Denmark Tissø In the 1990s, Danish archaeologists excavated a chieftain's residence on the outskirts of
Tissø in
West Zealand County. Among other finds, they uncovered the remains of a large longhouse or hall that was in use between the 6th and 11th centuries C.E. It was apparent from the postholes that the roof had been supported by a few very strong columns and that the building had been tall, possibly two-story. It contained a large central room, where a large number of animal bones, fragments of Frankish glass beakers, and a piece of a string instrument were found. These finds indicate with a high degree of likelihood that the hall was used for ceremonial feasts. In addition, large numbers of offered items were found in the area, among others a huge gold ring, amulets with mythological motifs, and animal bones. Etymologically, the name Tissø would mean "''Tyr's Lake
" or "God's Lake''". These finds all suggest that the entire complex was an important religious center. Other finds in the area, for example weapons and jewelry, show that the site was associated with the highest strata of society, possibly with the royal family. The entire complex, which also included workshops and a marketplace, may have functioned as a temporary residence for the king when he made periodic visits to that part of the kingdom. Investigations have shown that the complex was only in use for short periods. The king also functioned as a religious leader, and the hof was used for the feasts and blóts that were held when the king was at the location. Similar complexes of buildings are known from other places in southern Scandinavia, for example
Järrestad in Scania,
Lisbjerg in Jutland, and
Toftegård on Zealand. These royal centers, called central places by archeologists,
Iceland Hofstaðir The name of the settlement of Hofstaðir, near
Mývatn, and local tradition indicate it was the site of a hof. The site was excavated by
Daniel Bruun in 1908 and again by Olaf Olsen in 1965. Since 1991, the Icelandic Archeological Institute (
Fornleifastofnun Íslands - FSI) has re-investigated it; since 2002, in an international investigation under the Landscape of Settlements program. The excavations have uncovered a large
longhouse with a small separate room at the north end, 42 meters long overall and 8 meters wide in the main section. It had three small protruding sections, two near the south end and one on the opposite side. There was a fireplace in the center and smaller fireplaces at both ends of the main room. Animal bones were found all around the inside of the walls in the main room, and a smaller number in the small room. Various associated buildings have also been excavated. Olsen used Hofstaðir as a particularly good example of the idea of the temple-farm. Despite its large size, in form the building is identical to other longhouses, the small room at the north end was a later addition, and the 1908 excavation had not fully revealed the entrances, annexes, and ancillary buildings. He considered it primarily a farmhouse and only incidentally a hof. However, in addition to clarifying the relationship between the annexes and the main hall, the re-excavation revealed even more bone fragments, and analysis shows that at least 23 cattle had been sacrificial offerings. They were killed in an unusual manner, by a blow between the eyes, and their skulls displayed outside for years. The horns had not been removed and in age the animals ranged from just full-grown to middle-aged, both of these being unique in Icelandic farming at the time; also the majority appear to have been bulls, which is very surprising in a dairy economy. The dates of the skulls varied, with the last having been slaughtered around 1000 C.E., and one sheep skeleton was found that had been killed in the same manner as the cattle. The bone finds thus indicate the building did indeed serve as a hof. So do the surprisingly small size of the main hearth despite the great size of the building; the relatively few finds of valuable objects (and complete lack of weapons), and the location, which is convenient for travel and highly visible, but not good for a farmstead. Hence, the unusual evidence of frequent meat feasting does not simply indicate a particularly wealthy settlement, but a place of frequent ritual gatherings, probably in spring and summer. The unusual method of slaughter was deliberately dramatic and would have produced a fountain of blood. The skulls were found among roof and wall debris, all but one grouped in two places at the south end of the hall: inside the southeast annex and between the southwestern annex and the wall of the main building; it seems plausible that they were on display when the building was in use and that where they were found was storage, whether normal winter storage or concealment after conversion to Christianity caused the abandonment of the building in the mid-eleventh century. The goat sacrifice can be interpreted as a termination ritual. Olsen also regarded as highly significant that only 9 meters from the south door of the building was an oval pit containing ash, charcoal, fragments of animal bone, and sooty stones. He pointed out that Icelandic farms usually disposed of their refuse down a slope, and interpreted this as a very large baking pit.
Sæból and other reputed square hof sites A number of square ruins in Iceland, above all one at
Sæból, were interpreted as the remains of hofs, but Olsen demonstrated that they are identical in form and scale with horse stalls still in use in Iceland. He ascribed the hof legends attached to them to romantic nationalism and pointed out that many were called medieval chapels (
bænhús) at the beginning of the 19th century and had transformed into ruined hofs by the end of that century.
