From Centre to Periphery Main Lines of North Atlantic Cultural Development from Medieval to Modern Times Bjarne Stoklund
Stoklund, Bjarne 1992: From Centre to Periphery. Main Lines of North Atlantic Cultural Development from Medieval to Modern Times. - Ethnologia Europaea 22: 51-65.
Hitherto, most ethnological and anthropological research on society and culture in the North Atlantic islands has assumed, explicitly or implicitly, a very long, almost unbroken continuity ("the traditional community" or "the old peasant culture") which was superseded in the nineteenth century by a period of trans formation and modernization. This article argues that the history of the islands since their settlement in c. 700-900 has been marked by considerable changes in ecological and economic conditions, and that the small island communities cannot be studied as isolated entities, but should be analysed in terms of their shifting relationships with the rest of Europe. One main thesis is that their development can be described as a movement from an economically and culturally "central" position in the early middle ages through increasing marginalization to the "peripheral" status that was typical of these communities in the centuries of Absolutism. The article seeks to demonstrate that the changes in these centre periphery relations have been of great significance for the society and culture of the islands.
Professor Bjarne Stoklund, Department of European Ethnology (University of Copenhagen), Brede Alle 69, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark.
The North Atlantic island communities were Geographically, they were very varied, but established as part of the rapid Scandinavian they did have one thing in common: they all expansion in the last third of the first millen possessed resources that allowed them to con nium after the birth of Christ. The wave of tinue the farming culture that the emigrants emigration west from Norway began in the brought with them from their West Norwegian eighth century when settlers arrived in the homeland. It was based on agriculture with island groups lying along the sea route to Ire cattle and sheep farming as the most impor land: the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides. tant element, but supplemented by fishing and While these islands were already inhabited by hunting of various kinds. It was a seafaring Pictish and Gaelic tribes, the Norwegian emi culture, and its maritime expertise was not grants, if they went beyond them to more open only a precondition of the actual settlement; it seas, could find islands with more virgin terri was also the cultural factor that enabled the tory. In the ninth century they settled on the pioneer communities, despite distances of hun Faroes, and in 874, according to tradition, the dreds or even thousands of kilometres, to first landnam man came to Iceland. A century maintain contacts and form a relatively homo later emigrants from Iceland founded two set geneous Nordic culture in this extensive area. tlements in South West Greenland. During the high middles ages the pioneer Within a period of a few hundred years, communities came under the sovereignty of then, a number of independent Norwegian col the Norwegian Crown, and in 1380 they fol onies were created in the North Atlantic area. lowed Norway into the Union with Denmark.
4* 51 Parts of this "archipelago" were however lost in great divide in cultural research is between the transition from the middle ages to modern these scholars on the one hand and the func times: the Norse settlers in Greenland disap tionalists on the other. The functionalist cul peared from history, and the Scottish island tural researchers dissociated themselves from groups came under Scottish rule : the Orkneys the sometimes rather rash attempts to (re)con and Shetlands as a pledge to the Scottish struct the course of development, based more Crown in 1468-69, while the Hebrides had on speculation than documentation. Instead been lost to the "Norwegian realm" as early as they concentrated on the study of culture and 1280. In the post-medieval centuries Iceland society as functioning totalities; they described and the Faroes were governed from Copenha and analysed sociocultural systems at a given gen, and the two island communities remained time, and for good reasons that time was the under Danish rule when Norway was united present day or the period immediately before with Sweden by the Act of Union of 1815. it; for nothing else could be studied that way When the spotlight ofresearch turned to the with even a reasonable degree of certainty. North Atlantic island communities around the The period after about 1960 was typified in turn of the century, they were remote and pov North Atlantic studies as elsewhere by com erty-stricken possessions of the British and munity studies, carried out by both English Danish kingdoms. And the first things to at speaking anthropologists and Scandinavian tract cultural researchers were of course the ethnologists . The communities that were cho archaic features one could encounter here; the sen for such studies were in fact by preference "primitive", the "relics" provided the frame of in peripheral areas of Europe - so-called "tradi reference when researchers tried to recon tionalist" societies still more or less untouched struct their cultural development from an evo by "modernization" . This way the functional lutionist point of view. The archaeologist Aage ists - although their brief is quite different Roussell travelled all over the Scottish island from that of the cultural historians - in reality groups in