The village lay where the fjord cut into the mountain. Three dozen homesteads on stony terraces—and no more. Summer was short; winter lasted seven months. Snow rose to the rooftops, and the wind cut straight through to the bone.

The economy was simple: sheep, barley, and the meager shafts of light between stones, fought over by grandfathers with fury. Iron was taken from the same mountain that yielded stone for hearths. Every man was a farmer, a shepherd, part-time a blacksmith. Every woman was a spinner and keeper of stores that were never enough.

The problems were the same as their fathers’. The land did not grow, but mouths did. A third son received no inheritance. Maidens without dowries did not marry. Extra hands, extra throats, extra dreams.

But there was a way. It was not sages who discovered it, but those who first saw a longship gliding along the fjord and thought: “The sea does not end.” Vikinghood was not a profession, but a sentence. If the land does not give, take from one that will. If it is cramped here—there, beyond the horizon, are places where bread is thicker, where monks keep gold in chests rather than in stone.

And so, when the wind tore roofs away, young men looked not to the mountain, but to the fjord—to the water that led to shores where one did not have to ask stone for permission to live.