Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

have their obvious counterparts in the archaeological remains of the Late Iron Age. It
seems fair to propose the hypothesis that the struggle for power among the leading
families was to a certain degree a matter of fighting each other with the purpose of
destroying each other's halls. Smashing rather than plundering was the keynote of
this kind of political rather than economic warfare.
The Architecture
For many practical and social reasons farm houses tend to represent a traditional
building style – a way of expressing oneself as a member of a collective. With halls it
is more or less the other way round. They are designed to reflect the individual hall
owner and he constructs his house to be favourably compared with other halls, so
that similarities and differences may be pointed out in a meaningful way. Halls are
competitive architecture and only a reluctance in the collective, and thus also indirectly
among the master builders and kings, to accept the truly unique in buildings or
behaviour, make it possible to recognise the halls as a loosely linked set of houses.
Representing both the traditional building style and the aspiration towards uniqueness,
they may be said to contain a number of conflicting or complementary ideals.
The traditional ideal says that an Iron Age house in South Scandinavia should
have an entrance room and in Middle Scandinavia an entrance for humans at one
end of the house and another for animals at the opposite end. When the farms grow
new entrances may appear, but they are there for practical reasons as the houses are
required to contain a larger number of functions. In some halls, however, despite
their being small, we find side entrances and entrances of different status which cannot
be explained with reference to different indoor functions in the subsistence
economy. Since all doors in a hall are designed to fit humans, it therefore makes a
difference how we enter and leave the hall. This difference mirrors our role in the hall
and we may therefore conclude that some halls break the traditional entrance pattern
in which there is only one way of entering or leaving the kitchen dwelling (Fig. 15).
Contrary to the entrance pattern, the arrangement of the hearth and the posts
around it is obviously a loan from the dwelling quarters of the traditional main house
and a pattern that cannot be changed despite the fact that the hearth in the hall is not
meant for cooking, but solely to provide light and heat. The hall is in other words
meant to display tradition as well as change.
A few halls, Helgö, Dankirke, Vallhagar and Rönnerum lack an entrance room
and here immediate entrance is the only possibility. For this reason these halls fit the
entrance procedure that we hear of in Beowulf, in which the formalities before the
party is allowed into the hall are settled outside the house. When Beowulf is allowed
in, he is immediately at the centre of the story and is listened to and respected.
In The Sagas of the Icelanders, in which the social setting is often a peasant’s hall
with only undvegi and no high-seat, we find similar examples of guests who become
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