the 1930s to find material to compare end up with a model almost indistinguishable with the farm sites he had excavated in Green from theirs. Both operate implicitly with a cru land. However, Roussell found much more cial turning-point somewhere in the nine than that; he found that the so-called "black teenth or twentieth century . Before this we houses" in the Hebrides could in reality be in have the "traditional society", "the old peasant terpreted as direct, living descendants of the society" or whatever it is called ; from this there Scandinavian Iron Age houses. They were rel is an almost unbroken line back through time. ics in the evolutionist sense (Roussell 1934). The turning-point marks a radical process of However, cultural research in the area be transformation or modernization, "the advent tween the wars was dominated more by the of the new age", the break-up of something diffusionists and their attempts to discover the ancient and firm-rooted. "routes" of culture. In the same year as Rous Of course such a model is not completely sell was travelling through the Hebrides, the wrong. Much of what could be observed at the Swedish ethnologist Ragnar Jirlow, in an arti end of the last century and the beginning of cle on "aspects of Faroese occupational cul this one, but which was doomed to yield to ture", submitted a textbook example of how "modernization", was in fact phenomena that such a diffusionist analysis could be done (Jir represented continuity throughout as much as low 1931), and about a decade later another a millennium. This is true, for example, of Swedish ethnologist , Ake Campbell, wrote many of the working methods used in North about "the meeting of Celtic and Nordic culture Atlantic occupational life. Yet it is question in the Hebrides" (Campbell 1943/44). able to assume that everything one encounters In reality evolutionists and diffusionists in the so-called traditional communities can agreed on the overall aim of cultural research: simply be projected backwards into the remote the reconstruction of the long lines of Eu past. What looks ancient or primitive is not ropean or global cultural development . So the necessarily so. And one does not need to deal
52 for very long with the history of the North cesses within a system which encompasses Atlantic area before realizing that this is a both centre and periphery. region where one should rather expect radical These and similar ideas have inspired the breaks than a long, unbroken development. American anthropologist Eric R. Wolf to reexa Historical study also makes it obvious that it is mine the classic anthropological field of study. not advisable to view these island communities The "primitive" peoples have been studied ei as isolated entities. It is not only in recent ther as representatives of older stages of global history that the North Atlantic islands have cultural development or as cultures that could been inextricably linked with the rest of the be viewed as isolated totalities. But the history world; this is just as true if one wants to under of such peoples is indissolubly bound up with stand the earlier phases of the cultural devel our own, says Wolf; their culture is not an opment of the area. isolated phenomenon, but must be analysed as If one wishes to view the North Atlantic cul a result of European expansion under the cap ture from these perspectives, there is inspira italist world system (Wolf 1982). tion to be found in the work of some recent scholars who share the following features: I do not intend in the following to apply Imma 1) they try to reinstate a wider historical per nuel Wallerstein's theoretical apparatus to the spective in the cultural and social sciences; and study of the North Atlantic area. But the three 2) they want to view social and cultural change scholars to whom I have referred may be of in a global context. I am thinking first and assistance in underscoring the need to use the foremost of the historian Fernand Braudel, the study of cultural variation in Europe to take sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and the an the long historical view, and to analyse the thropologist Eric R. Wolf. The first two have individual areas as elements in larger, econom worked in parallel throughout the eighties on ically interrelated wholes. related projects. With separate points of depar In order to bring out the important lines of ture but in constant dialogue and mutual in development in the North Atlantic area, it is spiration - they have tried to analyse and ex not enough to follow Wallerstein and Wolf by plain European economic expansion from the starting with the emergence of the capitalist end of the middle ages on. While Braudel system around 1500; we must go back to the writes "universal history" in the tradition of Norse settlement of the area and to the society the Annales school (Braudel 1981-84), Waller of the Viking Age. In the chronological chart stein's project is the more ambitious one of on p. 54 I have tried to sum up North Atlantic discovering general laws of development. history in four main stages: 1) the period of Throughout the three volumes on "The Mod Viking society, from the landnam until about ern World System" (1974-89), he has devel 1100; 2) "Europeanization" from c. 1100 until oped his theory of the economic "world system" c.1350; 3) "Marginalization" c. 1350-1600; and as an all-embracing whole whose parts can on finally 4) a period with a relatively stable so ly be understood as elements in the totality. ciety at the periphery of Absolutist Europe, The growth of the market system and the c.1600-1800. The