King’s College 2004 v Mistress Gunnvör sílfrahárr
27
Bynames of Relationship: Marriage
*It was very uncommon for a husband and wife to share a surname in [the Viking Age].  A woman did not adopt her husband's surname upon marriage, so she would have the same surname only if it were a correct description of her as well as of him.
(See http://www.s-gabriel.org/1919)
*... you might have been known by a name which identified you as his wife.  Unfortunately, we have relatively little Swedish data from your period, and all of our Swedish examples of this type of byname are from the 15th and 16th centuries.  We do, however, have a handful of examples from Norway ca.1300, e.g., Ragnillde þoralfs kono 1289, Gudrune Eilifs kono 1282, and Bergliot Vþyrms kona ca.1300. We therefore think it very plausible that you might have been known by your husband's name in the genitive (possessive) case and kona 'woman, wife'.
(See http://www.s-gabriel.org/2512)


[Note: Bold emphasis mine.]
*A woman might occasionally be known as her husband's wife, but you shouldn't think of this as a married name in the modern sense.  It's more accurate to call it an alternate description.  Lina the wife of Úlfr ... could have been known as Lina Úlfs kona... However, in other contexts she would have been identified by a patronymic, e.g. Lina Snorradóttir.
(See http://www.s-gabriel.org/1493)
*... Scandinavian bynames are typically patronymic, identifying the bearer as a child of his or her father, and a spousal byname would at least be quite unusual.  We did find a handful of examples; Þoralfs kona 1289 'Thoralf's wife' and Eilifs kona 1282 'Eilifr's wife' are quite typical...  These are Norwegian, but in Denmark we find Elsef Jens Kune 1377 'Elsef Jens' wife'. All of these are a bit later than we'd like, especially the last, but this may be due to the limitations of our sources and the fact that women are quite poorly represented in the early documentary sources.  On the basis of the available evidence a hypothetical Old Danish byname Regners kuna would clearly not be the best historical re-creation, but we suspect that such forms were used from time to time.
(See http://www.s-gabriel.org/2721)