4 ideas
Bjartur works eighteen years as a hired hand for the Bailiff of Myri to buy a heath croft of his own, then loses his first wife Rosa, who dies alone giving birth while he is out on the moors hunting a lost sheep. When prices collapse the bank forecloses. At the end he moves his family to an even poorer abandoned croft, having lost the farm he sacrificed his family to keep.
Bjartur measures freedom only as owing no one money and taking orders from no one, so he turns down every form of help as a threat to his standing. The result is that he serves the sheep, the land and the debt more completely than he ever served the Bailiff. A freedom defined purely as refusing dependence makes a person a servant to the conditions that refusal requires.
On the croft the sheep are the capital and are protected first, so food, warmth and medicine go to the flock while the children go hungry and one son dies. Each choice makes sense by the farm's logic of survival, yet together they destroy the family the farm was meant to support. Look at what a household protects first in a crisis to see what it actually values, whatever it says.
High war-time wool and meat prices lead small farmers to borrow for houses and land as though the prices will last. The co-operative and the merchants offer easy credit, and when markets collapse the debts stay at their full value while income falls. The very people who worked hardest to stay independent are wiped out, because the price swings of a distant world market are passed straight down to the most isolated producer.