Instead, Brown uses Gudrid’s life as a lens through which to examine wider questions of settlement and lifestyle in Viking-era Iceland, while adding a parallel story of her own experiences, as part of a team excavating what may well be Gudrid’s house on the farm of Glaumbaer in northern Iceland. This remarkable woman serves as the lynchpin of Brown’s book, although I should point out that this isn’t – strictly speaking – a biography. Many years later, with her husband dead and her sons grown, Gudrid would leave her home for another long journey: as a lifelong Christian, she made a pilgrimage to Rome in about 1025 (just imagine how much of an adventure that must have been then!).

They remained there until it became clear that they couldn’t coexist peacefully with the ‘Skraelings’ (the native tribes) and then returned to Iceland. Karlsefni and Gudrid made another attempt to reach Vinland and this time they were successful, settling into Leif’s colony at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where their son Snorri was born (not the Norse poet another Snorri). Her second husband was Thorfinn Karlsefni (sadly not ‘our’ Thorfinn, although Gudrid, born in about 985, was a near-contemporary of his). Nothing came of that, and Thorstein soon died but Gudrid presently married again. She married Thorstein, the younger brother of Leif Eiriksson and, shortly after her marriage, seems to have persuaded her husband to make a first attempt to reach Vinland, the luxuriant land in the west that Leif himself had discovered some years earlier. Gudrid appears as a character in the two ‘Vinland’ sagas: The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders (both included in The Sagas of Icelanders, which Heloise reviewed here). Brown’s focus is not on the Scandinavian Viking heartlands, but on the more remote settlements in Iceland and Greenland and, more specifically, on a Viking woman: Gudrid the Far-Traveller. The Far Traveler was her first book on the Vikings, and it offers a rather different perspective than most. Foolishly I didn’t buy it at the time – that was before King Hereafter and my current fascination with all things Viking – but it meant that her name rang a bell when I discovered this. This is the first of her books I’ve read although, earlier this year, I spotted a copy of her Song of the Vikingsin the Strand bookshop in New York.

Her writing is consequently an appealing blend of specialist and enthusiast. Brown started out as a science writer, but she’s recently had the chance to return to her first love: Norse culture and mythology. I realised that I was going to get along rather well with Nancy Marie Brown when I read the opening sentence of her first chapter: ‘ The first time I saw a Viking ship in the water, I was struck with the desire to stow away on it‘.

The far traveler by nancy marie brown