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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Viking Age mortuary house was discovered during the excavation of the burial ground of one of the Viking Age farms on Vinjeøra in Hemne in Trøndelag. The house measured five by three meters. It had corner posts, and the walls were made of standing planks, in a building style similar to that used in early stave churches. Archaeologists could see that the building was solidly constructed, even though the only thing that remains is a rectangular ditch with a slight impression from the house and some retaining stones where the walls once stood.

Even though the style of building is typical of the Viking Age, this house was far from ordinary. Archaeologists think it was most likely home to a Viking grave. Hundreds of years of farming in the area have plowed away the grave that was likely found inside the structure.

"We can see that the house once stood in the middle of a burial mound. That's how we know that there probably was a grave inside the house," said Sauvage, who is project manager for the dig.

The burial mound itself is also gone, but the ring ditch that once surrounded the mound has been filled in, rather than plowed away, and is therefore still visible.

"The ditch forms a circular depression that tells us where the burial mound was situated, which means that we also can see that the mortuary house was placed right in the middle of the mound," he said.

The mortuary house was found under an excavation of a Viking Age grave field on Vinjeøra in Hemne municipality in central Norway. The dig was undertaken in preparation for road construction associated with expansion of the E39 highway.

Viking Age mortuary houses are rare finds in Norway, with fewer than 15 found in the entire country. That means there's a lot we don't know about why these houses were built and what they were intended for.

"Early research has often interpreted these houses as purely functional. They've been seen as a morgue, where the Vikings stored corpses, such as when they were waiting for the ground to thaw in the spring," says Sauvage.

But this interpretation doesn't explain why the house on Vinjeøra was dug into the burial mound, and why graves have been found inside mortuary houses in other locations. Now, most researchers believe that these houses played more of a symbolic role than a practical one.

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