Editor's note: Our Homescape correspondent dusted off The Barnstable Patriot's time machine (recently discovered in the attic of the news room) to go back in time in search of advice from an experienced collector.

"Can this be the place?" I ask, unable to conceal my disappointment. I suppose it's pretty much what you'd expect from an isolated 9th century Scandinavian settlement... still, everything's so dark and dismal.  So much for idyllic fjords.

I'm staring at a cow hide drying on a pole in the front yard. The head is still attached, and the hoofs just dangle, like it's trying to scare me off. I'm about to turn around when a loud voice calls out.

"You found us, great!"  I look up to see a barrel-chested, bearded figure standing in the doorway. "Just step under all that, but careful, it's slippery."

Encouraged by my host, I make my way like an acrobat over narrow planks set out to help visitors cross the muddy ground that surrounds the unassuming wattle and daub home of Eiric and Freydis Thorvald on the drizzly, wind-swept island of Gotland. Eric seems to delight in his visitor's occasional loss of balance, but once I reach him, he smiles broadly, clasps my forearm in a firm Viking handshake, and introduces me to Freydis, his wife, before retreating to a back room to locate something to drink.

The inside of Eiric's house is a sharp contrast to the dreary garden. It's an antiquarian's dream, and a feast for the eyes. There's rather a lot of Byzantine sculpture and most of the furniture is French. A chest in the corner is cluttered with the usual finds, including a number of exquisite jade boxes and a heavy gold candelabrum. Thor, the Viking god of thunder, gripping his signature hammer, looks down from an ornately carved shelf that he shares with a collection of walrus tusks and a large number of silver chalices. The walls are covered with an important looking ecclesiastic tapestry that's folded along the ceiling, and carefully cut to allow for the door to the main hall. I look closer at the curious textile.

"It's something Eiric brought back," says Freydis, rolling her eyes.

Her comment hints at the challenge of decorating a house when your husband is a Viking. Despite his unerring eye (he once spotted a gold lion-headed dagger with emerald scabbard that a captive was trying to hide under his shirt), Eiric's forays tend to result in an unplanned and eclectic mix of objets. Her job, it seems, is to make sense of it all. Somehow, she makes it work, creating a cluttered, unstudied ambiance that is at once warm and welcoming.

"For a while it was all things Danish, we did the obligatory 'Danish farmhouse motif,' but then he started marauding up the Loire River in France," explains Freydis. "Well, how can you mix the two? You can't. You absolutely cannot." Such a challenge led them to gut the main house and build a guest cottage, a quaint structure made of peat and located on a bluff overlooking the bay behind the house.

"All the Danish stuff is in there," explains Eiric, who has returned with a bottle of wine. He plops down on a wooden armchair inlaid with amber and puts his foot up on a silk cushion atop a haphazard stack of hand-lettered monastic texts (he says he had to have them, even though he admits he can't read). "Nowadays, if it's not French I won't touch it. I'm not interested." 

Like the muddy garden, the Thorvald home is a balancing act, a place to store and display the souvenirs from a lifetime of aggressive collecting, and a soothing sanctuary in which to unwind after a difficult North Sea journey. "When I get home, I'm pooped," said Eiric. "Leave the battle ax at the front gate, just sit back and relax."

His passion for collecting, he says, showed itself early. "On my very first raid - I was only 12 - everyone else was busy grabbing livestock and carrying it down to the boats, but I had my eye on this lovely little goblet made of ivory. My friends made fun of me. 'Eiric, why are you wasting your time with that?' they asked. But after all these years I still have it. Freydis wanted to make a lamp out of it, but I said no, I like it just as it is."

Lately, Eiric hasn't made as many trips to France as he once did. He limits his travels to periodic raids on nearby settlements and even that has slowed. Several years ago, Eiric hurt his foot on a trip to Scotland. The injury never healed properly.

"I was trying to move a baptismal font," he recalls. "It was marble, very heavy. I thought it would be perfect in the garden, but I didn't realize it was two pieces, so when I lifted it, the column tipped over on my foot."

These days, he prefers to stay closer to home, where he can entertain kinsmen and advise his sons, Olaf and Sigvald, on their own burgeoning careers. "If you see something, grab it right away, I tell them. Wait too long and it's gone, or worse, someone you know will have their hands on it and there'll be trouble." He points to a jagged scar running from his forehead to his ear. 

"That's how I got this. Chap named Harald tried to lay claim to a nice little bedside table that I wanted. He didn't even know what he was looking at." After a brief tussle, they compromised. Eiric got the bedroom set in exchange for an unexceptional pair of 6th century andirons and a blanket chest.

"And you've got to keep going back, or you miss things. There was this monastery, in Ireland. We must have raided it what, five or six times? The first few times I was there, we were so busy grabbing the silver, we didn't even notice the tapestries."

Arrive early, insists Eiric, preferably before dawn, "Before they have time to wake up and run away with the good stuff."  He directs my attention to an alabaster desk set.

"When I found this, the owner was still in bed half asleep." He chuckles at the memory. "I took a swing at him with my ax, missed his head by this much," he says as he holds up two fingers about half an inch apart. "There were feathers everywhere. He ran out the back door, still in his nightshirt, terrified."

But he much prefers those finds he's had to really fight for, like the table and chairs in the main hall. Though unremarkable and of decidedly local origins, they hold a special meaning for Eiric and Freydis. He got them after slaughtering a neighboring family with whom he'd been feuding for years, permanently ending the squabble (he hopes). "I set the whole place on fire, then I thought, hang on a tick, went back in and managed to drag this stuff out."

He runs an admiring eye over the well worn, slightly charred timbers. "The fellow who made the table (the chairs were added later) drowned my great uncle in a fight over a bolt of silk, which is how the whole thing started in the first place. Now I feel it's come full circle, in a way, which I love."

His advice when it comes to collecting?  Don't follow the pack, trust your own design instincts and develop your own eye. "Don't believe what people say, they're still plenty of good stuff out there." And don't forget to stop from time to time to enjoy the fruits of your plunder.

"Take it from me. Life is short, and gloomy. It helps is you surround yourself with beautiful things."