THE VIKINGS AT HOME

Home is where the hearth is—and the lutefisk

The town is not rich in goods and wealth. The staple food for inhabitants is fish, since it is so plentiful. It often happens that a newborn is tossed into the sea to save raising it. Also, whenever they wish, women may divorce their husbands. An eye makeup used by both men and women causes their beauty never to fade but to increase. But nothing can compare to the dreadful singing of these people, worse even than the barking of dogs.

—Ibrahim ibn al-Tartushi, Muslim adventurer

WITH ALL THE BURNING, LOOTING, plundering, and horrible mutilations going on throughout Europe at the hands of ruthless bands of bloodthirsty Viking pillagers, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that most Viking warriors were just regular folks who lived regular lives. Despite the axe-swinging mayhem, most of these dudes were just like you or me, only they didn’t talk about video games all day, drink milkshakes, or have to go to soccer practice. They were farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and family men, and anytime a Norseman wasn’t out on a raid impaling people and burning their pets, he was chilling at home, working his day job growing crops or raising cattle or doing whatever else he had to do to put food on the table for his family.

A typical day in the life of a non-adventuring Northman began around six in the morning. The men of the house would get up, clean their teeth with a wooden twig, and head out into the fields to work the farm, which wasn’t particularly exciting but had to get done anyway. They’d feed the horses, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens; sow the fields with flax, wheat, barley, oats, corn, peas, and cabbage; and do manly things like fix fences and dig holes. Around eight AM they’d come back to the house, where the women would have prepared dagmeal, which is the same thing as breakfast—typically eggs, buttermilk, salted fish, and maybe some berries or nuts or veggies. Following the meal, the men would either continue their work or head out to hunt or fish. Salmon, cod, herring, and trout were common catches throughout Scandinavia, and Vikings also hunted deer for food; foxes, wolves, and bears for their fur; and whales, seals, and walruses, which were prized for their fatty blubber because that stuff could be used for everything from food to boat grease.

Speaking of fish, a favorite traditional dish for Vikings was lutefisk, a terrible-smelling, jelly-like concoction made from dried, salted cod that’s been soaked in lye for so long that it tastes like stinky soap and can probably be classified more as a weapon than a food.

Around seven PM the men would come back home for nattmeal—dinner—which the women had been cooking basically since they’d finished making breakfast. Nattmeal was an intense feast with honey, beef, fish, cheese, stews, breads, and butter, eaten Viking-style on a wooden plate, with a metal knife and a spoon (but no fork, because forks are for wimps). This was accompanied by a generous helping of ale or mead chugged from the hollowed-out horn of a bull or a ram. In super-rich houses, this meal would sometimes be followed by dancing, singing, acrobats, clowns, and jugglers, and by poets and musicians singing heroic tales of ancient battles before a raging hearth fire.

The Vikings lived in big wooden homes known as longhouses. Ranging from 40 to 250 feet in length and decorated with everything from animal furs to golden cups plundered from French cathedrals, these rectangular homes were hand-crafted from wood timbers, then roofed with thick chunks of fresh sod. There were no windows, because windows let in the freezing cold of the Arctic winter, and aside from the front door, the only ventilation was a little chimney hole cut just above a huge fire pit in the middle of the house. There was no electricity, so the fire provided heat, light, and a cooking method, and if you could handle a little smoke inhalation, a good bench near the fire was the best seat in the house. Typically, the longhouse consisted of one or two large rooms, with beds, benches, and tables set up on each side of a long center aisle.

The Vikings lived in longhouses with their entire extended family, including grandparents, uncles, and cousins, and during particularly cold winters, sometimes they’d even bring the dogs and cows and pigs into the house to keep them from freezing to death in the subzero Scandinavian temperatures (the average low temperature for winter in Oslo, Norway, is nineteen degrees Fahrenheit… thirteen degrees below freezing!). Those temperatures were not your friend when nature called, because there were no bathrooms in the longhouse. You had to go outside and walk over to your outhouse, which is like a permanent version of those plastic portable bathrooms you see at construction sites and state fairs. When the Vikings were on campaign, they used to have two guys stand outside and guard the outhouse door, because English, Irish, and Frankish peasants liked to kill Vikings while they were trying to go to the bathroom. What a way to go.