Review by New York Times Review
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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Brown painstakingly reconstructs the extraordinary life of Gudrid the Far Traveler in this historical labor of love. Firmly grounded in Icelandic lore and literature, the legend of Gudrid recounts the story of a Viking woman who traveled between Greenland, Newfoundland, Iceland, Norway, and Rome approximately 500 years before Columbus officially discovered the New World. Piecing together contemporary archaeological evidence and other scientific data with literary accounts, the author extracts the facts from the mythological sagas. Even more compelling than the journeys themselves is the wealth of information providing illuminating details of a woman's place in both a flourishing and a declining Viking society. Recommended for larger women's history collections.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The voyages of Icelandic saga heroine Gudrid, said to have accompanied Leif Eirikson on his journey to Vinland. In July 2005, Brown (A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse, 2001, etc.) joined an archaeology crew from UCLA at a dig in Glaumbaer, Iceland, where legendary Gudrid might have lived later in life. It hasn't actually been proven that the longhouse at "Farm of Merry Noise" actually belonged to Gudrid, but the author, who has hungrily sought archeological confirmation of the Icelandic legends for several decades, was thoroughly convinced. Here, she sets out to unravel her subject's fascinating travels, recounted with slight differences in The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red. In Brown's retelling, Gudrid sailed for Greenland on her father's prosperous ship, got knocked around at sea and was eventually welcomed into Eirik the Red's settlement at Brattahlid, where he had lived since being banished from Iceland 15 years before for murdering his neighbors. With her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, Gudrid accompanied Eirik's son Leif to the fabulous Vinland (Newfoundland), where she bore a son, Snorri. After three years, the ferocious native Skraelings ran off the Vikings; Gudrid settled with her family at Glaumbaer, then later made a Christian pilgrimage to Rome. Into this saga Brown inserts a wealth of cultural history gleaned from archaeological finds at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and elsewhere. She displays an impressive, detailed knowledge of shipbuilding, longhouse construction, language (words like ransack and brag come from Norse), cloth-making, farming practices and gender roles. All this rich material accumulates to create a marvelously sneaky history of the Viking mind. A nimble synthesis of the literary and the scientific that will charm even readers who didn't know they were interested. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
