The Stabiir 



47 



with one room on each side of it, each the length of the 

 central hall. Or it may be that these two side rooms have 

 been again sub-divided to make two each. A house of 

 this kind shows us really a building-on of the side 

 rooms on either hand of the hall. You recognise tlie 

 hall as the nucleus of the whole by the large fireplace 

 which it contains. 



I use such words as hall and vestibule for the sake 

 of characterising the different sections of the house. 

 But let the reader understand that the house itself and 

 its divisions are supposed on a small scale. I ought, 

 perhaps, to use the words cottage, hut, rather than 

 house for some of the places which I have in mind ; 

 but words of this kind imply that the dwelling-place is 

 abominably small, whereas these houses of Norway are 

 really the original and primitive form of house ; those 

 that are larger (except when quite modern influences 

 have come in) have become so (as has already been 

 pointed out) by the growing together of several of these 

 primitive buildings. 



Among the buildings of the lower lands, beside the 

 ordinary house, stands nearly always a separate single- 

 roomed building for a store-house — in the Norse stahur 

 or stahbur — properly stav-hur, stave-house. This, as 

 the name implies, is a store-house raised upon props. 

 Sometimes the houses themselves are raised in the 

 same way. It is partly to avoid floods, partly to re- 

 move the stores out of the way of vermin that this 

 principle is adopted ; we see something of the same 

 kind in Switzerland. 



The accompanying wood-block gives a view of two 

 of these sfahur. They look like buildings still more 



