The most famous literary description of a hof concerns the temple at Uppsala in Sweden, recorded by the German cleric Adam of Bremen in the 1070s CE, who describes a building entirely covered in gold, containing the enthroned images of three gods, Thor, Wodan and Fricco, generally identified with Thor, Odin and Freyr, and standing beside a sacred grove where sacrificial offerings were hung. Adam never visited the site himself and compiled his account from informants with an evident interest, as a missionary church official, in presenting Scandinavian paganism as both impressive and appropriately alarming to a Christian audience, so historians treat the gilded splendor of his description with some caution even while accepting that Uppsala was clearly a major and long-lived cult center, confirmed by extensive archaeological work at Gamla Uppsala.
Smaller, local hof serving individual godord across Iceland, Norway and elsewhere in the Norse world would have been far more modest than Adam's Uppsala, closer in scale and construction to an ordinary chieftain's hall, and it is this more typical, locally maintained form of the building type, a working religious center attached to a godi's own household rather than a singular royal shrine, that the type as catalogued here is meant to represent.