crucial cut-off point, marked worldwide social division of labour leads to a with a broken line, represents the radical late classification into centres (economic nucleus medieval changes that meant the definitive areas) and peripheries, which depend on the end of the central position of the islands in centres and are exploited by them. The two are Viking and late medieval society and laid the interlinked such that conditions in the periph basis for the peripheral status typical of the ery can only be understood in relation to the centuries of Absolutism. development of the centre. "Underdevelop The displacement from centre to periphery is ment" in the periphery is not seen as a result of emphasized here as a main line in the history conservatism or stagnation, but is interpreted of the area. The concepts are borrowed from as the result of certain active economic pro- Wallerstein, hut it is unlikely that he would concur in the extension of their use to the his-
53 Figure 1. The most important periods in 800 the history of the North Atlantic area. 900 VIKING SOCIETY 1000 CENTRE
1100
1200 EUROPEANIZATION
1300 ------1400 MARGINALIZATION 1500 (Dried fish) 1600 l PERIPHERAL SOCIETIES 1700 IN ABSOLUTIST EUROPE PERIPHERY (Wool) 1800 l 1900
tory of Europe before 1500. In this respect we resemblance between them and the colonizers are more in agreement with Fernand Braudel, of the 1500s. Their economic expansion was who seeks precursors of capitalism in earlier based on superior technology and organiza periods of history and points out that there tional abilities, and on the mastery of a script have always been economic "world systems": (runes) which made communication over long the Phoenicians, Rome and the world of Islam distances possible; they opened new trade are some examples. And, he says, the Vikings routes, established trading stations and cre created "a short-lived and fragile world econo ated "periphery" areas where the population my" which others were to continue (Braudel paid tribute and supplied commodities in the III, 1985: 25). form of furs and slaves, among other things. In the necessary revision of the view of the We will not pursue this thought - only note Viking Age which is now in progress, but that it is as an element in such a dynamic which is only making a slow impact on Eu cultural system that we find the North Atlan ropean historiography, this passing remark by tic island communities in the first centuries of Braudel is perhaps worth pursuing. The sit their history, with a culture-bearing upper uation of Christian Europe in the early middle class actively involved in trade and maintain ages can with some justification be described ing close contacts over the very long distances as the remains of the Roman Empire squeezed that separated them. between two "world economies" in the Braude This "centre situation" - as we will venture lian sense: that of the Arabs in the south and to call it - persisted into the centuries of the that of the Vikings in the north. If the Viking high middle ages. It is this period I have called societies made up a whole, it was an economic the age of "Europeanization" in the chronolog rather than a political whole. And although the ical chart, because in these centuries the Norse merchants of the Viking age were great farm communities took over a number of new cul ers, not burghers, there are many points of tural features from the south and were remod-
54 Figure 2. The episcopal dioceses in the Norse area in the twelfth century. After Handbok i Norg es Historie, Vol. III .
elled on the European pattern with an effective Land. These are island communities which royal authority and ecclesiastical organization have still kept their own fleets and their own that quickly, in the course of the 1100s, estab trade, and whose farmenn (or trading peas lished its network of episcopal dioceses ants) sell a wide range of goods to a discerning throughout the North Atlantic area (Fig. 2). European clientele - from dried fish and wad The Norse communities of the 1100s were a mel to walrus ivory and hunting falcons . fantastic world where old Viking norms and ideals were judiciously mixed with new Chris From the end of the 1200s on, however, the tian ideas of piety and penance. Central in this picture changes. The independent trading of world were the later so remote island groups, the North Atlantic islands stops, and trade the Shetlands and Orkneys, as described in the gradually falls into German hands. From Orkneyinga Saga of the end of the twelfth cen about 1350 on the Hanseatic merchants com tury (Palsson & Edwards 1978). In the vivid mand Bergen, which is the centre not only for account given by this saga we meet a class of West and North Norway, but also for trade powerful men who are still citizens of the world with the Norwegian tributaries, the islands in with a radius of action extending thousands of the sea. The roles were now reversed. The eco kilom etres. This is a culture-bearing upper nomic focus had shifted to the south . From now class whose splendid wooden drinking-halls on it was the merchants from the German stand side by side with newly-built stone trading cities of the Baltic and the North Sea churches. A few still keep up the traditional who organized the hunt for the resources of the Viking raids in quiet periods for farming, in North Atlantic : fish, fish oil, whale blubber and the spring and autumn . Others work off their many other goods. The marginalization had urge for action and adventure by going on pil begun . gi·images to Rome or crusades to the Holy This marginalization meant several things.
