Stave Churches

 We think of medieval churches as made of stone, as indeed most of them were.  But stone churches always needed wood as well.  The scaffolding that was required when the church was being built, as the rows of stone blocks rose higher and higher, was of course made of wood.  And the rafters of the church, which held up the roof, were wooden.  As the fire at Notre Dame six years ago showed, if those centuries-old timbers caught fire the church itself would suffer serious damage.

Some churches were however made primarily of wood, most notably the Scandinavian stave churches.  There are over two dozen in Norway dating from the Middle Ages and one in Sweden.  The term "stave" refers to the vertical posts, one at each corner of the main, central part of the church, which supported the weight of the rest of the building materials.

These staves were made from entire trunks of an evergreen tree (a special northern species of pine).  An appropriately tall, straight tree would be chosen, its branches cut off, and its bark girdled.  It would now be dead, but it was left standing for several years.  This was believed to make the sap inside set up, making the wood very hard and resistant to rot and insect damage.

The staves were set on horizontal "sills," made from the same hardened wood, and clapboard siding was attached.  The churches were several stories tall, with very steep roofs that would shed Norwegian winter snow.  They were decorated with carvings on the rafter ends, the same way that stone churches might have gargoyles.

The result was something that to the modern eye looks fantastical, like something out of a fairy-tale, but they are treated by the local congregation as just their church (note the cemetery adjoining the church).

Because these churches do not look like the churches built in much of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, they are now often labeled "pagan."  This seems very unfair, as the earliest examples date from the end of the twelfth century, roughly 200 years after the region adopted Christianity.  (Remember, centuries were just as long in the Middle Ages as they are now.  We're talking about a time span comparable to the distance from us back to Thomas Jefferson as president.)

Movies and TV shows about the Vikings often give them "pagan temples" that look like stave churches, even though there is a grand total of zero evidence that Vikings ever worshiped Odin in anything that looked even vaguely like a stave church.  The carpentry skills that produced excellent long ships for the Vikings, however, carried over into the skills needed to build a stave church, and some of the techniques for the churches' clapboard siding are very similar to those used in ship construction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.