My fascination with tree rings (buy my book!) is mostly about climate stories. But the rings tell other tales as well:

According to folklore from the valley Hallingdal, between Oslo and Bergen, a young girl was locked into a farm storehouse to protect her from the Black Death.

The pandemic killed tens of millions in Asia, Europe and Africa and wiped out half of Norway’s population in the mid-1300s….

Few buildings have been dated to the middle and late 1300s because little construction was carried out. The Black Death was devastating in Norway, also economically, and empty farms were common.

So Thun was particularly delighted when he dated the Stave storehouse to exactly 1334, just a few years before the onslaught of the Black Death.