55 -- It was not only the economic centres that were and technological factors behind the late me displaced; it was also political power that, with dieval expansion of fisheries in the North At the union of Denmark and Norway, moved lantic. The demographic crisis of the late mid south. Late medieval Dano-Norwegian royal dle ages was marked economically by falling power was weak and unable to enforce its sov grain prices and rising prices for animal foods - ereignty in the North Atlantic or to afford ef meat and fish. A large European market devel fective protection to the inhabitants of its trib oped an increasing demand for dried and salted utaries. As the latter had lost their own fleets, fish, which could be transported over long dis they would now more and more live "enclosed tances and form part of household provisions. like cattle kept on islands", as an Icelandic This is an important part of the background for source of the beginning of the 17th century put both the boom in the Scanian herring fisheries it (Thorsteinsson 1985: 163) - abandoned to in the 1400s and the Hanseatic interests in the mercy of the tough sailors who followed the West Norway. schools of herring and whale. If we see a burgeoning of fisheries in the The expansion of the English , Germans and North Atlantic from the end of the 1300s, it is Dutch in the northern part of the Atlantic can not enough to regard it as the attempt of the be compared with that of the Portuguese far Dutch and English to get around the Hansa's - ther to the south. There are many resem first and foremost Lubeck's - monopoly of the blances between the procedures in the two re Norwegian fish trade through its control of the gions. Defenceless islanders along the sea old trading node of Bergen. It must also be routes had to supply free provisions to the linked with the technological revolution ac ships - sometimes, indeed, slave labour, inhab complished by the Dutch when, around 1400, itants who were taken on the voyage to the they developed the haringbui s, a fishing vessel hunting grounds and put ashore again on the that combined plenty of space and good sailing way back if they had survived the tribulations qualities . It can with some justification be of the voyage . Throughout the 1400s and called the first "factory ship" ; it was possible to 1500s there were many accounts of pirate raids process and salt the herring catches on board, on Iceland and the Faroes, and these lawless so the Dutch no longer had to depend on shore conditions in the transition between the late bases and could now sail to remote fishing middle ages and modern times are quite clearly grounds off Scotland. something that has to be taken into consid In the end this boat and fishing technology eration when one is seeking the reasons for the helped the Dutch North Sea herring to victory disappearance of the Norsemen in Greenland in the competition with the Hanseatic mer (Krogh 1982: 165f). chants' Scanian herring. But it was also an Economically, the area increasingly as important prerequisite of the Dutch drive into sumed the role of periphery in Wallerstein's the North Atlantic. Indeed, Wallerstein even sense. The North Atlantic islands were bull sees it as the actual starting-point for the dozed into the economic system as suppliers of build-up of Dutch economic hegemony in the raw materials or cheap mass-produced articles next centuries (Wallerstein 1980: 39). for the European market. In each of the two However, the Dutch were not allowed to mo main periods into which we have divided post nopolize the North Atlantic. The English and medieval North Atlantic history, the economy Hanseatic merchants from the North Sea cities is dominated by one such product: from about of Hamburg and Bremen quickly adopted the 1350 until the end of the 1500s, dried fish was technological innovations, and while the Dutch most important; but from about 1600 until and the Hamburg merchants dominated the 1800, knitted woollen stockings took over the waters around the Orkneys and Shetlands for role of main product from dried fish (cf. the a few centuries, the English conquered the chart). teeming fishing grounds around Iceland. Let us first look a little more closely at the Bjorn Thorsteinsson attaches the same kind dried fish period. There were both economic of importance for the development of English
56 world trade to the Iceland fisheries as Waller was at the same time a watershed of more stein attributed to the fishing revolution in general significance. In Wallerstein's analysis Dutch trade history: "From all the harbours it marks the transition from the first to the and points in England between Newcastle and second phase of the emergence of the capitalist Bristol, people set out on the Long Voyage to world economy. The sixteenth century was the Iceland. In the fifteenth century a hundred great, dynamic period of expansion which, af ships or more set sail in the spring and sailed ter a crisis at the beginning of the seventeenth north, and around midsummer they set their century, phased into something that cannot course homeward again. The last of them actually be called decline, but was rather con reached harbour in October. Most of the ves solidation. In this process the emergent na sels were fishing boats of the Dutch type, of tional states and their mercantile protectionist 30-80 tons, and until the mid-century a few policies played an important role . large merchantmen came on the voyage, but These new tendencies had a strong impact in then they disappeared. It was the most exten the North Atlantic area, especially in Iceland sive sea trade any nation plied before the dis and the Farnes. From about 1600 and for the covery of America, and the Iceland trade next two centuries these island societies were taught the English to sail the dangerous seas subjected to an increasingly regulated, restric that Norwegians and Icelanders only dared tive trade monopoly. At the same time , how sail in the summer ... The role of the Iceland ever, the state was better able to assert its trade in the history of English sea power can sovereignty in th!'