Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

mately the sense applied to the other examples used here. When the house first
occurs in the second settlement phase it marks out the economic and probably ritual
centre of the village (Haarnagel 1979, pp. 189 ff.). In the following two phases the
estate to which it belongs grows and comes to consist of two main farm houses and
two halls, i.e., houses 27 and 12 together with houses 13 and 35. This way of pairing
the houses cannot be shown to be more than probable, but we can note the fact that
in the northeast part of the villages there emerges a large estate displaying its halls
towards those who approach the village from the only direction from which it can
conveniently be approached, namely the east northeast.
The exact character of the farms to which the halls belong is not known, but
there is evidence of their economic strength, expressed not least in the amount of
storage buildings attached to the farms. Haarnagel (1979) sees a difference between
the Herrenhof in house no 12 and the Volkshalle in house no 35, but there
is little substantial proof of such a division, although it mirrors the general division
of power in Early Iron Age society. Suffice it to say that in Feddersen Wierde we
see part of the development of the hall farm, and in the fifth settlement phase (2nd
century AD) the whole northeast sector of the village seems to be dominated by a
wealthy estate displaying two halls, houses 12 and 35 (Fig. 2).
Part of the structure can also be observed in phase 6 (3rd to 4th centuries AD),
but in the two last phases, ending in the 5th century, the structure is not discernible.
Although there is much to support the hall interpretation of these two houses in
Feddersen Wierde, it must nonetheless be said that in theory these houses, 12 and
35, may be equivalent to the so-called second house (Herschend 1993) found on
several larger farms, which, despite their size, lack halls. Hall farms are often characterised
by a combination of three houses, the main house, the second house and
the hall.
If we had been able to follow the development of the Hodde settlement at the
time, it is possible that we would have seen a development of the dominant farm
similar to that in Feddersen Wierde. The farm and the house that may fit this kind
of development in Hodde, the main farm and house II, were, however, interpreted
by Hvass (1985, pp. 131 f.) as a large farm with a normal outhouse, albeit signified
in ways that denoted its attachment to the large farm.
The origin of the hall is veiled in obscurity even though we may consider its
general European roots to be connected with the Homeric megaron (Thompson,
M. 1995, pp. 8 ff.). In our North European focus, however, it seems fair to say
that halls grew out of the egalitarian Early Iron Age village.
A leap forward for the hall, not least geographically, seems to have taken place
in the fourth century (cf. Appendix I), when halls are found in Denmark, Dejbjerg
or Gudme and in the Baltic, at Övetorp on Öland and at Vallhagar on Gotland. On
the Swedish mainland the house under Högum Mound 3 is so far the best and
earliest dated published house, probably built in the fifth century. In Norway, a hall
17