SC - Iceland

[Stefan li Rous]

Nanna said:
> I don't think anyone has built a turf house to live in for the last 50 years
> and I can't remember offhand if anyone still lives in a turf house
> somewhere. But houses and structures are still being made of turf -
> actually, the guy who made the website - he calls himself a "turf artist" -

I was wondering about this also when I read the material on the website
you gave. A turf house would seem to be an excellant solution for the
area. They are well insulated and the material is more readily available
than other materials. Even if you have to use a modern sealant on the
inside or as a barrier elsewhere they look to be good choices.

> >The stave church was wonderful.  What would be the
> >purpose of that type of archetectural design?  Flight of fancy?  It looked
> >to be made from fairly uniform lengths of wood and vaugly brought to mind
> >the temples of Japan in form.

There is a small stave church replica(?) at Pennsic that one of the
merchants uses. The style looked very close.

> I don't know much about stave churches, actually. Presumably some of the
> early Icelandic churches were stave churces but none survived - lack of
> wood, after all, made these churches extremely costly to build. There is a
> nice site about Norwegian stave churches, with lots of photos, here:

Yes, I don't think the style is unique to Iceland. This scarcity of
wood is why I was wondering why there weren't more stone buildings
built over the centuries.

Unfortunately, the history of Iceland, as well as other isolated spots
such as Easter Island, are good examples of what happens over time
when there are too many folks in one area with a limited amount of
resources. I sure hope we can avoid doing this to the entire planet. :-(

And I'm not singling the people of Iceland out. You can see the same
deforestation in England and Europe during the Middle Ages. They just
had a larger area so it too longer and it wasn't as complete.

- -- 
THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****