SC - Clean Vikings -- OT

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

>Iceland has bath-houses
>using volcanic hot springs that have been in continuous use
>since the Settlement. Now where is this documented? *sigh*

Huh? Is the lady saying that we have bath-houses that have been in
continuous use since the Settlement? If so, I´d dearly love directions to
find one of them. If she means that the hot springs have been used for
bathing since the Settlement, well, some of them were used then, and are
used now, but I´m not too sure about the continuous use. For washing and
sometimes cooking, yes. For bathing - well ...

She also says, in the article referred to:
>In Iceland where natural hot springs are common, the naturally heated
>water was incorporated into the bath-house.

This could easily be understood as if most farms had a bath-house heated
with water from hot springs. I´m not saying there weren´t any but offhand, I
can´t recall any such bath-house mentioned in the Sagas. Sure, a house was
probably built around Snorralaug in Reykholt and a few other hot springs but
that was not the norm. There was a bath-house (or bathroom, probably a sauna
of sorts) at most farms but it was usually heated by firewood. Later, when
wood became scarce, the bathroom was the only heated room in the farmhouse
and people began sleeping there. Later still, almost all fuel (mostly peat
and dung, at that point) had to be used for cooking and people stopped
bathing, more or less - but the "bathroom" kept its name (baðstofa). For
centuries, the main sleeping/living/dining/working room of the Icelandic
farm went by the name of bathroom. My mother was born in a "baðstofa" in
1928.

Yes, the old Icelanders probably bathed a lot, as did the Vikings (saturday
is still called "laugardagur" (bath day) in Icelandic). And they probably
used natural hot springs when available. But relatively few Icelandic farms
have a hot spring of suitable temperature close by the farmhouse, so these
naturally heated bath-houses couldn´t have been that common, really.

Nanna