[48] Close to Vossevangen is a building very similar to this one, but much more interesting, both from its still standing where its builders wished, and from its greater size; it also seems rather earlier in date than the stabbur re-erected at Bygdö, and was probably built about 1300. It is called the Finneloft, and is locally believed to be the oldest wooden building in Norway that was not a church. The basement is of slate stone, roughly walled, instead of, as at Bygdö, timber-work resting on big stones. The first floor in both is framed of flattened horizontal beams, dovetailed to fit at the corners; but at the Finneloft there are little passages at the sides occupying the space which at Bygdö is merely covered by the overhanging of the upper storey. This stage in both cases is walled with thick boards, placed vertically and overlapping each other. The roofs are of flattish pitch and in the pleasant manner of the North simple patterns are carved on doorpost and lintel and beam. The little side passages and the manner in which the horizontal beams are often mortised into the vertical remind one very much of Chinese carpentry, an impression greatly strengthened by the far more obvious resemblance that Norwegian Stavekirkes bear to Chinese temples. (See title-page.) [49] This remarkable little building, like several others of its class, consists of nave with aisle all round, aisled chancel with apse and an open cloister girdling the structure. The interior is lofty and dark, pillars, walls and roof all of timber. The three roofs, of cloister, aisle, and clearstorey, rising one above another, are increased to six by a turret-like structure that rises in three stages from the middle of the nave roof. The effect produced is singularly like that of a small Chinese temple, especially as queer objects like dragons project diagonally from the corners of the ridges. The cloister part seems far more suited to China than to Norway. In England there is a stavekirke at Greensted, near Ongar, supposed to have been erected in 1013 as a resting-place for the body of St. Edmund. The side walls are built of oak-trunks, but it is as plain as it could possibly be. [50] _Heimskringla, Saga of Olaf the Holy_, Ch. XI. [51] In his first volume to the _Political History of England_, edited by Hunt and Poole. [52] L. M. Larson. _Canute the Great, and the Rise of Danish Imperialism during the Viking Age._ 1913. [53] It is doubtless largely for this reason that Adam sometimes writes rather from the Danish point of view. The Icelandic Sagas are as free from bias as any history works in the world.