Tag: Mead Hall

Description:

A mead hall is the Germanic version of a longhouse, a large, narrow, single-room building for communal dwelling. Longhouse-type buildings have existed all over the world since as far back as the Neolithic period. The Scandinavian longhouses were an important part of the social life of various Germanic people from roughly the 6th–13th century AD. I have chosen the term 'mead hall' as the heading for this tag since that is probably the most well known term applied to these Nordic hall buildings. Typically these other terms, "longhouse," "hall building/structure," are used by archaeologists more often. Longhouses in northern Europe and Scandinavia originated as farm buildings, later growing in size in reflection of social stratification and transforming into social spaces for the communal gathering of peers of this class of wealthy farm owners. In the 6th century, an ecological crisis called the dust veil event (dated to 536 AD) cause upheavals and radical changes throughout Europe, where crop failure led to famine and the mass abandonment of settlements which were no longer viable. This destabilization and scarcity factored into the emergence of a centralized, elite warrior culture, where economic, political, and religious power was concentrated at so-called 'central places' under the leader of a warrior band. These central places were fortified settlements where wealth and power were concentrated, and this also fostered the possible emergence of a more masculine-dominated religious order, not unlike in Christianity throughout the rest of the continent, where the human king is paralleled to God. This would have been the environment in which a cult of Óðinn may have originated, inside large, specialized hall buildings located at these centralized sites, where the warrior band and their king would feast and participate in the exchange of precious gifts and other symbolic gestures to tie together this social order. This form of society is epitomized and idealized in the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, which depicts a Danish society centered on the golden hall, Heorot (LINK), and the retinue (a band of loyal retainers, warriors) of king Hroðgar, which is being disrupted and attacked by the monster Grendel (LINK). Halls, and this incarnation of the Scandinavian mead hall, are thus part of the main iconography of Iron Age/Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavian society; the powerful king bestowing rings and swearing oaths, toasting with horns filled with mead or beer, and the exultation of battle and war in the boasting of proud warriors, fearless of death. Scholars have theorized that such social organizations may be the origin of the Norse eschatological (apocalyptic) mythic material involving the close connections of Valhöll (LINK) (which can be seen as THE mead hall, a divine mirror of earthly ones), Óðinn, the Einherjar (LINK) as his retinue, and Ragnarök (LINK), a mythic dimension for the individual death and afterlife.

Tag Category: Setting

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