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1993 May, Trevor William, “Jake's Castle”, in Harper's Magazine:
Ulrike lived in a farm hof, and all around me were the dark blank fields punctuated by a few disparate lights.
2009, Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 1st edition, New York: Black Cat:
Like many old houses, this one had a front section, where I lived, and at the back an interior courtyard, the Hof, enclosed on all three sides by more apartments.
Hymiskviða, verse 33, lines 3-4, in 1860, T. Möbius, Edda Sæmundar hins fróða: mit einem Anhang zum Theil bisher ungedruckter Gedichte. Leipzig, page 48:
út or óru / ölkjól hofi.
the ale-ship out from our house
(late) a royal court
Usage notes
Old Norse makes the distinction between hof "a hall, a sanctuary with a roof" and hǫrgr(“an altar, any cult site without a roof”).
The prevalent meaning of hof in Old Norse literature is “temple, sanctuary”. Cleasby and Vigfússon (1874) note the generic meaning "a hall (as in German and Saxon)" in Hymiskviða 33 as a hapax legomenon. The meaning of “court” follows Middle High German and appears only from the 14th century and almost exclusively in compounds such as hof-ferð(“pride, pomp”), hof-garðr(“lordly mansion”), hof-folk(“courtiers”).