Sweden Uppåkra . Top: interior as reconstructed by
Foteviken Museum; bottom: plan of excavation, showing locations of wall trenches (pink), central columns (brown), hearth (red), and beaker and glass bowl (green). By Sven Rosborn. In 2000–2004, excavations in
Uppåkra, south of
Lund in
Scania, revealed that a heathen hof was located there for several hundred years. Since it was possible to excavate the entire site and since it had not been disturbed, this excavation afforded the first opportunity for a purely archeological study of a heathen hof in its entirety. The remains of the building consist of holes and trenches for the placement of the pillars and walls that once stood there. Various floor levels were discernible, and it was possible to determine that the hof was initially erected in the 3rd century C.E. on the site of an unusually large longhouse, and then rebuilt six times without appreciable changes, the last version of the building dating to the early Viking Age. The building material was in all cases wood, which was also sunk into the ground. The building was not large, only 13 meters long and 6.5 meters wide. The walls on the long sides were made of slightly convex, rough-cut oak posts or "staves," which were sunk into a trench in the earth more than one meter deep. At each corner of the building stood a pillar or corner-post. The central part of the building, which stood free of the outer walls, was formed by four gigantic wooden columns. The holes for these and for the corner-posts are unusually wide and more than two meters deep, and stone packing found in three of the center holes indicates columns at least 0.7 meters in diameter. That must therefore have been the main entrance of the hof. This has been interpreted as the men's entrance, the entrance on the north side as the women's entrance, and the southeastern entrance as for the priest, on the model of stone churches. Two large iron door rings were found, one in the fill around a post, the other about 10 meters from the building. The hof is near the center of the settlement and there are at least four burial mounds to the west and north of it, probably dating to the early Bronze Age or the early Iron Age.
Lunda At Lunda farm in
Södermanland, excavation revealed a small building parallel to the north side of a longhouse, with three phallic figurines inside, one solid gold, the other two cast in bronze and gilded. This is thought to have been a hof associated with the longhouse residence. In addition, a nearby hillside appears to have been a
sacred grove: numerous settings of crushed stone and fire sites were found all over it, and evenly distributed on, under, and around them, large amounts of burned and crushed bone, burned and crushed clay fragments, and resin drops, and smaller numbers of beads and blades such as knives and arrowheads. The bone fragments were very worn, indicating they had been left exposed or possibly ground, and the very few that could be identified were from pigs and either sheep or goats.
Borg At Borg in
Norrköping Municipality,
Östergötland, a small building was excavated that had two rooms on either side of a central hallway. There was a stone foundation interpreted as a
hörgr at the far end of the hallway from the entrance. Two amulet rings were found near this and 98 amulet rings and 75 kg of unburned animal bones, In the eleventh century the building and its yard had been covered with a thick layer of gravel and a church erected 100 m away. he found post-holes that he interpreted as the remains of the great hof described by
Adam of Bremen. He interpreted them as two concentric rectangles, the remains of an almost square building with a high roof. However, as Olsen demonstrated, the remains are too sparse to support this interpretation, which is in any case based on
Carl Schuchhardt's reconstruction of the
Wendish temple at
Arkona, a later and non-Germanic site. Moreover, Schuchhardt's excavation was rushed and his own data do not certainly support the square plan that he later claimed to have found at two other Baltic sites. Further excavations at Gamla Uppsala in the 1990s uncovered remains of a large settlement and a very large hall near the church, which has been identified as a hall hof, either "a feasting hall in which pagan festivals took place at certain times" or, based on its lack of internal divisions, a ritual space based in overall form on the long house.
Norway Mære Under the medieval
Mære Church in
Mære in
Trøndelag county, archeological investigation in the 1960s revealed remnants of a hof, the only one found under a Norwegian church. The building had been of post construction, and
gullgubber were found in one post-hole.
Hov At Hov in
Vingrom near
Lake Mjøsa in southern Norway, excavations of a
longhouse have revealed gullgubber and "strike-a-lights," suggesting cultic use. The as yet unpublished site is identified as a 6th-7th century building that was part of a farm and apparently was never used as a residence, and so far has yielded 29 gullgubber, a half-dozen strike-a-lights, a
scramasax dated to approximately 550 C.E., pearls, knives, and a ring-nail.
Ranheim In 2011, remains of a site of heathen worship were found at
Ranheim on the outskirts of
Trondheim, consisting of a stone circle approximately in diameter and in height delineating an altar, a ceremonial way marked by standing stones, and a building about in size, consisting of 12 large pillars resting on stone bases and enclosing 4 pillars. The building is thought to have been a shelter for the god-images which were mounted on the inside pillars. The site dates to about 400 CE, during the
Nordic Iron Age, and had been covered with earth to conceal it. Several human teeth, a partial skull, and two glass beads were found, but no gullgubber. The site was later bulldozed to make way for housing.
