Stöng
Stöng is the excavated ruin of a Viking-age and medieval farm in the Þjórsárdalur valley at the edge of the South Iceland highlands, sheltered beneath a modern protective roof at the end of a rough gravel track. About seven kilometres away stands Þjóðveldisbærinn, a full reconstruction of the farm that lets visitors walk through a turf-and-timber longhouse of the kind Stöng once was.
Region
South Iceland
Coordinates
64.1516° N, 19.7507° W
Accessibility
- Wheelchair · None
- The ruins lie at the end of a rough gravel track and are reached by an unpaved path over uneven ground, with no step-free access into the sheltered excavation.
- Limited mobility · Limited
- A short walk over uneven, unpaved ground from the small parking area to the protected ruins.
- Sensory · Full
- A remote, quiet highland-edge valley with few visitors.
- Cognitive · Full
- A single excavated site with interpretive signage; the separate Þjóðveldisbær reconstruction is easier to read as a complete building.
Why it matters
Stöng was a substantial farm whose longhouse, byre, and outbuildings were buried and preserved under tephra when the volcano Hekla erupted in 1104, an eruption that laid waste to some twenty farms in Þjórsárdalur and drove the valley's abandonment. Excavated in 1939, its unusually complete stone-and-turf foundations, with a main hall, a living room, and attached rooms, became a benchmark for understanding the layout of the Icelandic skáli, the settlement- and saga-age longhouse, and earned the site the informal name 'the Pompeii of Iceland.' A protective structure was later built over the ruins. To mark the 1100th anniversary of the settlement of Iceland, the state built Þjóðveldisbærinn, the Commonwealth Farm, nearby between 1974 and 1977, a full reconstruction based on the Stöng excavations under the medieval-architecture scholar Hörður Ágústsson, later joined by a reconstructed early Icelandic stave church consecrated in 2000.