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Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid's story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman's last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid's steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned?and expanded?the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.
List of contents
contents
a note on the language xiii
prologue Gudrid the Far-Traveler 1
chapter 1 At Sea 11
chapter 2 Ransacking the Past 30
chapter 3 A Very Stirring Woman 55
chapter 4 The Terror from the North 78
chapter 5 The Land-Taking 103
chapter 6 Eirik the Red’s Green Land 135
chapter 7 Land of Wine or Walrus 162
chapter 8 The House of the Sagas 193
chapter 9 The Farm of Merry Noise 217
chapter 10 From Witch to Nun 237
acknowledgments 267
notes 271
sources 279
index 293
About the author
NANCY MARIE BROWN is the author of A Good Horse Has No Color and Mendel in the Kitchen. She lives in Vermont with her husband, the writer Charles Fergus.
Summary
Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be.
Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid’s steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned—and expanded—the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.
Additional text
PRAISE FOR A GOOD HORSE HAS NO COLOR
"The best journeys go two ways: out, into the unknown, and in, to what we might have known all along. Nancy Marie Brown's absorbing tale of looking for horses in Iceland is that kind of odyssey. Like the ancient legends she recounts, hers is rich and transporting, a true saga."--Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of Dark Horses and Black Beauties
"This is a wonderful book, a can't-put-down read about loss and healing, joy and discovery."--Jeanne Mackin, author of The Sweet By and By
