Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

When eventually hall and power, king and throne stand out as synonyms, the hall
itself starts to move down the social scale again. It leaves the throne behind and
becomes a couple of square metres inside everyone’s front door, perhaps furnished
with something to sit on when changing footwear.
The Family in the Hall
Even though some halls like Lejre and Yeavering were hardly just private, the privacy
of the hall can be found during the whole of the Late Iron Age inasmuch as hall-life
was a socially differentiated vogue related to families of sufficient wealth to split their
households into two. Splitting the household was probably a slow process in the first
centuries AD when the farms grew, but by the fourth century the original kitchen
dwelling was obviously less private than the hall in its everyday use without guests.
Good archaeological examples of this privacy may be found in Migration Period
Vallhagar or at Viking Age Borg. In Vallhagar there are hardly any finds of high-status
artefacts. The artefacts consist of a few larger pots and a fair share of small ceramic
drinking cups, together with loom-weights, spinning wheels, some modest jewellery,
a glass shard and a box on the floor with seeds and nuts. The distribution of the
artefacts may indicate a gender division in the house (Fig. 11) and the artefact material
stands out only in comparison with the material in the main house of a farm,
where there is an abundance of coarse household ware which makes other artefacts
relatively speaking fewer (Fig. 12).
Find categories and distributions are also interesting at Borg in Lofoten (Fig. 13).
The artefacts found clearly indicate the different functions of kitchen, dwelling and hall,
but at the same time this hall is much more intricate and more ceremonial than the farm
hall on Gotland. Nonetheless, the mixture of handicraft utensils and drinking vessels is
present, and there seems to be a division of the room into a male and a female part
since utensils for weaving belong to the southwest side of the room while small knives
and pieces of tufa for smoothing are more common in the northwest one.
All in all ‘Guldgubbar’, artefacts used for wood carving, weaving or spinning, together
with lavish drinking glasses and a hearth not used for everyday cooking, indicate
the ceremonies as well as the daily family life of the farm owner on the large farm. This
is a room for a gender-divided family engaged in handicraft and consequently in talking
to each other. Even in the royal milieu of Beowulf the nuclear family is present in the
hall. The Queen, who administers a significant toast by serving beer to her husband and
the three most prominent men in the hall, acts as the king’s complement and the royal
princes are duly pointed out to us (Beowulf, vv. 1162–92). The ceremonies, as well as
the terms, employed to designate the seats used by the hall owner and the guests refer
back to an earlier situation in which husband and wife entertained and served their
guest or guests, with their children as an audience. Significant parts of the hall life seem
thus to be a continuation of the life in the small Early Iron Age farm house.
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