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‘The Far-Traveller’

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I’m moving through the book I’m reading with unusual slowness. So of what shall I blog? I don’t want to post about my car again; that topic has outlived its welcome. Anyway, there’s nothing much left to say.

Except that I named her. You may recall that I always name my cars, and they’re always female names – probably because of my chronic deficiency of female companionship. I used to use the names of old schoolteachers of mine, emulating the fictional detective Travis McGee, who named his Rolls Royce pickup truck after a schoolteacher from his childhood. (Note, I make no claim to ever owning a Rolls Royce pickup truck.) But I named my previous car Sigrid the Haughty, after a femme fatale from the Norse sagas.

So I chose a saga name for my “new” Toyota Rav-4 too. Because she has quite a high number on her odometer, I’ve chosen to christen her “Gudrid the Far-Traveled.”

This is another great saga name. Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is a prominent character in the Icelandic Vinland sagas, Erik the Red’s Saga and the Saga of the Icelanders. If I recall correctly, she figures most prominently in the first, which gives the impression (to this reader at least) that it was intended as a sort of a defense of her reputation. According to the sagas, she was descended from slaves, but the saga writer takes every opportunity to point out that she was (in spite of that) a very outstanding woman who entirely transcended her humble origins. And had great stories to tell.

Just to mention the high points, she married Erik the Red’s son Thorstein, and traveled with him to Vinland (America). After his death, she married an Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni (the nickname means, essentially, macho), and with him attempted to plant a permanent colony in the new country. These efforts failed, unfortunately (though Gudrid bore the first European child born in America), and eventually they moved back to Thorfinn’s home in Iceland. After she was widowed, she made a pilgrimage to Rome, and she ended her life as a hermit nun. Thus she earned the nickname, víðförla (far-traveled), since she’d been to America and Rome. That made her the European who had seen the most of the world in her time.

The video clip above is a trailer for a documentary which may or may not have ever been released – I don’t know. As you’d expect, it “spins” the story, catering to current fashions of thought. Gudrid seems to be portrayed as a leader of expeditions (which she was not) and a warrior (which she even more certainly was not).

But she was a remarkable woman, and her descendants had every reason to immortalize her in literature.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Far Traveler,’ by Nancy Marie Brown

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The 1,000 square-foot sail, requiring almost a million feet of thread, took two women four and a half years to make. It used the wool of more than 200 sheep, each sheep the size of a large dog and yielding two to four pounds of wool.

I resisted reading Nancy Marie Brown’s The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman, because I generally avoid the whole matter of Viking women. The field is too fraught with politics. But I’ve come to trust Nancy Marie Brown, who, even when I disagree with her, seems to be a solid (and, as we see in this book, highly industrious) scholar with a fair mind. And I’m glad I read this one. It was an enjoyable and informative work. I learned stuff.

Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is a figure of particular interest in the Icelandic sagas. Widow of Leif Eriksson’s brother Thorstein and wife of Thorfinn Karlsefni, who led the most ambitious attempt to establish a Norse colony in Vinland, she outlived three husbands and ended up becoming a nun and making a pilgrimage to Rome. Thus she was best-traveled woman in the Viking world, and possibly in the world at large. Though she seems a subsidiary character in the sagas, author Brown believes, based on saga hints and a deep understanding of Norse culture, that she played a more decisive role than has been thought.

This book would be much shorter than it is if it had not been extended – or rather enriched – by the author’s thoroughgoing efforts to enter profoundly into Gudrid’s world. In that capacity she spends time in museums and archives, travels far in Gudrid’s footsteps, and does backbreaking labor on an archaeological dig in Iceland. It makes for fascinating reading, and the reader learns a whole lot at her expense.

I enjoyed The Far Traveler, and highly recommend it. I was particularly pleased when she demolished the judgment of Jared Diamond on the Greenlanders in one of his books, and when she explained positive reasons why Christianity appealed to so many Viking women, in spite of all the “superior” rights we’re always told they enjoyed under the old religion.

A good  book, which every Viking buff ought to read.