The far traveler Voyages of a Viking woman

IN "The Far Traveler," Nancy Marie Brown tries to solve the mystery of a beautiful woman named Gudrid who appears in two Icelandic sagas and crossed the North Atlantic, from Iceland and Greenland to Newfoundland and Norway, eight times. Who was this intrepid woman, and why did she roam off the edge of the known world? Thousand-year-old clues lie scattered about, but few are conclusive. Brown's springboard and inspiration are the sagas, filled with revenge killings, out-of-wedlock births and the predictable craziness of communal life in a cold country. Though these tales, written in the 1200s, are unreliable and largely unreal - they contain references to trolls and warlocks - they have led archaeologists to many a Viking farm, church or gravesite. As time passes there's less to find, of course, but technology is helping researchers, and thus Brown (whose previous book, "A Good Horse Has No Color," was about Icelandic ponies), create vivid narratives from the shards - stories about Viking economies, technologies and sexual politics - and determine why some outposts of these hearty northerners disappeared after surviving more than 400 years. To reverse engineer the Viking diet, for example (and thus learn where Vikings traveled, what they planted and how many people a region could support), researchers collect and examine pollen grains, seeds, fleas and lice. Radiocarbon dating of animal bones and tallying the headless fish in garbage heaps show how those diets changed. Studies of tree rings locate when and where a ship was made; replicas reveal its speed, handling qualities and what it might have carried. Locating a soapstone spindle whorl, used to spin yarn, placed a Viking woman - possibly Gudrid - in North America 1,000 years ago. The identification of three butternuts in Newfoundland, where the trees don't grow, proves the Vikings traveled at least as far south as Quebec. These details give Brown new ways to tell Gudrid's tale, to pick up where the sagas leave off. The story of the Vikings is in part, of course, one of collapse, and Brown delights in debunking Jared Diamond's theory that the Vikings disappeared from Greenland because of their refusal to eat seals. That the Vikings radically transformed Iceland and Greenland with their introduction of domesticated animals is less debatable. Sheep ate willow buds and twigs, pigs rooted up entire trees and humans burned what remained. (It's so unusual to find wood in Greenland that one major discovery, of a Viking woman's loom, was made when two modern-day reindeer hunters spotted a stick protruding from a riverbank and reported this bit of weirdness to the authorities.) The choices these first settlers made, of where to live and how to make a living, would resonate throughout the history of the political, economic and environmental interactions of both Iceland and Greenland. Eventually the Vikings gave up on pigs, goats and geese and focused on sheep, which they raised not for meat but for wool. The women sheared and washed it (in barrels of stale urine: "It was certainly available," Brown writes), then sorted, combed, spun and wove it into clothes and other goods. It was more than a full-time job: to keep her head above water, Gudrid needed to process the wool of 100 sheep a year. A sail of 1,000 square feet required nearly a million feet of thread and gobbled the time of two women for four and a half years. By the end of the 11th century, one historian has noted, the Viking economy ran not on silver, acquired through "men's violent and sporadic activities," but on cloth. Brown fails to make Gudrid three-dimensional - there's just too little evidence. But this snappily written biography of a time and place more than compensates with the stories of those who toil in the ditches, counting lice eggs and brushing peat ash from the long-buried walls. Brown digs in, too, and tells us about, among other things, turf, wool, hayfields, curds, baleen-laced buckets and strainers made from the hair of cows' tails. Of course, the author's most important tool is her fecund imagination, stoked by the archaeologists' collected facts and objects and the sights and sounds of her own far travels (to Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and beyond). Necessarily, she uses speculative language - "it may have been," "likely it was" - but she takes little for granted. In surprising flashes, Gudrid comes into focus. An archaeologist in Iceland describes a fuzzy line on a computer screen, generated by ground-penetrating radar that has located long-buried turf walls, as "an area of high conductivity, which is consistent with a midden"; Brown instead imagines Gudrid tossing out her kitchen ash and garbage. Thus are science and art wed. All the technology in the world can't tell us what Gudrid was truly like - her favorite jokes, or why she didn't get along with her mother-in-law, as one saga suggests. But we do learn quite a bit about Nancy Marie Brown: she's eager and hard working, openminded and humorous. 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. Brown digs in and tells us about, among other things, turf, wool, hayfields and curds. Elizabeth Royte, the author of "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

chapter 1At SeaThey 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 RedThe 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, Excerpted from The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.