BUILDINGS AND ARCHITECTURE

The types of settlement follow a certain pattern through the Viking Period and the Middle Ages and up to recent centuries. In the Age of migration, during the 400s and 500s, the landscapes are divided between chiefdoms and petty kingdoms, followed by a long period wherein the ecclesiastical and royal powers increase and towns develop.

As the period moves into the Middle Ages castles and forts are built and as such replace the chieftains' halls of the Viking Period; churches, convents and monasteries are erected, and in the agricultural landscapes farm settlements change from consisting of few and large longhouses to becoming more complex villages.

We can find remnants of the "pillar houses" (thus named because the ceiling was supported by a row of pillars inside the house) of the Viking Period and the Iron Age along the entire North Sea coast from Friesland to Jutland and south-east Norway – and this type of house continued to be part of the building traditions of the post-Reformation centuries. The half-timbered houses of Denmark and Germany belong to the same architectural tradition as the Norwegian stave buildings which, on their part, have an unmistakeable constructional affinity with the large mediaeval barns of the farms of southern England, Normandy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Norwegian log house, the open hearth house, is in principle the same type of dwelling house as the "Scottish blackhouse", with an open hearth in the middle of the floor and a smoke vent in the ceiling. However, the farm buildings in Scotland and on the Western Isles, and in Jutland and Friesland, too, are stone buildings with large thatched roofs – while the Norwegians built wooden houses with roofs of birchbark and turf. In the landscapes of the southern part of the North Sea, it is particularly the stone architecture and the half-timbered houses that characterise the building tradition of towns and villages alike.