The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read Free Book Online

his 2004 book,
The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition.
Though tales change with their tellers—bits left out, others embellished (as the description of the seer obviously was)—they still must ring true to their audience. “They’re still within limits,” he told me, regarding the two young Gudrids. “You must fill in the gap somehow. The basic idea is that she comes to Greenland, and soon enough there’s a problem. She has to make a fresh start. She has to get involved with Eirik the Red’s family, since in order to become somebody there, you had to make friends with Eirik.
    “The only way we can explain these written texts,” he continued, “is that you first had stories about separate events and characters. I think people were telling these stories in a mishmash, without the beginning and end that we know. They were very regional. They were stories about disputes, about the qualities of the land, about someone’s misbehavior. They had a very clear ethical message, both about how you as a farmer should behave, and about how a chieftain should react. These stories were being told to reinforce that ideology.”
    The written sagas were a way of systematizing the oral stories. “When people in Iceland in the thirteenth century saw the long written narratives they were getting in books from abroad, they realized they could use these old stories in that new form. They learned to write them down chronologically. That’s not what you would do with oral literature. When you told these stories, you just told them from event to event and key word to key word. The Icelanders in the thirteenth century were fascinated with chronology, with this new way of systematizing knowledge, just like we’re fascinated by computers. They weren’t saying anything new, they were just putting it into a different form.”
    To work chronologically, to follow a set of characters through time, a writer needed to build bridges, to fill in gaps, to connect one oral tale to another. These bridges could be drawn from another tale, or come from the writer’s general knowledge about the area in which the story took place. The differences between the two Vinland sagas, then, can be set down to their writers’ interests, intentions, and abilities, but also to which tales they had heard, what memories they shared, what bridges they needed to build, what audience they were addressing.
The Saga of Eirik the Red
has been traced to a nunnery in northern Iceland, whose abbess was Gudrid’s seven-greats granddaughter: Gudrid was presumably an exemplar, a role model for young Christian women.
The Saga of the Greenlanders
comes down to us as disjointed chapters in a long saga of the kings of Norway. The discovery of Vinland, rather than Gudrid, lies at its heart.
     
    When it comes to Gudrid, the memory both sagas seem to be based on is this: Gudrid had a suitor who was a merchant, plying the sea routes from Norway. She may or may not have married him, but he soon passed out of her life. She went to Greenland. She had a bad voyage. Her first winter there was hard, with hunger and sickness. By spring she had lost most of the people she loved. But she was remarkable in some way that was not dependent on her being wealthy, and she married Eirik the Red’s son, Thorstein, becoming Leif Eiriksson’s sister-in-law. Thorstein attempted to sail to Vinland, but failed. He and Gudrid lived for a time in Lysufjord, a lonely spot remote from their fathers’ farms, and there, after a terrible illness, Thorstein died.
    In the Red version, Thorstein borrowed Gudrid’s father’s ship and set off for the New World with no mention of Gudrid accompanying him. Foul winds drove his ship east instead of west, until Thorstein thought he could see birds off the coast of Ireland. He limped home to Greenland with tattered sails at summer’s end. That autumn, he and Gudrid married and moved north to Lysufjord, where Thorstein owned a half-share in a farm.
    Green