Reviews and Advance Praise for
The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
by Nancy Marie Brown
(Harcourt 2007)
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"admiration for a woman bold and wise" | |||||||||||||||||
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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 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, open-minded 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. --excerpted from the review by Elizabeth Royte, New York Times Book Review--click the link to read the full review: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/books/review/Royte-t.html?ref=review | |||||||||||||||||
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"fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable" | |||||||||||||||||
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She was 19, married for the second or third time but pregnant for the first, when she left Greenland for a new world across an ocean of imagination and desire. Twenty years later, a grandmother, she would journey from Iceland across the sea to Norway then overland to Rome. That was 1,000 years ago, at a time when such travels were dangerous, daring, and uncertain in every way--and nearly unheard of for a woman. Nevertheless, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir ventured forth intrepidly and was celebrated for her rare courage, as readers of the medieval Icelandic sagas of the Greenlanders and Eric the Red already know.
Like Heinrich Schliemann unearthing the truth of Homer's Troy in the 19th century, Nancy Marie Brown--with the help of scientists, archaeologists, and 21st-century technology--uncovers the real historical world of Gudrid and her unlikely voyages, and writes about them with erudition and grace in this fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable book. --James Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review | |||||||||||||||||
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"a marvelously sneaky history of the Viking mind" | |||||||||||||||||
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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 archaeological 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 followed 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.
--Kirkus Reviews
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"vital, dynamic, and very real" | |||||||||||||||||
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The Far Traveler, Gudridur's story, is told through Brown's own voyage to discover more about this remarkable woman. Brown travelled to Newfoundland, to L'Anse aux Meadows, to Greenland and to Iceland, where she joined the dig on the house at Glaumbaer. She traces Gudridur's life and voyages from Iceland to Greenland, Vinland, Iceland, Rome and Iceland, weaving saga with modern historical understanding. There is much of Brown in the book, but she never loses her focus. This is Gudridur's story, not hers....
Brown weaves history, science, personal observation and the saga stories into a voyage of discovery that is, at once, scholarly and literary. The book reads with all the excitement of an adventure or a mystery novel--except that there is much more depth to character, and more substance in the plot. While the book leaves the reader with a wealth of knowledge, Brown never crosses the line into dry academia. Her story, her characters, and Gudrid herself, remain vital, dynamic, and very real.--excerpted from the review by Joan Eyolfson Cadham, Logberg-Heimskringla--click the link to read the full review: http://www.logberg.com/ | |||||||||||||||||
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"fascinating details ... engaging reading" | |||||||||||||||||
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"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" were long believed to be fictional flights of fancy until Heinrich Schliemann used them to help him discover Bronze Age palaces at Troy and Mycenae in the late 19th century. To this day, Aegean remains continue to be found, sometimes unearthed and better understood thanks to stories in Greek epic poetry, plays and other literary forms.
Studies of Norse sagas and finds in modern Scandinavian excavations have run a similar course, Nancy Marie Brown writes in her third nonfiction book, with the one revealing fascinating details about the other. Yes, Viking longhouses were fashioned from turf, and wooden vessels plied the Atlantic all the way to North America's "Vinland," the land of grape vines, half a millennium before Columbus arrived in the New World. While Helen's face may have launched 1,000 ships to Troy, a less-fabled Viking woman, Gudrid, made her own journeys. Featured in "The Saga of the Greenlanders" (dating to the early 1100s AD) and "The Saga of Eirik the Red" (from the 12th century), Gudrid crossed the Atlantic eight times, earning the moniker "Far Traveler." "Gudrid's story is not found in the great sagas," Brown notes. Nonetheless, the author was so captivated by this intriguing figure--born in A.D. 985, Gudrid was married and widowed twice, raised two sons on her own and later became a nun--that Brown joined a 2005 excavation in Iceland, volunteering five weeks of her summer to dig what may have been one of Gudrid's many homes. Brown isn't an archaeologist. She admits she can't get the hang of the metric system. She stands atop ancient walls, a basic taboo on any fragile remains. She makes giant assumptions--that an Icelandic structure at Glaumbaer, for example, was "Gudrid's house," built by Gudrid's husband "when they returned from their Vinland adventure"; the dwelling's official excavator, Brown points out, wouldn't make such claims. Brown rightly leaves scholarly work to scholars. Instead, her account presents an enthusiastic appreciation of her education in how fieldwork and literature offer insights into the past. With Gudrid as a springboard, Brown's interests range from the size of Viking beds and the skill of navigating without compass or clock to preserving meat, spinning wool and how Christianity replaced pagan religion. She serves readers well by examining many sides of what she encounters. In one saga, Gudrid is portrayed as rich, in another, poor. Which is true? A bit of both? How should one decide? Modern technology, she shows, isn't beyond question. The high-tech, ground-penetrating radar device used to scan for remains below the Earth's surface completely missed an entire room at Glaumbaer. Why? And what else failed to reveal itself? Brown notes she was "a complete beginner" when she was first turned loose with a trowel. By the end of her sojourn, she has learned much, reminding readers that "future archaeologists will have only our photographs and drawings ..." What's left--a pit, earth, ash--are, like the sagas, open to interpretation. Brown's archaeology of a summer's work and the society it helps to illuminate make for engaging reading.--Irene Wanner, The Seattle Times | |||||||||||||||||
