Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

this farm, however, the village was divided into three sections separated by streets. It
is difficult not to see the introduction in the village of a strict structure and a large farm
with a hall (van Es 1967, pp. 56 f. and Fig. 14) as mutually dependent.
Also in Vorbasse we have an example of the same situation. When the Late Iron
Age village was moved to its early Viking Age site, this was accompanied by the
introduction of precise regulation and a very big farm (Hvass 1979; 1984; 1991).
Vorbasse had had several earlier stages with regular sections and no obviously
dominant farm or perhaps with a dominant farm located outside the village, but
whichever was the case, the change in the settlement pattern seems to show the
power of the big farm to organise the structure of the community. The somewhat
special case of the ideal and planned Migration Period Eketorp ring-fort shows a
complex balance achieved in a seemingly egalitarian, but at the same time hall-dominated
settlement. Here planning has been used to stabilise this balance (Herschend
1988; 1991b, pp. 157 ff.)
Examples of this kind of precise settlement regulation introducing a dominant farm
are rare, but they must be paralleled with the situations in Beowulf and the tale of
Saint Sabas where typical members of the hall-owning nobility are seen to act for the
benefit of the collective by establishing an organisation in order to deal with a social
crisis, be it due to the symbolic Grendel in Hroðgar’s hall or to the inability of the
Visigoth assembly to solve the problem of the communal meal (cf. below pp. 121
ff.). The introduction of a strict settlement pattern in connection with the establishment
of a large farm can be seen as a consequence of the kind of corrective executive
power described in the texts.
The situation of a Scandinavian settlement is very often but not always one in
which the unity of grave and settlement is apparent (cf. Tollin 1989, pp. 77 f.). There
seem to be two types.
One is a general connection such as that in Hodde, Klasro, Skavsta or Lindholm
Høje (Hvass 1985, p. 96; Norr 1992; Herschend et al. 1993; Olausson 1994;
Ramskov 1976, p. 12 Fig. 1), the other a ranking situation where there is an obviously
big farm and an obviously dominating grave (Fig. 19). Where it is possible to
single out the hall as a prominent building, it also becomes possible to compare the
most prominent graves with the most prominent house and to form an axis between
the most prominent living and dead. This axis may be seen, e.g., in Wijster, Lejre, Gl.
Uppsala, Yeavering or Valsgärde.
The general association between grave and settlement goes back to a shift in the
Late Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age, when the Bronze Age barrows with
their marginal but monumental position ceased to be a source of inspiration
(Carlsson 1979; Tesch 1993, pp. 18 ff.; Björhem and Säfvestad 1993, pp. 353 ff.).
This basic connection can also be illustrated by an example from the Mälar Valley
from Tibble (Notelid 1993), where houses, fields, hearth area, a burnt mound with
offerings as well as graves and cupmark rocks are situated next to each other in a
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