Viking Houses

I have been researching Viking housing and I have compiled my own mini guide to Viking housing based upon this research. I started by creating mood boards of imagery pertinent to Viking housing, please see below:

I then looked at a number of sources regarding the subject matter, in order to gain an understanding so I could produce this guide, to see the full list of my sources please see the bottom of the page.

Subsequently I used these sources to compile my own textual mini guide to Viking housing, which you can see below:

Viking Houses

Most Viking houses were long box-shapes and consisted of just one room which the family shared. The materials used by the Vikings to build their houses were dependent on local materials; wood, stone or blocks of turf were commonly used. To keep out the wind and rain the floor of was often dug below ground-level, the walls were made of timber planks or wattle (woven sticks, covered with mud) and the roofs slopped and were thatched or covered in turf.

Viking homes were not very comfortable, they had little furniture and the floors had no carpets, so some Vikings placed rushes leaves and grass on the floor. Most Vikings did not have beds so they slept on benches that were along the walls inside their houses, some homes also had a table and stools, and chests were used to store tools and clothes.

Viking houses were dark because they had no glass, so windows had to be small; they were often covered by wooden shutters, so the only light came from oil lamps or fires.

The fires were usually in pits in the centre of the houses and this is where the cooking was done, the smoke from the fire just escaped through a hole in the roof above the pit because there was no chimney.

Usually everyone slept in the same room, in some houses animals and people lived together in the same building, the animals lived at one end of the house and the people lived at the other.

I then decided to create a graphical and textual guide to Viking housing which you can see below:

I use many different pieces of software within my working practice and the one I consider to be my weakest is Adobe Photoshop so I thought it would be useful to create a Viking village scene using Adobe Photoshop to help me enhance my familiarity and confidence with the software whilst creating a piece of work relevant to the topic of my project please see below: