The Far Traveler
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Travel the world of The Far Traveler by Nancy Marie Brown:
Viking Ship Museums: Denmark and Norway
Ole Crumlin-Pedersen of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, signed me up as an oarsman when a German TV personality wanted to take a Sunday-morning ride in the smallest replica Viking ship, 37 feet long by eight feet wide. Nicely maneuverable in the narrow harbor (even with a raw crew brand-new to the oars), it seemed precariously low to the waves once the sail was up. Yet when scientists compared the pattern of the tree rings in the original ship's pine timbers to wood samples from throughout the Viking world, they found a perfect match with the wood of a church in Sognefjord, Norway. The ship had been built there and had sailed the 500 miles to Roskilde at least once. By the time it was sunk to blockade the fjord, it had been patched in several places and refitted to be a small cargo ship, the oarlocks taken off and an extra strake added to give it a little more height. Photos of the Viking Ship Museums in Roskilde, taken by Kate Driscoll, and in Bygdoy, Norway, by Charles Fergus.
Viking Iceland: Snaefellsnes
On the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting from the west coast of Iceland sat a small Viking longhouse. Behind the house rose a pyramidal black hill, then the clean white flank of the glacier called Snaefellsjokull, "Snow Mountain's Glacier." Beneath the glacier hid a volcano, known to the inhabitants of the house only from a pleasant side effect: Water hot enough for washing bubbled up from the ground not far away. The saga does not describe the farm where Gudrid grew up, it names it: Arnarstapi, "Eagle Peak." I can imagine the green field and the cliffs and the harbor because I have driven down that long peninsula, under the eye of Snow Mountain's Glacier. I have sat where Gudrid as a girl might have sat, watching the white birds circle and waiting for a ship to come in. Photos of Snaefellsnes by Nancy Marie Brown and Charles Fergus.
Viking Greenland: Brattahlid
Gudrid lived in Eirik the Red's settlement of Brattahild for about five years. Today, boatloads of tourists cross Eiriksfjord from the international airport at Narsarsuaq to visit the Viking ruins. As elsewhere in Greenland, what is visible through the grass are the stone foundations of the houses, barns, and church that were here in the 1300s--over 300 years after Gudrid left. Brattahlid is still the center of Greenland's sheep industry. Green valleys, full of modern sheep fences alongside Viking stonework, finger out all along the thirty-mile length of Eiriksfjord, with sixty farming families now providing 30,000 lambs a year to the abattoir in the market town of Narsaq, a three-hour boat trip south. Photos of Brattahlid by Nancy Marie Brown.
Viking Greenland: Sandnes
Sandnes ("Sandy Point") lies deep in the Lysufjord south of Nuuk. According to archaeologists' best guesses, Sandnes is the farm Gudrid owned with her first husband, Thorstein Eiriksson, or at least where they ended up after their failed attempt to get to Vinland. Cruising along at about eight knots, drinking coffee and eating Danish pastries, I realized that sailing to Sandnes in a Viking ship would have taken amazing skill. The narrow Lysufjord heads due east for most of its length, the ice-gray mountains falling straight into the sea, with no beaches, no harbors, no skerries, no bays, nowhere to find safety if the wind should turn contrary--or the ship should sink. Photos of Sandnes by Nancy Marie Brown.
Viking America: L'Anse aux Meadows
L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northwestern tip of Newfoundland, is a windy, wide-open place, filled with the roar of the sea and the plangent cries of whimbrels. With the sun hot on my neck, I had the overwhelming sense that Gudrid would have felt at home here. The bare rocks and mosses and low-growing juniper, the bog and black beach looked surprisingly Icelandic. But as Birgitta Wallace told me, it's not Vinland. "I don't understand why people want to make Vinland one spot," she said. "People don't think Brattahlid is all of Greenland. Of course Vinland is not a little spot, and L'Anse aux Meadows can never be Vinland. It's in Vinland." Photos of L'Anse aux Meadows by Charles Fergus
Viking Iceland: Glaumbaer
In 2001, John Steinberg, an archaeologist now at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, began working in Skagafjord, the valley in northern Iceland where the sagas say Gudrid finally made her home. Surveying Glaumbaer, Steinberg and his crew found signs in the hayfield--where tradition said no houses should be--of a Viking Age longhouse. Learning of my interest in Gudrid, John invited me to join his crew as they began excavating the longhouse in July 2005. See my dispatches from the field, "Secrets of Ancient Iceland," published on Research/Penn State Online. Photos of Glaumbaer by Nancy Marie Brown.
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