

Hanging above the fire, up in the smoke, there are meats and fish, drying and curing slowly. Legs of mutton. Strips of whale. A few sausages.

And all around the walls of the house, stored in the cold, there is the food that must last until spring.

Barrels of butter, salted down in summer. Cheeses. Sacks of barley, some of it grown in the small fields here, more of it bought from the south. Sour milk, kept in wooden vats. Berries dried in autumn. And above all, fish.

Dried fish is the treasure of these islands.

Every winter, from about January, great shoals of cod come down from the Barents Sea to spawn in the waters around Lofoten. The men of the islands go out in open boats and bring them in by the thousand. The fish are cleaned and hung in pairs on wooden racks in the open air, where the cold, dry wind of spring slowly dries them, until they are as hard as wood.

Fish dried that way will keep for years. You can carry it on a ship to the other side of the world, and it will still be good to eat.

It feeds the house through the winter. It feeds the crews on long voyages. And one day, in the centuries to come, it will be sold in every port of Europe.

The first boats of the season will go out in a few weeks. For now, the men mend their nets by the fire.

Chapter four. The evening meal.

Twice a day, the household eats together. Once in the morning, once in the evening.

Tonight, the boards are set up on trestles along the platforms. The food is brought from the fire in wooden bowls. Stew. Bread. Butter. A little cheese. Dried fish, beaten with a stone on a flat rock until it is soft enough to tear, then eaten with butter.

People eat with their own knives, which they carry at the belt, and with spoons of wood or horn. There are no forks.

To drink, there is ale, brewed in the house from barley. On feast days, there is mead, made from honey and water, and kept for special nights. Today is not a feast. Today there is whey, and a little ale.

At the table, everyone has their place.

The chieftain sits in his high seat. Opposite him, in the second high seat, sits his most honoured guest, if there is one. Then the men of the house, in order of their standing. The women sit together, a little apart. The children wherever they can find room. The thralls eat afterwards.

To be given a seat close to the high seat is an honour. To be moved farther away is a quiet, public shame. People notice. They remember. Many of the feuds in the sagas begin with something as small as a seat at the table.

You sit near the end, close to the fire, where you can feed it when it needs it.

Chapter five. The loom.

After the meal, the work goes on.

No one in this house is ever idle in winter. There is too much to do, and the winter is too long.

In the room at the end of the hall, the women are weaving. The loom stands upright, leaning against the wall... two tall wooden posts, a beam across the top, and hanging from the beam, hundreds of threads of wool, held straight by stone weights tied to their lower ends. The weaver stands in front of it and works from the top down, passing the thread across and beating it upward with a flat wooden sword.

Everything the household wears was made this way. Shirts, dresses, cloaks, blankets. And the sail of the chieftain's ship.

A ship's sail is made of wool, too. One great square sail, many metres across, woven in long strips, then sewn together, then rubbed with fat to make it hold the wind.

Weaving such a sail takes years of a woman's working life. The ship, which the men are so proud of, is carried across the sea, in the end, by the work of the women's hands.

Before the weaving, there is the spinning. All day, the women and girls of the house spin wool into thread with a small hand spindle... a stick with a round stone weight on it... turning it, letting it drop, drawing out the thread, winding it on, again and again. They spin while they talk. They spin while they watch the children. They spin while they walk.

By the fire, the men are working too.

One is carving a new handle for an axe. One is mending a net. One is sharpening knives on a whetstone, slowly, with a little water. One is cutting thin strips of leather for a new pair of shoes. A boy is learning to carve a spoon from a piece of birch.

The old man who was once the best boat-builder on the islands sits on the platform with a small block of wood in his hands. He is making a toy horse for a child. He has made many.

Chapter six. The game.

Not everything is work.

On a board between two young men, there is a game. It is called hnefatafl... the king's table. The board is a square of wood, scratched with a grid of lines. In the middle stands a king, and around him his defenders. On every side, the attackers wait, twice as many.

The king must escape to one of the corners of the board. The attackers must surround him and trap him. One side has more pieces. The other has the king. It is never quite clear which side has the better chance.

The pieces are small pegs of bone or glass or amber. Finds from graves of this time sometimes include a whole set, buried with its owner, so that the game could go on.

Others are playing with dice, carved from bone, each side marked with dots, as dice still are. Some are wrestling, half joking, on the earthen floor, until someone tells them to stop before they fall into the fire.

And there are riddles.

Riddles are a serious pastime. In the old poems, gods and giants, and kings and strangers, test one another with riddles... sometimes for their lives. Around the fire, they are only for fun. Somebody asks... what is it that runs without feet, and roars without a mouth? And the children call out answers, until someone guesses the river.

Chapter seven. The guest.

Late in the evening, there is a sound outside, above the wind. The dogs bark. Someone calls from beyond the door.

A traveller.

On a night like this, in a place like this, there is no question of what to do.

In the north, to refuse shelter to someone at the door in winter is a terrible thing. Not only cruel... shameful. The old poem called Hávamál, the sayings of the High One, written down in Iceland much later, but older than its writing, begins with advice for exactly this moment.