! area - for example against hardly be overestimated" (Thorsteinsson 1985: the newly-opened English trade route north of 126-26) . Norway to Archangelsk. For the Atlantic is The Anglo-Dutch activity in the North At lands this meant more stable and peaceful con lantic meant that everywhere among the is ditions, but also a more static period when the lands fisheries assumed a much larger role in challenges and economic potential were more the overall economic pattern. For a couple of limited than in what we have here called "th e centuries fish became the predominant export age of marginalization". item, while trading in the North Atlantic is As mentioned above, the dried fish trade was land communities became the de facto domain superseded by a new mass product which as of these foreign fishermen and merchants. The sumed an even more dominant role: knitted role of dried fish in the period from c. 1350 to c. stockings and other woollen goods. This "ho 1550 is the first example of the way the grow siery trade" constitutes an interesting chapter ing capitalist economy in the North Atlantic of cultural history which still awaits a broad, periphery demanded a single product and thus comparative study. For it is very intriguing forced the area into a one-sided, market-de that mass production of woollen goods using a pendent type of production. new technique began at about the same time in Economic changes were heralded in the lat a large north west European area which in ter half of the 1500s by a drop in the price of cluded Iceland, the Faroes, the Shetlands and fish and a decline in the fisheries . The causes West Jutland . are hard to establish. Among factors that have The woollen stockings were cottage industry been mentioned are competition from the products, but regulated by precise instructions newly-discovered, rich fishing grounds off that ensured a standardized product of uni Newfoundland and the decline in European de form quality. Wool and idle hands could be mand due to the Reformation's abolition of the found almost everywhere in the north west weekly fast day. European region, but above all wherever dried However this may be, the long dried-fish fish production had been abandoned. But from chapter of the economic history of the North whom came the demand for this standardized Atlantic must be said to have ended in about product in such large quantiti es? We appear to 1600, at least as far as Iceland and the Faroes be dealing with two categories of consumers: were concerned. But the turn of that century on the one hand the great new merchant com-
57 -- Figure 3. Most Farnese settlements are at the foot of the steep, grass-covered fell slopes, where land and sea meet. Around the houses is the cultivated infield, and farth er off the outfield, where cows and sheep graz e. Everywhere there is easy access to the fish resources in the sea, and in many places there is also bird hunting on the fells. Most of the farms in the Faro es have been split up into smaller units, which now appear as a byling - a clust er of houses like the one in the picture. Part of the village ofHattarvik on the island ofFugloy. Photo: Bjarne Stoklund 1959 . panies, first and foremost in the Low Coun expansion of overseas trade and the growth of tries, which needed the stockings for their the state apparatus. thousands of seamen; and there was a similar We can see how quickly and radically the need among the navies that the national states new industry made its impact and became eco were vying to build up in these years. The new nomically dominant from the description of the North Atlantic "monoculture" of the beginning Faroe Islands written by the priest Lucas of the seventeenth century can thus be related Debes in the mid-1600s. The former impor to two typical phenomena of the period: the tance of fisheries was still fresh in memory .
58 Figure 4. In Iceland the settlement pattern is still dominated by the big, undivided farms that lie along the watercourses in the wide valleys stretching inland. These offer fine opportunities for hay harvesting on the homefield and grazing on the mountain slopes. The farm H6lar in Eyafj(llrour, North Iceland. Photo: Bjarne Stoklund 1974.