Ørsta In late summer and early autumn 2020, during archeological survey for a build site, remains of a building with size with slightly curved walls marked by large postholes was found at Ose on the outskirts of
Ørsta in
Ørsta Municipality in
Møre og Romsdal county. It is located from the current shore of the local
Ørstafjorden. The building was remarkable in that it in its centre, a quadratic-shaped structure had four holes for round pillars which is interpreted as holding up a central spire, similar to Uppåkra. The longer side walls had probably rectangular heavier roof carrying posts with a size of about . It is interpreted as being a hof. In one of the pillars of the building a part of an iron plough was found. This is interpreted as an offering for a place of worship. Remains of fireplaces was found in the building thought to be used in heathen ceremonies. The burnt remains of pillars were C-14 carbon dated in 2021 to be from the period 970-990 CE, late Viking age. Another building, round and smaller in size, marked again by holes for its posts was also found during these excavations about 100 m northeast of the first, slightly more distant from current shore. It seems to be of a similar age around year 900. It is thought to be a
hörgr. Part of a grinding stone found at its location is interpreted again as a religious offering for a sacred place. A number of other buildings from three time periods were found at the site, pointing to an important central farm site, Ose, which was located here at least from 500 years before CE.
England Yeavering The only heathen temple site yet found in England is at
Yeavering,
Northumberland, which seems to correspond to
Bede's
Ad Gefrin. Between 1952 and 1962,
Brian Hope-Taylor directed an excavation of the site. This was a royal residence of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria, but Hope-Taylor emphasized that as implied by its Celtic name, its history began far back in the post-Romano-British past; the "Great Enclosure" on the eastern edge of the site, in his opinion, had most likely been created in the 4th or 5th century C.E., possibly earlier, and only one of the burials on the site could reasonably be claimed to be Anglo-Saxon rather than indigenous Celtic, and that mainly on grounds of the individual's unusual height. In his view the archeological evidence was "preponderantly Celtic." However, he also identified the buildings he found as the product of a "vigorous hybrid culture" and regarded the buildings with solid walls in foundation trenches as "Saxo-Frisian" halls constructed by native [Celtic] craftsmen; in construction they are very early examples of a technique later found widely in important buildings, including churches, in both Anglo-Saxon England and on the Continent, but at this time otherwise only found on Iona and near Yeavering, at Milfield, while in form they closely resemble buildings excavated west of the Weser. Among these trench-built solid-walled buildings were three that lay some distance west of the great hall, with the amphitheatrical structure Hope-Taylor referred to as the assembly-structure lying between them: a pair of rectangular buildings placed end to end with what appears to have been a wattle fence between them, and an associated building that Hope-Taylor interpreted as a kitchen. These three were the only buildings on the site oriented north-south rather than east-west, and were constructed at the same time as or shortly before the assembly-structure. They were destroyed along with the Great Enclosure around 633, after which a church was built at the east end of the site. The southern building of the pair Hope-Taylor was convinced was a temple. No pottery or other indications of normal domestic use were found in this building. Nor were scattered animal bones. The building had been constructed in two stages: the second was constructed around the first (which was one of the few buildings on the site not to have been burned down), using carefully finished carpentry and heavy buttresses similar to those of the great hall. Inside the inner wall, the trench had been left open or opened up to form a pit approximately 6 feet long and more than 1 foot wide, which was full of animal bones; these had been deposited in at least 9 layers and stacked against the wall above the pit after space ran out, There were three non-structural postholes from which the posts had been removed before the building was burned and demolished. In addition, outside the northwest corner of the building there was a pit 4 feet in depth in which a post had been placed; nothing was found here except unusually clayey soil compared to the rest of the site, and crushed animal teeth, probably from sheep or goats; numerous thin, pointed stakes had been driven into the ground around this feature. And south of the pit, on the west side of the building, were traces of the successive erection of at least four temporary huts. A smaller, similar set of traces lay to the west of the screen between that building and the one to the north. South of the temple building was a rectangular enclosure that appeared to have been unroofed. There was no door out to this area from the building; both buildings had doors on their two long, east and west sides. Finally, of the graves in the western cemetery area of the site, the northernmost 16 were grouped around the temple building; but no burials lay to the east of the enclosure, suggesting that was where the gate was. All but one body, a child who was buried doubled-over, were buried with their heads to the west. Hope-Taylor considered the burials associated with free-standing posts beside the building and pointed out that although the form of burial—stretched out and without grave goods—would have been acceptable to Christians, the dating and association with the un-Christian building mean that at least some of the burials must have occurred during heathen times. ==Stave churches==