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

Nancy Marie Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 9, 2007

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.

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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Review

PRAISE FOR A GOOD HORSE HAS NO COLOR

"The best journeys go two ways: out, into the unknown, and in, to what we might have known all along. Nancy Marie Brown's absorbing tale of looking for horses in Iceland is that kind of odyssey. Like the ancient legends she recounts, hers is rich and transporting, a true saga."--Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of Dark Horses and Black Beauties

 

"This is a wonderful book, a can't-put-down read about loss and healing, joy and discovery."--Jeanne Mackin, author of The Sweet By and By

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015101440X
• ISBN-13: 978-0151014408
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > History > Americas > Greenland
  • #23 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Scandinavian
  • #28 in Books > History > Europe > Iceland

More About the Author

I like extremes: Science and sagas. Science and faith. History and fantasy. The Dark Ages and modern times. Fire and ice. My books combine extremes. They ask, What have we overlooked? What have we forgotten? What knowledge must not be lost? For 21 years, I worked as a science writer at a university. Now I write from a farm in northern Vermont, where the days are quiet and cool. Four Icelandic horses graze outside my office window. Every few years I take an adventure--and write a book about it.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable Perspective on the Norse World, October 15, 2007

By 

Patrick J. Stevens - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Hardcover)

Nancy Marie Brown's The Far Traveler is a wonderfully intelligent and immediate narrative not only of the journeys of Gudrid, the Icelandic colonist of North America around the year 1000 who also made a pilgrimage to Rome, but also of the dangerous world and harsh climate she inhabited--and how her people, the Icelanders and Greenlanders, sustained their way of life in the North Atlantic environment.

With little known from the Icelandic sagas about the life of Gudrid, author Brown makes excellent use of a range of sources to reconstruct the Norse world, recounting along the way her own work as a volunteer archaeologist at Glaumbaer in Iceland, likely Gudrid's last home. Not to be forgotten among these sources of information are the experimental archaeologists who have built replicas of Viking ships and, as important, have reconstructed the techniques of women's work in the Norse world, so much of it based on the economically vital production of cloth from wool.

I highly recommend this engaging, fluently written, deeply researched book.

--Patrick J. Stevens, curator, Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid Account of Viking Life, September 23, 2007

By 

Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful book!, September 25, 2007

By 

Gisli Palsson "gisli palsson" (Reykjavik, Iceland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Hardcover)

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