Nevertheless, hosiery had by that time been sources, and which has the manufacture of a fully integrated into the economy of the is single product for a far-off market as its dom lands. Lucas Debes rails at the role played by inant activity? Is it a phenomenon we can justi the wool trade, even in his own household fiably call "old peasant culture" or "traditional economy. The priest "must live not only as a peasant economy"? No, strictly speaking it is good farmer, but also as a craftsman or stock the exact opposite; what we encounter here is ing knitter. For he and his wife must take in reality a very modern economy, extremely pains to ensure that his people spin and knit specialized and market-oriented. It shows that stockings that will be good merchandize ... And the Faroe Islands - and Iceland at the same since this kind of husbandry requires many time - had become closely linked to the new people, one must have at least five or six la European economic system. bourers and as many servant-girls" (Debes One could with some truth object that an 1673: 300). He also writes that work norms on area like the Faroes at that time had a dual - a farm are counted in terms of finished woollen or sectoralized - economy. True, hosiery was a goods: "For each morning they weigh out to market economy phenomenon ; but beside it each lad or lass the amount they are to spin there was a self-sufficiency or subsistence and knit that day - to wit, two pounds of wool economy, with cattle farming, fisheries and to spin and two pounds of spun wool to knit a bird hunting, which existed independently of pair of stockings during the day" (Debes 1673: the market economy and continued the old tra 248). ditions unchanged. How should we describe the Faroese econo To this I would reply that the two "econo my that we find in Lucas Debes and later mies" cannot simply be separated, for they
59 form parts of the same economic totality. The hand, it seems reasonable to assume that in an subsistence economy, too, was affected and economy with the main emphasis on fish, and changed by the shifting market relations. It in a period of high fish prices and low grain was said of the hosiers in West Jutland around prices, people chose to react to the market 1800 that they neglected their farming so that economy by giving up cereal farming ahd buy it was left at a relatively backward stage of ing the cheap cereals for bread from abroad. development. Interrelationships of a similar We know a little more about the effect of the kind can be found in large numbers in the next dominant type of market production - North Atlantic area . knitted stockings - on Icelandic farming. It has They already existed in the dried fish period, been estimated that the ratio of cows to sheep in the transition between the middle ages and in the middle ages, up to about 1600, was 1:6. modern times. Forkell Johannesen, who pre In the hosiery period this balance shifted, so sented a doctoral thesis on Die Stellung der that the ratio of cows to sheep around 1800 freien Arbeiter in Island in 1933, had a keen was 1:20 or 1:25. This period is marked by a eye for such interrelationships: "Dieser Um steep decline of birch wood and rapidly increas bruch in der Wirtschaftsweise ist ein lehr ing soil erosion (Bjarnason 1976). It seems log reiches Beispiel dafor, wie eine ganze Volks ical to interpret the latter phenomenon in par wirtschaft mit fest eingewurzelten Wirt ticular as a result of the increase in sheep schafts- und Arbeitsformen geradezu auf den farming and the overpasturing this must have Kopf gestellt wird 60 eral took very deliberate steps to turn their W"indaws,G1a.z111g unctt,1111 estates into economically profitable concerns . A well-known result of this throughout north ern and western Scotland was the so-called "sheep-clearances" - the annexation of the peasants' old common lands - and sometimes whole villages - as pastures for a new and bigger breed of sheep so that the estates could meet the demand for wool from the British textile industry . The Orkney and Shetland economies were thus moulded by the same two products for the European market - fish and wool - but production took on a different na ture, and social and cultural development fol lowed other paths than farther out in the Figure 5. "Black-house" in th e Hebrides . After Fen North Atlantic (Smith 1984; Fenton 1978). ton 1989. Let me conclude by showing how a "tradi their relations with the European centres had tional" element of culture - the house or dwell a different character and social and cultural ing - becomes more comprehensible when in development took a different course there. terpreted in the long historical perspective for The crucial historical turning-point for the which I have argued here. This can only be a Orkneys and Shetlands, too, was the transition very rough sketch, but it is a theme I have from the middle ages to modern times , but the dealt with in more detail elsewhere (Stoklund transition was given a particular emphasis by 1980; 1982; 1984; 1987). the pawning of the islands to the Scottish The houses on the Scottish islands which Crown in 1468-69. This inaugurated a mas have interested cultural historians can be il sive "Scotticization" and politico-economic link lustrated by two drawings of dwelling types . age with Scotland and later Great Britain. In Figure 5 shows a so-called "black-house" from the course of the 1700s and 1800s the islands the Hebrides and Figure 6 a "long-house" from became a remote province of the expanding Shetland. Both have been regarded as repre British industrial society . An important differ sentatives of an ancient tradition. It was ence from Iceland and the Faroes was that, from the 1400s on, immigrant Scottish "lairds" transformed the old Norse peasant society to a feudal society of estate tenants who became increasingly dependent on the lairds. This was a long process, which resulted in the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries in the charac teristic crofter society, typified by the very small farms (crofts) whose tenants eked out the yield of their small land holding with fish ing , kelp burning and other "secondary occupa tions" . Where trade and the fish market had been in NORU 5UflVIVALS the hands of German and Dutch merchants in ON SHE;TLAND CROFT the seventeenth century, these too were now subsumed under the dominance of the lairds. The estate owners became "merchant lairds", Figure 6. "Long-hous e" in the Shetlands, drawn for developed and financed fisheries and in gen- the Jarlshof publication. After Hamilton 1956. 