Log Buildings and the Fenni

In my last foray into Greco-Roman geography, I ended with speculation — that, "[h]ad a globetrotting Greek wandered into the forests of Finland, perhaps he . . . would have returned with reports of 'houses made from trees.'" Whether or not any Greeks (traders or otherwise) possessed knowledge of the lands which today comprise Scandinavia is an open question. In the fourth century BC, Pytheas explored portions of northern Europe (including the British Isles and Baltic coast); alas, none of his writing survives, and his precise route will forever remain a mystery. The Romans, though, certainly could claim an awareness, dim though it may have been, of today's Scandinavia.

About AD 98, slightly more than a century after Strabo wrote his Geographica, historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus published Germania, one of the classical world's best-known ethnographic works. Germania's final chapter covers tribes living to the Germans' northeast — the Peucini, Veneti, and Fenni. This last group (whose name bears an obvious similarity to the exonym "Finn"), Tacitus considers uniquely barbaric. His (brief) description may be the earliest account of Uralic (1) construction methods:

The Fenni are strangely beast-like and squalidly poor; neither arms nor homes have they; their food is herbs, their clothing skins, their bed the earth. . . . The little children have no shelter from wild beasts and storms but a covering of interlaced boughs. Such are the homes of the young, such the resting place of the old. (2)

At a glance, the text seems to support my contention. But, as usual, the Latin is too vague to reveal much about its subject. The relevant line, "ramorum nexu contegantur," could be translated as "a covering of interlaced boughs," but it might also mean "a roof of connected branches" or "a shelter of fastened twigs." Then again, had Tacitus intended to describe log houses, he surely would've employed truncus or trabes, the two Latin words often applied to trunks and timbers.

It's likely, then, that the Finns adopted log construction well after the first and second centuries AD. But who (if anyone) introduced the practice to them? When did the shift from branch hovels to log houses occur? Alas, I can't say. No doubt, the westernmost Uralic-speaking populations interacted with southern Scandinavia's Germanic peoples, who preferred to build timber long-houses (a practice which survived into the Viking Age). The pastoral Sami constructed tents and pole (or earthen) huts — goahti — into the twentieth century. In some ways, these habitations resemble the "covering of interlaced boughs" described by Tacitus.

A Sami family outside their goahti. Photo, 1870s, from the Galerie Bassenge collection; taken from Wikipedia.

Whatever its origin, log architecture had, by the early modern period, become entrenched in Scandinavia and northwestern Russia. Log dwellings, storehouses, barns, and (especially) saunas dotted the Finnish landscape, and peculiarities of construction acquired distinctive names — hammasnurkka, lukko, and whatnot. At Helsinki's Seurasaari Museum, 87 buildings, the majority log, testify to the popularity of timber construction.

The Niemelä stable, now housed at the Seurasaari Museum. Photo by Jani Patokallio, 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.

In the seventeenth century, Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns brought their architectural traditions to North America, and thus (in conjunction with the Germans) engendered the practice which defined frontier architecture in the United States.

1) I've assumed, of course, that Tacitus's Fenni were, in fact, the ancestors of today's Finns, Estonians, Livonians, Karelians, Ingrians, and Vepsians. But such an identification is a matter of controversy.

2) From the Church, Brodribb, and Cerrato translation (1942); transcribed by Perseus.

The First Log Buildings?

According to convention, log construction was introduced to America by Scandinavian and German immigrants, who settled in the Middle Colonies after 1638. Tracing the European log house's history is a more arduous task. The question, "Who built the first log structure?" may be unanswerable. The Roman architect Vitruvius (ca. 75 – ca. 15 BC), in the second book of his Ten Books on Architecture (or De Architectura), describes the log dwellings erected by the inhabitants of Colchis, a region lying between the Black Sea and Caucasus Mountains, in present western Georgia:

The woods of the Colchi, in Pontus, furnish such abundance of timber, that they build in the following manner. Two trees are laid level on the earth, right and left, at such distance from each other as will suit the length of the trees which are to cross and connect them. On the extreme ends of these two trees are laid two other trees transversely: the space which the house will inclose is thus marked out. The four sides being thus set out, towers are raised, whose walls consist of trees laid horizontally but kept perpendicularly over each other, the alternate layers yoking the angles. The level interstices which the thickness of the trees alternately leave, is filled in with chips and mud. (1)

Were it not for his use of "Colchi" and "Pontus," Vitruvius could be detailing a standard American log house (or cabin). (Whether the Colchians — like their Western inheritors — notched or hewed the timbers they used, I can't say.) Vitruvius continues:

On a similar principle they form their roofs, except that gradually reducing the length of the trees which traverse from angle to angle, they assume a pyramidal form. They are covered with boughs and smeared over with clay; and thus after a rude fashion of vaulting, their quadrilateral roofs are formed.

Here, the Colchian method of construction diverges from later European techniques. That the Colchians could erect such roofs suggests that they treated (that is, notched or shaped) their logs. I'm scarcely an engineer, but a pyramid of round trunks, I suspect, would risk collapse.

Did log architecture truly originate in the Caucasus? Perhaps; perhaps not. Few written accounts of pre-Christian European building techniques exist, and archaeological evidence for log construction is, for obvious reasons, scanty. In any case, the Germanic tribes of northern and northeastern Europe (by the early modern period, the log house's locus) did not, during the Roman era, employ such methods. In Germania, Tacitus (ca. 56 – ca. 117) writes:

With [the Germans] in truth, is unknown even the use of mortar and of tiles. In all their structures they employ materials quite gross and unhewn, void of fashion and comeliness. Some parts they besmear with an earth so pure and resplendent, that it resembles painting and colours. They are likewise wont to scoop caves deep in the ground, and over them to lay great heaps of dung. Thither they retire for shelter in the winter, and thither convey their grain: for by such close places they mollify the rigorous and excessive cold. (2)

The Germans, then, occupied mud huts or earth-roofed cellars (Tacitus surely uses "dung" only to deride). No doubt, these buildings contained wood (if only for a roof framework), but I can't imagine they used stacked logs. In the valley of the Danube, such subterranean habitations survived into the 1880s.

I searched for a corroborating account of Colchis's log homes, but found only one (possible) reference. Strabo's Geographica, written in the first or second decade BC, mentions the abodes of the "Heptacometae," who resided just north of Colchis:

Now all these peoples who live in the mountains are utterly savage, but the Heptacometae are worse than the rest. Some also live in trees or turrets; and it was on this account that the ancients called them 'Mosynoeci,' the turrets being called 'mosyni.' (3)

Though "live in trees" may mean "live in dwellings constructed of trees," Strabo, more likely, describes simple tree houses. In the succeeding sentence, he writes, "They . . . attack wayfarers, leaping down upon them from their scaffolds."

1) From Joseph Gwilt's translation (1826); transcribed by Bill Thayer, and posted on his excellent website.
2) From Thomas Gordon's translation (1910); reproduced by Fordham University.
3) From H.L. Jones's translation (1917–1932); transcribed by Bill Thayer.