Pretty weird browsing HN and seeing a pictures from the small mountainous parts of Norway where I grew up!
Fun fact about my local "stavkirke": there's a hidden urinal up where the priest is preaching, with a pipe leading to a whole in the outer wall. Rumored to be because one of the old priests long time ago had these incredible long sessions and needed to relieve himself midway but didn't want to interrupt.
If you're in the U.S. and want to see one of these, there's one on Washington Island in Door County, Wisconsin.[0] There may be others, I was just reminded of this one since I visited it this past summer.
and if you make it to Washington Island, also worth checking out the boathouse on neighboring Rock Island if you like cool buildings built by Scandinavians.
I had the good fortune of visiting the Hopperstad stave church when it was getting a fresh coat of the traditional resinous mixture that preserves it and gives it its signature color. If I remember correctly (I probably don't), they said they give it a new coat every 26 years. The smell was heady.
The carvings throughout the building are as cool as the building itself: chimerical mashups of Christian and local pagan imagery, signatures from ancient travelers, and of course more runes than you can shake a stave at.
One of those places, like the Hagia Sophia, that overwhelms you with the depth of history. How tragic to only get one life; to only experience one era.
This is a good concise overview that answers several questions right away.
>The load-bearing posts are called staves and have given their name to the stave church. The stave church is built on a frame of sills. The whole frame is raised off the ground and rests on foundation stones. The wall planks are inserted into a groove in the sill and another groove in the upper beam or ‘wall plate’.
The sequence of construction illustrations are very helpful.
Now I understand Civ VI better (though they don't look like that).
I wonder if Japan had run out of ginormous trees earlier in her history, if something like a stave church would exist instead of pagodas. Replacing the central post in these has proven tricky because the life expectancy of equivalent posts they can find today (second and third growth timber) is less than half of that of the originals.
Though it looks like getting a new pillar into a stave church - without disassembling half of the building - is approximately as tricky as replacing the ones in a pagoda.
Tree rings in similar ecosystems will follow similar patterns. There's more to it than this, but imagine if each ring is thick or thin, indicating a rainy year or a dry year.
Now, imagine you cut down a tree. You see that it has 122 rings, meaning it was born 122 years ago, or 1900. Then you go look in the same forest and you find a dead tree, you don't know when it was born or when it died, but you see that the 20 outermost rings thick-thick-thin-thick-thin-thin-etc ring pattern matches the innermost pattern on the tree you know the date range of. So that means the last 20 years of the unknown tree's life overlapped with the first 20 years of the known tree's life. So that means your unknown tree died in 1920. You count the unknown tree things and see there were 140 rings, so that means that tree was born 140 years before 1920 - in 1780. Then, you find another tree that has overlaps with this now known tree, and you keep daisy chaining your information backwards.
With this method, you can go back thousands of years, if you have enough preserved trees or wood available to you. Then, you can take any random piece of tree, and if enough rings are present, you can tell exactly when that tree was growing.
If you see that every tree your building is made out of stopped growing in the year 1300, then you can be fairly confident that the building was built around or slightly later than 1300(since most people aren't going to let good lumber just sit around for centuries).
The gaps between rings are affected by the climate and can be used to find the years when a given pics of timber “accumulated” around the tree, by piecing together a timeline of gaps across many trees harvested over a long period.
No, it's not a mistranslation. Most people use freshly-cut trees when building things out of wood, rather than years-old fallen timbers. So the date of when the tree died is the date of the building (with few, rare exceptions).
Etymologically, this may be less than certain. German Stiftung ("foundation"), stiften ("to found, donate") or simply Stift as in Altenstift ("pension home") might derive from this, but that's uncertain.
Since all houses would be build like this ("Pfahlbauten") on marsh land, only foreign visitors would find it an outstanding feature. It's conceivable that this would be noted in official books, but the setting is an opportunity for misunderstandings (case in point, marsh may or may not refer to outskirts, borderland, wasteland, but I mean swamps).
Stift ("peg") has otherwise come to mean "pen, pencil" (initially of charcoal, I believe), but there is no related verb that I'm aware of (ie. no to pen, to sign). Another sense, "apprentice" (also Stippie, Stepke, potentially "child"), might be like an intern of the foundation, but stepchild offers another possibility if the intern was an orphan and the church took them in (see also staff).
It's notable that the steps of a ladder are little more than pegs, although step and step- are held distinct,
through Proto-Indo-European roots (wiktionary):
* stebʰ- ("to stand still, to harden")
* steyp- ("stiff, errect")
* stab- (“to support, stomp, curse, be amazed”)
* (s)tewp- (“to push, strike”)
are supposed to derive
staff / stave (G Stab)
stiff (thus G Stift beside steif "stiff")
step (G Stufe, stapfen only in Fussstapfen "foot prints, etc.)
step-* (G stief-), "Related to Old English stīepan (“to deprive, bereave”)
This is rather inscrutable because small details like a vowel can be found incompatible with a reconstruction, indicating eg. a loanword, but phonology alone is not enough. The final consonants -p or -b may be conditioned by vowel length and the development of the auslaut through Kluge's law is uncertain anyway. There is a virtually endless plethora of such words in st- (stage, stand, stick, stuck, sturdy, ...).
So, nobody can really say that they are not related, and the dating may be questionable. The modus operandi is to separate them until proof to the opposite. Albeit, the reconstruction depends on the choice of comparanda and a good theory to explain them. A theory is only as good as the explanations that it has to offer. Or in other words, there is a big difference between working within a framework, rather mechanically, or trying to set-up, extend and complete the frame. Now PIE stab-, steb- or stebʰ- are alternative reconstructions, the former from overcome theories with less precise phonology. However, historical linguistics is intimately related to, well, history and the evidence that they can afford. Relative chronologies as for the spread of Christendom depend on so many factors and technology, more recently, that it is very difficult to date something not before. Textual evidence only allows at the latest, as a rule.
Nevertheless, I have a hunch that stub* may be related (PIE (s)tew-, "compare steep* (“sharp slope”)"). I never thought of a stub-article as a foundation, perhaps because it may get shaved for various reasons. G Stoppel ("stubble") on the other hand is from Latin stipula, through Low German, from PIE steyp-. I thought for a moment that the typographic sense of stub ("A row heading in a table [...]") equates to G Staffel- ("table"), staffeln (to cascade; NB: cp. scada "ladder"), etc. Stipulation (boilerplate) doesn't work any better. The stuff of legends (G Stoff) is interesting, given the legend on a map. Be that as it may, little churches had probably started as outposts, bridge-heads in a sense.
There is also Serbo-Croatian snub "pillar", a regular cognate of Polish kościół słupowy ("stave church")! The connotation does not speak well of the church, indicating corruption, see słop: shell corporation, straw owner.
Wow, incredibly foreboding. Looks like a place that people would organize witch hunts from, or maybe other occult rituals. If I saw one of these in the woods I would run in the other direction.
Fun fact about my local "stavkirke": there's a hidden urinal up where the priest is preaching, with a pipe leading to a whole in the outer wall. Rumored to be because one of the old priests long time ago had these incredible long sessions and needed to relieve himself midway but didn't want to interrupt.