61 Figure 7. Plan of the manse farm, Glaumbrer in Skagafiroi . Surveyed .f : ·-··-~···. .:. by Sacher 1938 . ,._ t' '' 11 : poLllou--fhuNrt:I yl: .., ~ ·, i,:-i, i:. l:' houses like the one in Figure 5 that were in The buildings in Iceland in which cultural terpreted by Aage Roussell as direct descend historians have primarily been interested are · ants of the Scandinavian iron age houses. The not small houses like those on the Scottish long-house from Shetland was drawn by the islands, but large farm complexes like the archaeologists who excavated the Viking age manse farm at Glaumbrer in Figure 7. This is sites at J arlshof, and who used it in their re partly because in Iceland we have a quite dif construction of the excavated building on the ferent social structure . Here there is no land basis of a postulated unbroken tradition. lord class in the European sense, culturally In both cases , however , it is important to be distinct from the ordinary peasant population , aware that these houses were used by the crof but an indigenous class of big farmers who ters - by the cottager class that only emerged built turf farms like the one shown above. on the islands in the 1700s . The primitive ap The construction of such farms represents pearance of the buildings need not necessarily an old tradition in a particular Icelandic ver be the result of a very ancient tradition . It sion; but the actual farm layout , which consists could also be the result of poverty rather than of one-room elements linked by a connecting age. This possibility seems to be strengthened passage, is a seventeenth and eighteenth-c en by the fact that there are strong indications in tury phenomenon. Thanks to archaeological the Shetlands that the houses preserved from investigations and H!'Jrour Agustsson's recon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had structions on the basis of valuations (Agusts certain pred ecessors which disappeared almost son 1982), we can trace how this complex grad without a trace. The more prosperous peasants ually takes form in a course of development or "udallers" who were turned into tenants in stretching from the late middle ages to the the 1600s appear to have obtained wooden eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . An im houses from West Norway, with which trade portant room element is the peculiar baostofa. relations were maintained for a long time . We In the late middle ages it seems to have lived do not know with certainty what they looked up to its name : then it was really a ba:th-house like. They may have been log houses, but there for steam baths, but this function had to be are a few items of information that suggest abandoned at an early stage because of the that they were close relations of the stave-built increasing scarcity of fuel. Instead, everyday Faroese hou ses. workin g and accommodation functions were 62 a high degree of persistence with the Norse or Western Scandinavian traditions of the middle ages and Renaissance. This applies both to the construction and planning of the house. In the Viking age and in the middle ages stave con struction was widespread all over the Norse area. Today we know it best from the Norwe gian stave churches, but there are traces of it in the oldest Icelandic farms, just as there are _. .,,· indications, as we have seen, that it was used ~,.·.,.········ in the Shetland dwellings. However, the Fa roes are alone in keeping stave construction as the preferred method of building in the special Figure 8. Stave construction of the Faroese house. variant shown in Figure 8. After Stoklund 1987. The dwelling, as represented here by a house from Mula in the Danish Open Air Museum moved to this stove-heated room. First it be (Fig. 9), includes two main elements, the royk came a workroom for the women, then a din stoua and glasstoua. The former, the "smoke ing-room for the whole household. In the eigh room", originally simply called the stoua or teenth and nineteenth centuries the former room, was a medieval innovation introduced to bath-house also became a bedroom, first for the the Faroes and the rest of the North Atlantic farmer and his family, then also for the ser area in the period of Europeanization in the vants, so that it became a kind of "multi-pur high middle ages. The glasstoua or glass-room pose room". But by that time the stove in the was a Renaissance innovation which reached baostofa had long since disappeared. Only the the Faroes by way of West Norway, probably in name remained as a reminder of the history of the sixteenth century when contacts with and the room. It was now applied to a phenomenon impulses from Norway were still maintained. which was unique in Europe - an everyday However, the glasstoua only became more living-room heated solely by the body heat of widespread in the Faroes in the latter half of the members of the household combined with the eighteenth century. This is a development the efficient insulation provided by the metre that can be followed fairly closely in probate thick turf walls. proceedings and sales accounts. The back Among the factors that contributed to the ground for this is the relative prosperity that development of the distinctive Icelandic gang the trade monopoly ensured the Faroese pop hus, three are worth mentioning: the first is ulation from about 