DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
There is, nevertheless, a distinct difference between the
seating arrangement of the house of a North Germanic
chieftain of the Saga period and that of the guest and
service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall. In the North the
benches and tables were set up in the aisles of the house;
the center floor was primarily a passageway and could
therefore be kept relatively narrow. The setting up at
Flugumyr of special forestools on the inner side of the
aisles, and of the even more special rows of church seats
on the center floor, was an unusual arrangement conditioned
by the gathering of an exceptionally large number of guests
attending the wedding. In the guest and service buildings
of the Plan of St. Gall, by contrast, the benches and tables
are set up in the center space itself. The floor plan of the
House for Distinguished Guests, the Hospice for Pilgrims
and Paupers, and the House for Horses and Oxen leaves no
doubt on this point. They have benches—or benches and
tables—all along the walls of the center space. The outer
spaces serve as bedrooms, dormitories, or stables. In the
house of the North Germanic chieftain, at the height of the
Saga period, the functions of dining and sleeping were
often relegated to separate buildings, a dining or festal hall
(veizluskáli) and a sleeping hall (hviluskáli), one lying in
prolongation of the axis of the other, the whole assuming
the aspect of a "long house." In the St. Gall house, on
the other hand, all these functions are combined in one
building. The use of the central hall as dining room
necessitates a substantial enlargement of this space, as well
as the introduction of separating wall partitions to safeguard
the integrity of the respective functions of eating and
sleeping. Both these innovations tend to strengthen the
"central" character of the house.
Yet it should not be forgotten that when Iceland was
settled by immigrants from Norway at the end of the ninth
century, the North Germanic house in use there was an all-purpose
structure combining living, cooking, and sleeping
under one roof.[182]
This is the case in most of the Germanic
houses of the Iron Age and continued to be so on farmsteads
of modest size, even in the Saga period. The long
house previously referred to was a very special type, heralded
in by the emergence of powerful chieftains in a society that
had formerly been characterized by its egalitarian structure.
