[HN Gopher] What is a Stave Church? (2019)
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What is a Stave Church? (2019)
Author : benbreen
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-09-29 02:35 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| sideshowb wrote:
| Tldr ikea is only the latest incarnation of a very long standing
| tradition of Scandinavian flat pack furnishings
| aheckler wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.trinitylutheran-wi.com/stavkirke
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Something not weird: Norwegians rushing to the comments to say
| "I was here".
| Isamu wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220929023632/https://www.stavec...
| dang wrote:
| I guess we'll changed to that from
| https://www.stavechurch.com/2019/04/what-is-a-stave-
| church/?..., since the latter is 404ing now. Thanks!
| mitchbob wrote:
| Getting a Not Found error for this and other pages on the site,
| but the home page [1] is working.
|
| [1] https://www.stavechurch.com/
| www_harka_com wrote:
| Hugged to death ATM.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 404?
| inasmuch wrote:
| I love stave churches so much.
|
| 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.
| posterboy wrote:
| 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):
|
| * _stebk-_ ( "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 _stiepan_ ("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 _stebk-_ 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 _kosciol slupowy_ ( "stave church")! The connotation
| does not speak well of the church, indicating corruption, see
| _slop_ : shell corporation, straw owner.
| echlebek wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| "We have been able to determine the age of the church by the
| growth rings of its timbers."
|
| Is this a mis-translation? How can growth rings show anything
| other than the age of the tree when it died?
| numbsafari wrote:
| Dendrochronology...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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).
| jakear wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-09-29 23:01 UTC)