Far Traveler Voyages of a Viking Woman

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 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.

 

PRAISE FOR THE FAR TRAVELER "[A] snappily written biography . . . In surprising flashes, Gudrid comes into focus. Brown pursues Gudrid out of admiration for a woman bold and wise. I eagerly pursued this book, which is as much about Brown's adventures as Gudrid's, for the very same reasons."—The New York Times Book Reivew

 "Brown's enthusiasm is infectious as she re-teaches us our history."—The Boston Globe

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.

contents

 

a note on the language                                                    xiii

prologue                 Gudrid the Far-Traveler                                   1

chapter 1               At Sea                                                                 11

chapter 2               Ransacking the Past                                       30

chapter 3               A Very Stirring Woman                                   55

chapter 4               The Terror from the North                              78

chapter 5               The Land-Taking                                           103

chapter 6               Eirik the Reds Green Land                         135

chapter 7               Land of Wine or Walrus                                162

chapter 8               The House of the Sagas                                193

chapter 9               The Farm of Merry Noise                             217

chapter 10             From Witch to Nun                                        237

acknowledgments                                                                   267

notes                                                                                                    271

sources                                                                                               279

index                  293