1750 on. But it is important the deterioration in climate that began at the to point out that at that time the glasstoua was end of the middle ages; the second is the disas an element that had already been absorbed trous shortage of firewood that arose in the into Faroese culture - that is, not an innova sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the tion from abroad. Nor does the Faroese pop birch woods had been exhausted; and the third ulation seem to have adopted new furniture and final factor was the cultural isolation for types in this period. Bourgeois Danish home which the trade monopoly's single-stranded furnishings can only be found in the probate bond with Europe must bear much of the re records among a small group of inhabitants in sponsibility. T6rshavn. But these people were not held in Where the Icelandic ganghus or passage very high esteem, so they did not come to func house thus represents an independent, endoge tion as models for, or suppliers to, the more nous cultural development determined by the prosperous people out in the populated dis special economic and ecological situation of Ice tricts. Perhaps one might also venture to see land in the centuries of Absolutism, the tradi national self-assertion in the massive rejection tional Faroese house on the other hand showed of Danish household culture and the persist- 63 :;;;-- ·--·· ••••• • •••r -s- ,, ...... , • • ,. - - . - ... Q ___·- = ----..-...... •' "'.. ,_ _.,_.. ._ __ =: 1 ,c.,, \ GLASSTOVA 0 1 2 Figure 9. House at Mula on Borooy, now in the Danish Open Air Museum at Lyngby. The living-room of the house, or roykstova, is to the right of the entrance behind thick stone and turf walls. There are no windows, but the room is lit through a ''louvre" in the ridge of the roof. Originally the louvre was also a smoke vent, but this house has a wooden chimney above the open hearth in the niche behind the front room. On two sides of the room there are built-in bed alcoves . To the left of the entrance is the best room of the house, the glasstoua, so called because of the windows in the gable . Other recent cultural features in this room are the ceiling and the iron stove, fired from a small kitchen. On two sides the room has wooden outer walls . After Stoklund 1982. ence in something genuinely Faroese in the hope, shown how useful and necessary it is to society of the 1700s. apply a long historical perspective when cul This brief overview of the development of tural conditions in this area are to be under dwelling types in the North Atlantic area has, I stood and explained. It has also - along with 64 the outline of shifting relations with Europe - Debes, Lucas 1673: Fa:r¢ernes Beskrivelse. (Reprint 1963). K¢benhavn. emphasized that these island societies cannot Fenton, Alexander 1978: The Northern Isles: Orkney be studied as isolated units, but should be seen and Shetland. Edinburgh. as elements in larger economic systems. The Fenton, Alexander 1989: The Island Blackhouse. example chosen, the dwelling, may however Edinburgh. help to remind us that such interrelationships Hamilton, J. R. C. 1956: Excavations at Jarlshof, Shetland. London. in themselves cannot explain everything. Hastrup, Kirsten 1990: Nature and Policy in Iceland Many other factors have an influence; that eco 1400-1800. An Anthropological Analysis of His logical conditions are crucial in an area like the tory and Mentality. Oxford. North Atlantic, for example, goes without say Hunter, James 1976: The Making of the Crofting Community. Edinburgh. ing. It is important that the centre-periphery Jirlow, Ragnar 1931: Drag ur faroisk arbetsliv. In: model does not become a new kind of reduc Rig 1931. tionism, but remains a perspective that can J6hannesson, I>orkell 1932: Die Ste/lung der freien reveal new, important aspects of North Atlan Arbeiter in Island. Reykjavik/K¢benhavn. tic cultural development. Krogh, Knud J. 1982: Erik den R¢des Gr¢nland. K¢benhavn. Palsson, Hermann and Paul Edwards 1978: Orkney Translated by James Manley inga saga. London. Roussell, Aage 1934: Norse Building Customs in the Note Scottish Isles. K¢benhavn /London. Smith, Hance D. 1984: Shetland Life and Trade The first version of this paper was presented as a 1550-1914 . Edinburgh. lecture at a conference on North Atlantic cultural Stoklund, Bjarne 1980: Houses and Culture in the research August 27.-30. 1990 in T6rshavn, Faroe North Atlante Isles: Three Models of Interpreta Islands, and published in Nordatlantiske Foredrag. tion. In: Ethnologia Scandinauica 1980: 113-132. Seminar om nordatlantisk hulturforskning i Nor Stoklund, Bjarne 1982: R¢gstue og glasstue. Bolig dens Hus pa Fa:r¢erne 27.-30. august 1990 . T6rs udviklingen pa Frerperne set i vestnordisk sam havn 1991. menhreng. In: Myhre et al. ed.: Vestnordisk byg geskik. Stavanger. Stoklund, Bjarne 1984: Building Traditions in the References Northern World. In: Fenton and Palsson ed.: The Agustsson, H¢rour 1982: Den islandske bondegards Northern and Western Isles in the Viking World. udvikling fra landnamstiden indtil det 20. arh. In: Edinburgh. Myhre, Stoklund & Gjrerder, ed.: Vestnordisk byg Stoklund, Bjarne 1987: Nordatlantisk byggeskik. geskik gjenom to tusen ar. Stavanger. Kontinuitet og forandring 9--19. arh. IEF Arbejd Bj¢rk, E. A. 1956/57: Fa:r¢sk bygderet I. T6rshavn. spapir 1/1987. Bjarnason, Hakon 1976: Nogle bemrerkninger ang. Thorsteinsson, Bjorn 1985: Island, Politikens Dan Islands historie i forbindelse med birkeskovens markshistorie. K¢benhavn. ¢delreggelse. 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