Gunda Béla et al. (szerk.): Ideen, Objekte und Lebensformen. Gedenkschrift für Zsigmond Bátky - István Király Múzeum közelményei. A. sorozat 29. (Székesfehérvár, 1989)

Axel Sttensberg: Predecessors of the Chimney

device in the different living-houses of the farms of Borup had special peculiarities that were not found in the others. There was even found a baking-oven, placed in the open air some metres north of the demesne-farm No. 4, situated on sloping ground so that the fire-opening was in its lower end. There may have been some kind of shelter above it otherwise the clay of its valulted top could be washed away.

The tradition of constructing some a form of cheminée need not, of course, have spread from the Latin-speaking countries with their monasteries, castles and wealthy burghers’ houses, although the upright position of the two constructions at Borup might indicate such a derivation. There was an old tradition in Scandinavia itself of fuel-retrenching ovens without any smoke-outlet other than the fireopening itself. They were, however, normally constructed from natural boulders or bricks. In Norway some stood upright like the wood-constructions of the farms No. 2 and 3 in Borup, but in southern Scandinavia and the island of Zealand they were often constructed like a baking-oven, except that their walls were built from boulders. Such an oven was almost completely preserved at a site from about 1500 A.D. in a corner of the living room of farm No. 3 in the village of Store Valby near Slagelse (Fig. 4). The fireopening was in one of its long-sides, facing the room it was intended to serve; had it been a normal baking-oven, it would have had its opening at one end. It only lacks its top, which was probably made of flat boulders. The conservators succeeded in moving it intact, without its being taken apart, and until recently it was on display in the National Museum of Copenhagen.

(Valby)

This type of heating-oven without any special tube for the smoke to disappear is called rogovn in Scandinavia, i.e. „Smoke-Oven”.

The introduction of chimneys in the Danish peasant farms was not implemented until after the Middle Ages, and it did not happen at one time in all parts of the country. It started in the western parts of Schleswig and Jutland, probably inspired from the Frisian areas and Holland, where fuel was sparse because the original woods had been cut down. In another of the author’s family farms, “Skree” in Sinding near Herning, where the same family has lived for ten generations, there is still preserved the very first heavy front beam of a chimney dated to 1616. But in other parts of Jutland the tradition of cheminée or open fire, Low-German “Schwibbogen”, related to the structure found in Farm No. 3 of Borup c. 700 A.D., could still be observed when R. Mejborg made drawings of surviving specimens in his Slesvigske Bondergaarde (translated into German) figs. 40-42 in the late 19th century.

In Zealand Prince Karl of Vemmetofte Manor urged his peasants to replace their old fireplaces with more fireproof chimneys. This was about 1720, and before 1800 chimneys were generally accepted by Zealand peasants. The story related in this paper is, however, informative because it demonstrates how many different factors may have been decisive in the choice of type of fireplace, and how novations in some cases could be under way for more than one millennium, for today an open fire of the cheminée type is all the fashion in many centrally heated private houses in Denmark.

Axel Steens berg

REFERENCES

Lerche, Grith

1969 Kogegruber i New Guineas Hejland (English Summary: A Cooking Pit in New Guinea), KUML, 195—206.

Mejborg, R.

1992 Danske Bőndergaarde, I, Slesvig. Lehmann & Stage, Kjobenhavn.

Steensberg, Axel

1974 Den danske bondegárd, 2nd ed., Forum, Kőbenhavn.

Steensberg, Axel

1982 Skorslenens forgaengere. In Saga och Sed, 202—224, ed. Kgl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien, Uppsala, Sweden.

Steensberg, Axel

1983 Borup A D. 700—1400. A Deserted Settlement and its Fields in South Zealand, Denmark. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters’ Commission for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements and Field Structures. Publication No. 3, The National Museum, Copenhagen.

1986 Man the Manipulator. An Ethno-Archaeological Basis for Reconstructing the Past. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters’ Commission for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements and Field Structures. Publication No. 5, The National Museum, Copenhagen.

1980 Hard Grains, Irrigation, Numerals and Script in the Rise of Civilisations. The Royal Danish Academy of Scienses and Letters’ Commission for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements and Field Structures. Publication No. 6. The National Museum, Copenhagen.

Steensberg, Axel — Östergaard Christensen, J. L.

1974 Store Valby. Historisk-Arkaeologoisk Undersogelse af en nedlagt Landsby pd Sjaelland (English Summary), I—III. Det kgl. danske Vindenskabernes Selskab, Historisk-Filosofiske Skrifter, 8,1 Part I, Munksgaard, Copenhagen.

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