The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

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.

 

• Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them
• Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths
• Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths
• The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler
• Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them
• Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas