The farm carried the name, and the household was measured by what it could keep through winter.
The house that stores, stands.
The household
Patronymics plus the farm name: the place and the father together made the address. The mistress carried the keys — literally, at her belt.
The trade
Timber, iron, fish and shipping, traded through Hanseatic towns; craft guilds in Bergen, Stockholm and Copenhagen followed the German pattern.
1300s
Bergen's Bryggen was a foreign counting-house on home soil: warehouses, clerks, and stockfish shipped to Europe. A northern household's income was one good cured catch.
Provision was theology. Everything the year produced was counted against the months it had to cover.
1400s
Odal right kept land in the family across generations — a legal preference for the line over the market. Inheritance was designed to prevent the house being sold apart.
Sagas were genealogy said out loud, generations deep, before parish books existed.
1500s
Reformation-era church books and the crown's tax rolls (jordebøker, mantal) began recording every farm and head — the beginning of traceable Nordic lines.
Copper and iron works drew whole families into industrial villages; a trade became a place.
Free books
Household, honour and line — free text.
Snorri's kings' sagas.
Copy a chapter and shelve it in your Library — the Pearl quotes it from then on, with no tokens spent.
