She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. This month's pick is "The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman" by Nancy Marie Brown.įive hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. Rick Fuller leads this in-person group at the library. I strongly recommend it.Check out a copy of this month’s book selection and join the conversation! The style was very readable too, and paced well with laying out a very plausible narrative for Gudrid. The sagas also link well to what has been dug up. There are houses in Iceland with the same pattern as the ones in Vinland. The book explains what was found at these sites, as well as what is known about how the houses were built. The author was also in contact with the people that dug the site in Canada with Viking artefacts. One of the digs was on a turf house which dated to around the time of the Vinland trips. These were inspired by the sagas, and some opportunities to dig before other things were built. The author started work on some archeological digs in Iceland, and that’s what lead to her writing The Far Traveler. So much is explained about the ordinary parts of life. If I was a historical re-enactor of this period it would be a valuable source. My copy has many flags on it so that I can refer back to things to add verisimilitude to my stories. This book is as much social history as archaeology. Actually, the story is based on the archaeology, supplemented by sagas, and then the very few gaps left over are filled in with a very small amount of speculation. There’s a fair amount of archaeological evidence to support this story. I got a real sense that the Gudrid written in the Far Traveler was a real woman. It was in homage to this book that I named Gudrid’s Prophecy.
It’s obvious why I read it, it was background into Fierce, and women of the viking era. I think because it was sort of half-finished and I was crazy busy with work in January & February, sick in March, and then the world imploded.
I read this last year, the Far Traveler was the first book that I read in 2020 but for some reason I forgot to post the review to the blog.
Gudrid was born in Iceland, and went to America with Erik the Red. This is not a tale of warriors and raiders, but one of persuasion and influence and a hard life on the very frontiers of where humans could exist. Even though we can’t be sure hat Gudrid was a real woman that actually existed the combination of the sagas and the archaeology give a great understanding of life in the viking period, and particularly from a female perspective. The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie BrownĪn awesome mix of documentary history and archaeology, to bring a character to life.
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