The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman [Paperback]

While most medieval women didn't stray far from home, the Viking Gudrid (985–1050) probably crossed the North Atlantic eight times, according to Brown. Rather than just a passenger, Gudrid may have been the explorer on North American expeditions with two different husbands (one was the brother of Leif Ericson, who discovered America 500 years before Columbus). Brown (A Good Horse Has No Color) catches glimpses of Gudrid in the medieval Icelandic sagas which recount that her father, a chieftain with money problems, refused to wed Gudrid to a rich but slave-born merchant; instead he swapped their farm for a ship and a new life in Greenland. Specifics about her life are sparse, so Brown, following in Gudrid's footsteps, explores the archeology of her era, including the splendid burial ships of Viking queens; the remains of Gudrid's longhouse in a northern Icelandic hayfield; the economy of the farms where she lived; and the technology of her time, including shipbuilding, spinning wool and dairying. But the plucky and adaptable Gudrid remains mysterious, so this impressively researched account will interest serious students of Icelandic archeology, literature and women's history more than the general reader. Map. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 Gudrids story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering womans 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 Gudrids steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spannedand expandedthe 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.

NANCY MARIE BROWN is the author of A Good Horse Has No Color and Mendel in the Kitchen. She lives in Vermont with her husband, the writer Charles Fergus.

chapter 1 At Sea They set sail in good weather. But once they were at sea, the fair winds died. They were tossed this way and that and made no headway all summer. Sickness set in.... Half their people died. The seas rose, and they were faced with danger on all sides. The Saga of Eirik the Red The first time I saw a viking ship in the water, I was struck with the desire to stow away on it. Writers, even the normally sedate scholarly type, tend to wax effusive about Viking ships. They were unrivaled, the best and swiftest ships of their time, the swift greyhounds of the oceans, the ultimate raiding machine, a masterpiece of beauty, the most exquisite examples of sophisticated craftsmanship, a poem carved in wood. What temples were to the Greeks, wrote one expert, ships were to the Vikings. Said another, Plato may have denied the existence of ideal forms in this world, but Plato never saw a Viking ship. The story of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, however, begins with a shipwreck. As The Saga of the Greenlanders tells it, Leif Eiriksson had just spent a year in Vinland as the first Norseman to set foot in the New World, and was heading home with a ship full of timber and wine grapes. Hed had fair winds all the way and had just sighted the great ice cap when one of his crewmen admonished the young captain. Going a bit close to the wind, arent you? Im watching my steering, said Leif. But Im watching something else, too. Dont you see it? It was a shipor a skerry. He couldnt tell which. The older man saw nothing until they came closer, then he, too, could see a wreck clinging to a bit of bare rock. Leif anchored close to the reef and sent his towboat over. He rescued fifteen peopleto add to his crew of thirty-fiveand as much of their baggage as he could fit into his already-laden ship. The wreck had been carrying house timber from Norway to the Greenland settlement; the men secured it as best they could on the rock, and the next spring Leif sent his boat out to fetch whatever could be salvaged. By then, most of the rescued fifteen had died. The only person known to have survived the journey is Gudrid. If she had ever shared my delusions of peaceful, sunny, blue-sea sailing, surrounded by a crew of handsome men, she would have lost them abruptly on the first of her eight voyages. She knew the killing force of the sea, of weeks at the mercy of the winds, of fog that froze on the sails and rigging, when hands blue with cold was not a metaphor and no land, no shelter, was in sight. She knew how fragile a Viking ship was. You can easily sail her down if you are not doing it right, Gunnar Marel Eggertsson, the captain of Gaia, told me. Gaia was a Viking-ship replica with the dual mission of spreading environmental awareness and arriving in America in 1991, one year before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbuss discovery. From the west coast of Norway, where the boat was built and financed by the Norwegian owner of the Viking cruise-ship line,