Yggdrasil · Humankind

Households and Craftspeople: Tissø and Jórvík

Two excavated settlements, Tissø in Denmark and Jórvík in England, show how households worked and traded.

Myth and literature

The story

Thematic connection: these two settlements show how ordinary and elite households lived and worked in the same centuries as the myths, but they do not prove that any one god was worshipped in them.

At Tissø on Zealand, a powerful family kept a large residence for several centuries. A great hall stood at its centre, with workshops and a market area close by. Weavers, metalworkers and visiting traders worked and dealt there, and guests were fed and entertained in the hall. Out in the lake and the fields around, people left weapons, tools and jewellery, and at least one hilltop held a cache of burnt bone and metal.

In Viking-age York, known as Jórvík, the picture is of a crowded street. Timber houses stood close together, and many of them opened onto workshops. Woodturners, smiths, leatherworkers and comb-makers made and mended goods there, and their rubbish, tools and food scraps were left in the damp ground. Almost none of the people are known by name.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: At Tissø, the layout, the buildings, the crafts and the trade goods are recorded by excavation. The lake’s name is read as “Týr’s lake”, and offerings were left in and around it. At Coppergate, the street plan, the trades and what people ate and wore are recorded in the ground itself, with unusually good survival of wood, leather and textile.

What is not recorded: Neither site tells us which gods any household honoured. The Týr name does not show a cult of Týr alone, and the offerings are not tied to one deity. Nothing at York names a god. Most of the people are unnamed, and we cannot say how any individual felt or believed. Scholars interpret the hilltop deposit and the hall’s ritual role with caution, and sites like these are used here only as a view of daily life beside the myths.

Historical evidence

The evidence

Tissø: the National Museum of Denmark describes a very large magnate’s residence with a palisaded enclosure and a heavy-timbered hall, workshops in pit-houses outside it (loom and spindle weights, jewellery models and moulds, casting waste), coins and trading weights, and animal bones and glass from drinking cups that point to feasting. Medieval Histories reports a first residence at Bulbrogård from about 550 to 650 with a hall some 38 metres long, a move about 600 metres south, and a last phase of about 950 to 1050. It also reports weapons, tools and jewellery from the lake, a 1.8 kg gold neck-ring from a field in 1977, and a hilltop deposit of burnt bone, coins and arrowheads.

Jórvík: the York Archaeological Trust dug at Coppergate from 1976 to 1981, finding timber buildings, wattle walls and paths, metalworking slag, textiles, leather, animal bones, oyster shells, seeds, insects and parasite eggs. Alexandra Cochrane’s 2021 article lists lathe-turned wood cores, crucibles and moulds, shoes and belts, and combs and other items of bone and antler.