It is our intention to use this parallel in the discussion of the Homeric house. All Icelandic chiefs' houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries were not precisely uniform in structure and accommodation, and saga writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living more comfortably than their forefathers, sometimes confuse matters by introducing the arrangements of their own into the tale of past times. But, in any case, one Icelandic house of the tenth or eleventh century might differ from another in certain details. It is not safe, therefore, to argue that difference of detail in Homer's accounts of various houses means that the varying descriptions were composed in different ages. In the _Odyssey_ the plot demands that the poet must enter into domestic details much more freely than he ever has occasion to do in the Iliad. He may mention upper chambers freely, for example; it will not follow that in the _Iliad_ upper chambers do not exist because they are only mentioned twice in that Epic. It is even more important to note that in the house of Odysseus we have an unparalleled domestic situation. The lady of the house is beset by more than a hundred wooers--"sorning" on her, in the old Scots legal phrase--making it impossible for her to inhabit her own hall, and desirable to keep the women as much as possible apart from the men. Thus the Homeric house of which we know most, that of Odysseus, is a house in a most abnormal condition. For the sake of brevity we omit the old theory that the Homeric house was practically that of historical Greece, with the men's hall approached by a door from the courtyard; while a door at the upper end of the men's hall yields direct access to the quarters where the women dwelt apart, at the rear of the men's hall.