Not set in Ribe but in the corresponding small ports of north Norway in the nineteenth century, Wassmo's haunting trilogy captures the texture of life in a Lutheran trading town on a difficult coast — the salt-bitten houses, the merchants' households, the women's restricted lives, the dark Nordic winters and the brief intense summers. The world Dina inhabits is essentially the world that the merchants of Ribe knew, one generation earlier.
Read for atmosphere rather than fact: it will make the merchant houses of Ribe and the seventeenth-century inns suddenly inhabited.