The site now called Huseby sits about 1.2 kilometers southwest of the village of Tjollingvollen in Larvik Municipality, roughly 5 kilometers east of present-day Larvik. Excavations in 2000 and 2001 uncovered the footprint of the hall: tapered ends, massive post-holes, a structure that would have dominated the landscape for a century and a half before going out of use around the year 900. The name Huseby itself -- meaning roughly "estate with buildings" -- appears frequently across Scandinavia and is consistently linked with places of administrative control. Whatever the hall's original name meant, its function was unmistakable. This was where power lived.

About 50 years after the hall was built at Skiringssal, a trading place emerged at Kaupang, near the shoreline southwest of Tjolling. The Old Norse word kaupangr means "market" or "trading place," and the archaeological record confirms it -- buildings dating from 800 to 810 mark the earliest phase, with commercial activity continuing into the late tenth century. Whoever controlled Skiringssal controlled Kaupang, and the trade that flowed through it connected Vestfold to networks stretching from the British Isles to the Byzantine East. Archaeologist Dagfinn Skre has linked both sites to the first Norwegian members of the Yngling dynasty, the royal line that traced its origins to the semi-mythical kings of Uppsala in Sweden.

The sagas wrap Skiringssal in layers of legend and ritual. The ninth-century poem Ynglingatal records that the petty king Halfdan Whiteshanks died in Toten but was buried in a mound at Skiringssal. The Fagrskinna says the head of Halfdan the Black, a ninth-century king of Vestfold, was interred here as well. Most strikingly, the Sogubrot af nokkrum fornkonungum describes an important annual sacrifice at Skiringssal attended by the entire population of Viken, the region around the Oslofjord. Historian Stefan Brink has identified cultic place-names clustered around a lake north of Tjolling, suggesting the area had been considered sacred ground long before the hall was built. The focus of settlement migrated southward toward the shoreline as sea levels dropped, but the aura of ritual importance persisted.

The Old Norse form, Skiringssalr, combines salr -- meaning a chieftain's or king's hall, as in Uppsala -- with the element skiring, whose meaning has defied consensus. Scholars have proposed that it honors a forgotten deity, that it describes clear water in the nearby bay, that it means "bright" or "shining." Historian Stefan Brink has dismissed each interpretation as "practically impossible" and concluded that skiring is simply a word whose meaning has been lost. The name last appears in a 1445 hospital register from Tonsberg, in the form "Skirisall." After that, silence. The hall had been abandoned for five centuries by then, buried under the quiet farmland of Huseby, waiting for archaeologists to rediscover what the sagas never forgot.