It is more of a Germanic pre-Christian thing. It has to do with cultural practise rather than geographical practise. As long as you understand that the hall is just a big-ass room within the longhouse, we're on the same page.
The most famous meadhall I guess would be Herot, the hall in Beowulf. Notably, all the political alliances in the story are forged within that hall and sealed with a drink from the mead horn. Two good books on the subject are by Michael Enright and Steven Pollington. There is a huge amount of litterature relating to Beowulf, but those two books discuss the hall and the sumbel from two different angles. Notably, Beowulf may be written and preserved in Anglo-Saxon, but it depicts events that took place in Scandinavia, some of which are actual datable events. So I guess Beowulf is some sort of weird hybrid: written by a Christian, based on Anglo-Saxon oral tradition retelling Scandinavian events from the 500's. As such, I've used it in my paper to refer to cultural practices. It is my opinion that much of what happened within the hall iteself, and certainly (for sure) the way the longhouse and hall were constructed, harks back to a time before the Germanic tribes split up. Thus, the same layout is found across the board with the longhouse, for a time period of about 5000 years. The hall stays much the same during that period of time, until conversion. That's because so much of the layout was so closely tied to the pre-Christian religion (but I know I've said that at least twice in this thread already, so I won't go into that again).
As for ON halls, there are quite a few excavated ones to read about on the net etc., but for actual litterature that contain feasts and stuff, you still have to revert back to Heimskringla. There are some good thesis papers etc available on-line about the exacvations that have been done on some of the Norse halls, such as the hall at L'anse Aux Meadows, the one at Gene, Järrestan and Stöng and so on, but books or papers that outline the sumbel itself in Norse terms, rather than Anglo-Saxon, Frankish or Langobard terms, there really isn't much to be found at all (if any), which is why I took on the subject with my own paper. I feel that you can discuss the hall until you're blue in the face, but you'll never know the full truth about the items you find, until you can establish what they were used for, how and why. That was my object.
And hey, Bates, The Ruin makes a whole lot more sense if you try to read it in the original language. It is a fascinating work of poetry, for sure, and it makes even more sense if you relate it to Beowulf and Heliand and Dream of the Rood. Then you take that, and compare those to the feast in Lokasenna and Hymskvida. Then you really start to see a pattern of how feast were held and how each guest played a part.
I was thinking "Early Middle Age tavern", but upon further review, I can not find any reference to such a thing. Actually, it was pretty much me misinterpreting a passage from "The Ruin".
My thirsty wolf 
Raven and maker's mark.