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"Brown's enthusiasm is infectious as she re-teaches us our history"
In the construction of history, perceptions count. Five hundred years before Columbus "discovered" America, there were Norse settlements in Vinland, the Vikings' name for what is now Newfoundland. We accept this cognitive dissonance because we think of the Vikings as barbarian marauders whose feats couldn't possibly compare to those of Renaissance entrepreneurs. But archeological finds from Scandinavia to the New World support what the Norse sagas relate: that the Norsemen were farmers compelled by the exigencies of a feudal economy to sail ever westward to the end of the sea in search of new pasturelands. | The sagas speak of a chieftain's daughter, Gudrid the Far-Traveler, who crossed the North Atlantic eight times and bore a son in the New World. A Christian convert, in advanced age she made a pilgrimage overland to Rome. Nancy Marie Brown, touring archeological digs in Iceland, Greenland, and Canada, throws herself into imagining the details of life in the medieval Norse diaspora. Although the scantiness of actual evidence beyond the occasional cloak pin or spindle makes Gudrid's story one of "may haves" and "could haves," Brown's enthusiasm is infectious as she re-teaches us our history.--Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe
| "an excuse to explore the rich world of Viking archaeology"
Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the heroine of Nancy Marie Brown's The Far Traveler..., is less a biographical subject than an excuse to explore the rich world of Viking archaeology. Mentioned in two Norse sagas, Gudrid was part of the first European expedition to settle North America.... Brown strikes a good balance between a novelistic narrative and hard science but excessive detail occasionally swamps the story. Gudrid largely disappears as Brown reports on archaeological advances at sites across Viking territory. Her quest to "find" Gudrid even drives Brown to volunteer on a 2005 dig at a longhouse in northern Iceland, where the sagas say "the far traveler" and her husband settled after their last trip to North America. Not surprisingly, archaeologists are circumspect about the likelihood of the longhouse being Gudrid's: Brown gamely reports how often they try to check her enthusiasm for the literary source that inspired her journey. "You can believe it was her house if you want," one archaeologist tells her.--Jennifer Pinkowski, Archaeology
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| "lovely ear for storytelling"
... One service Brown performs is her questioning of the recent idea, proposed in Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," that one reason the Greenlanders starved was because they would not eat fish. Diamond's theory may be another example of archeology serving an agenda, not the truth: The darling of conservationists, he holds up the death of the Greenland settlement as an example of humans ruining a landscape, then being too stubborn to adapt and survive. According to Brown, the archeological findings don't bear this out. | The book soars when Brown leaves the dig and discusses Icelandic archeology and the sagas, which she has an ear for reproducing. People from cultures in which one's sense of family goes back for many generations often find New World amnesia strange (and sometimes suspiciously convenient). In Iceland Western culture has been in place, undisturbed, for 1,100 years. The Icelanders have never lost that sense of a community extending through time. A few shipwrights in Iceland still practice skills the Vikings used. Lacking books, people can keep knowledge (such as the location of Glaumbaer farm) intact for a thousand years, as long as their society remains in place. When Brown sticks to the facts, her lovely ear for storytelling outshines her other agendas. Despite herself, she demonstrates that it's possible to appreciate wonderful stories without forcing them to say what you want them to say. Though believing that spin is unnecessary is, for some writers, as difficult as believing in elves and trolls.--excerpted from the review by Laurel Maury, The Los Angeles Times
| "illuminating details of a woman's place"
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.
--Margaret Flanagan, ALA Booklist (Sept.1)
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| "plucky and adaptable Gudrid"
While most medieval women didn't stray far from home, the Viking Gudrid (985 to 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 archaeology 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 archaeology, literature and women's history more than the general reader.
--Publishers Weekly (July 16)
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| "a shimmeringly detailed vision of a time and place long gone"
The Far Traveler is a marvelous book, an intricate weave of human experience, literary interpretation, travelogue, and history. Even readers who are not fascinated by the old Norse sagas and the ancient culture of Iceland will find themselves drawn into this compelling story. Nancy Marie Brown brings alive the story of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, a remarkable, brave, and bold Viking woman who lived around 1000 A.D. and traveled from one end of the Viking world to the other. Brown offers a shimmeringly detailed vision of a time and place long gone.
--Pat Shipman, author of Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari
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| "the brave world of Gudrid finally gets the treatment it truly deserves"
The Far Traveler is a striking play with some of the concepts of the age that it relates. In Saga time, divinatory practice--a particular kind of ransacking (eftirryni)--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
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| "Who needs fantasy?"
Instead of merely telling us about the remarkable Gudrid, the Viking woman who traveled the entire known world of her time, Nancy Marie Brown brings her to life. Archaeological digs and modern sea voyages shift magically into Icelandic Sagas, and exhaustive research illuminates rather than burying the story of a family woman who was also a female Marco Polo--before even Marco Polo. Who needs fantasy--The Far Traveler makes historical reality every bit as fascinating.
--Scott Huler, author of Defining the Wind: the Beaufort scale, and how a 19th-century admiral turned science into poetry.
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your favorite bookseller to order ISBN-10: 015101440X and ISBN-13: 978-0151014408
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