Life on a Viking Settlement

While it’s hard to imagine Vikings apart from their fearsome raids, life at home was decidedly domestic. Most Vikings lived in small settlements made up of six or seven farms.

Families lived in longhouses built of wood and lined with clay or mud and wooden strips. They’d hang dried meat and herbs from the rafters below the thatched, wooden, or turf roof.

Larger farms might have outbuildings, like barns and stables, but some homes only had a partition between the animal and human occupants.

Life in the longhouse centered on the hearth, which provided heat for cooking, light for work, and warmth at night. But with only a hole in the roof and no windows, the house was always dim and sometimes smoky.

At night, someone would lock or bolt the doors before the family curled up on wooden benches with blankets. Only the wealthiest had elaborately carved wooden beds, topped by feather-stuffed duvets.

Using the bathroom in a Viking settlement meant heading outside to a hole dug in the ground. Once full, the holes would be filled in, providing a rich (if stinky) source of material for today’s archaeologists.

Viking women spent a lot of time spinning and weaving to make the cloth required to dress their families, provide sails for ships, and trade at the market. A half-sunken pithouse, sometimes made with turf walls, made a cozy weaving hut for several women to work in. After about 1000 CE, weaving was more likely to take place inside the home.

Vikings covered the settlement’s pathways with brush, planks, or the wood shavings left from building homes and ships.

Blacksmiths were an important part of any Viking community. They made weapons, like swords and axes, but also ship parts, farm tools, and cookware.

Viking kids had toys. Archeologists have found small boats, rag balls, wooden swords, and toy horses in settlement excavations. At home, people played a board game called hnefatafl and pulled out animal-bone ice skates and wooden skis in wintertime.

Wheat and grains for bread and porridge grew on farms, but Vikings also planted herbs, raised animals, hunted, kept bees for honey and mead, fished, and foraged for wild berries. Milk became cheese or skyr, a yogurt-like dairy product you can find at the grocery store today.

Enslaved people, or thralls, did much of the hardest farm work: herding animals, fertilizing fields, and milking the cows.

Myths, sagas, and well-known stories were a daily part of settlement life. A Viking might wear jewelry featuring Thor’s hammer, listen to a poet’s recitations at a feast, or share memorized tales around the fire at home.