Norwegian farm buildings | The food storehouse on the old Norwegian farm
Like all buildings on the traditional Norwegian farm, the stabbur had a clear purpose: to store food — and sometimes also fine clothing and other fragile possessions.
Keeping the rodents out
The Norwegians placed the stabbur on wooden stilts or boulders — structures specifically designed to keep rodents and other creatures out.
Throughout summer and autumn, the farmers worked hard to stock the stabbur with enough food to last through a long and frosty winter.
The stabbur contained foods such as threshed grain, flour, flatbread, butter, frost-resistant cheese, and dried, smoked, or salted meat and fish.
The stabbur did not have a fireplace, so the food and items stored there had to withstand low temperatures. Frost-sensitive foods — such as some vegetables, milk, eggs, and other perishable products — needed to be kept in a frost-free location. These were typically stored in a cool indoor pantry or in an earth cellar, either underneath the main house or outdoors.
A building of all sizes
Typically — but not always — the stabbur was a wooden structure. The earliest versions were built using a stave‑type construction, but from the Viking Era onwards the lafting log‑building technique became more dominant, at least in some regions of the country.