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 The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman :: 015101440X
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Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid’s steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned—and expanded—the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.
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Author: Guest
A powerful book. The Far Traveler is a striking play with some of the concepts of the age that it relates. In saga time, divinatory practice was said to open up the past, revealing hidden information about people and their (wrong)doings. This book represents remote sensing in a dual sense; not only does it provide an illuminating account of high-tech archaeology and the ways in which it gazes beyond the surface layers of modern Icelandic farmland, also, and more importantly, it convincingly reconstructs a series of spectacular events from distant times and contexts. Thanks to Nancy Marie Brown's vivid imagination, detailed research, and, above all, skilful narration, the brave world of Gudrid finally gets the treatment it truly deserves. A moving and gripping account, in a language strangely reminiscent of the saga style. Gisli Palsson, author of Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Travelling Passions: Stefansson, the Arctic Explorer
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Author: Guest
For any reader who appreciates a good, real-life mystery and enjoys learning about the old crafts and lost arts, Far Traveler satisfies on all counts. As in her previous book, A Good Horse Has No Color, the author writes with such descriptive precision and sense of immediacy that the reader experiences the search for information about this historically significant Icelandic woman as if right by the author's side during the discovery process. A book you want to immediately re-read on reaching the last page when the story comes full circle.
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Author: Guest
The far-traveling Viking woman of the title was Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, once a sister-in-law of Leif Eirikson and reputedly the mother of the first European child born in North America. The little which is known specifically of Gudrid comes from two Icelandic sagas: "Eirik the red's Saga" and "The Greenlanders' Saga", but even those two sources disagree with one another about details of Gudrid's life. What we can be reasonably sure of is that Gudrid was born in Iceland, traveled to the new Norse Greenland colonies in about the year 1000, became a ward of Eirik the Red, and married his son, Thorstein, who soon died. Widowed, Gudrid then married the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni, apparently convinced Karlsefni to attempt colonization of the newly discovered Vinland, lived with her husband for three years in Vinland -- at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, it seems -- giving birth to a son, Snorri, then returned to Greenland and then back to Iceland, where Karlsefni died. In later life, Gudrid may have made a pilgrimage to Rome and returned to Iceland to die a nun.
With so few details of Gudrid's life certain, the greatest part of Nancy Marie Brown's book is devoted to exploring what we know of Viking life, especially in Iceland, and what we don't know, plus a first-hand account of Brown's experiences as a volunteer archaeologist at the site of what appears to be Gudrid's final home in Iceland. Along the way, the author discusses the nature of Icelandic sagas and the fine Viking arts of cheese-making and weaving. All this is done in an engaging manner that brings Gudrid (and modern Iceland) fully to life.
My only real criticism of the book is that it could have benefited from additional maps and from diagrams of the Norse ruins at L'Anse aux Meadows and of Gudrid's Icelandic farm at Glaumbaer.
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