@bm_george Fire is needed by the one who has come in, whose knees are frozen. Food and clothing are needed by the one who has travelled across the mountain.

The traveller is brought in, out of the snow. He stamps his feet. Snow falls from his cloak in clumps. Someone takes the cloak and hangs it near the fire to dry. Someone brings him water to wash his hands and face, and a towel, and then a bowl of the stew.

Then, when he is warm and fed, everyone turns to him.

A guest from outside is a great event in the middle of winter. He brings news... about who has married whom, who has died, which chieftains are quarrelling, what the king in the south is doing, which ships came back last autumn and which did not.

And if he has a talent, he will be asked to use it.

This one, it turns out, is a poet.

Chapter eight. The story.

In this world, a poet is a person of great value. The word for him is skald.

A skald knows the old stories... of the gods, of heroes, of the great families. He can make new verses, too, in praise of a chieftain, which the chieftain will reward with a ring or a fine cloak. His verses are composed in a strict and complicated form, with patterns of sounds that must fall in exactly the right places, and full of hidden names for things.

A ship is the horse of the sea. Gold is the fire of the sea. Battle is the storm of weapons.

A good verse is remembered. It travels from house to house, and from generation to generation, without ever being written down. Some of them were remembered for three hundred years, until monks in Iceland finally wrote them on vellum. That is the only reason we have them now.

The skald sits near the high seat, where the light from the fire is strongest. The room grows quiet. The spindles stop. The game is left on its board.

And he begins with the beginning of the world.

In the beginning, he says, there was nothing. No sand, no sea, no cool waves. No earth below, no sky above. Only a great empty gap.

To the north of the gap lay a world of ice and mist. To the south lay a world of fire. And where the warm air from the south met the frost from the north, the ice began to melt, and drip... and from the drops, life came.

The children have heard this story many times. They know what comes next... the giant made from the melting ice, and the great cow who fed him, licking the salty ice blocks until a man appeared from them. They know how the gods made the world from the giant's body... his flesh became earth, his bones the mountains, his blood the sea, and his skull the sky.

They know it, and still they listen as though they had never heard it.

The skald's voice rises and falls. Sometimes he speaks. Sometimes he half sings. The fire throws his shadow up onto the soot-black roof.

Outside, the wind blows across the snow and over the turf roof. Inside, there is only his voice, and the fire, and thirty people listening.

When he is finished, the chieftain takes a silver arm-ring from his own arm and gives it to him.

In this world, that is how a ruler shows he is generous. And a ruler must be generous. A chieftain who keeps his silver to himself will not keep his men for long. The poems call a good king the ring-giver... the breaker of rings.

Chapter nine. The night.

Slowly, the house goes to bed.

The lamps are put out one by one. They are small dishes of iron or stone, filled with fish oil or seal fat, with a wick of twisted moss or cotton grass. They give a small, smoky, yellow light, and they smell of the sea.

People lie down on the platforms where they sat... on skins and woollen blankets, close together for warmth, with their cloaks over them. The children in the middle. The dogs where they can.

The guest is given a good place, near the fire.

Someone banks the fire for the night. The burning wood is pushed together and covered with ash and a few pieces of peat, so that it will smoulder slowly until morning, without going out. In the morning, someone will uncover it and blow on the coals, and it will wake again.

A fire that goes out is a small disaster. Lighting a new one with flint and steel, in the cold, with damp tinder, can take a long time. So the fire is guarded. It has not gone out for weeks. In some houses, it is said, the same fire was kept going for years.

The house is quiet now.

There is the sound of the wind. Thirty people breathing in the dark. A child turning over. One of the cows behind the wall, shifting its weight. Now and then, the soft settling of the coals.

Outside, beyond the walls, the snow lies on the mountains. The sea moves against the stones of the shore. And above it all, if the clouds have gone, the stars are out, and perhaps the green light is moving across the sky, with no one awake to see it.

Chapter ten. The return.

The darkness does not last forever.

In the middle of winter, at the darkest time of the year, the people of the north held a great feast. They called it jól. It lasted for days. Animals were slaughtered, the best food was eaten, the best ale was brewed, and people drank toasts... to the gods, for a good year, and for peace. When the new religion came, centuries later, its Christmas took the old feast's place... and in the north, it kept the old name. To this day, Christmas in Norway is called jul.

And then, in early January, comes the day.

Everyone who can goes outside, a little before midday, and looks toward the south. For weeks, the sky there has grown bright and faded again without the Sun ever appearing.

Today, very slowly, a sliver of gold shows above the edge of the mountains. Only for a few minutes. Then it is gone again.

But it was there. And tomorrow it will stay a little longer. And the day after, a little longer still.

Soon the cod will come. The boats will go out. The racks will be hung with fish. The cattle will be let out of the byre, thin and blinking, onto the first green grass. The snow will retreat up the mountains. And then, in the summer, the Sun will not set at all.

But for now, it is still winter.

And in the middle of the long house, under a roof of snow, the fire is still burning, low and red, in its trench of stones. Someone will feed it before dawn. Someone will feed it tomorrow night, and the night after.

They had a word for it. Langeldr. The long fire.

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