The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

Gudrid—the poor Gudrid—sailed with Thorstein. They took Leif’s ship, but they had the same bad luck. They made landfall back in Greenland just before winter and slept in a tent on the ship until they were taken in by the farmer at Lysufjord.
    Thorstein’s death scene at Lysufjord is gloriously spooky—and remarkably consistent from one saga to the other. It is dark, and the dead are all around them. The farmhands (in the Red version) or the crew of the ship (in the Green) had died one by one as winter came on, and their bodies were piled up in the snow until they could be buried in the spring. Then Thorstein and the farmer’s wife fell ill. Red Gudrid became their nurse. One night, the sick woman was stumbling back from the privy on Gudrid’s arm when she let out a shriek. Gudrid tried to calm her. “This isn’t wise. You mustn’t get chilled. We have to go back in right now.”
    The farmwife would not budge. She could see the dead lined up at her door. “Your husband is there. And I am with him!”
    The vision passed, and Red Gudrid hurried her charge to bed. By morning, the woman was dead—though before she could be carried out, her corpse rose up and tried to get into bed with Thorstein. (In the Green version, we see the ghost through Thorstein’s eyes, as he called out in panic to Gudrid: “She is pushing herself up on her elbows and poking her feet out of the bed and groping for her shoes!”) As soon as the old wife was safely coffined, Thorstein died. He, too, did not lie quiet. Red Gudrid was asleep from exhaustion when her dead husband called for her; Green Gudrid was sitting on the old farmer’s lap while he “tried to comfort her in every way he knew.” In the Red version, the corpse begged for a proper Christian funeral, with a priest, and told her to give his money to the church or to the poor—appropriate fare for young nuns. He mentioned only in passing that Gudrid was “fated for great things.” To Green Gudrid, he spoke exclusively about her future—this Gudrid had not taken part in the séance. She hasn’t heard yet that she will marry an Icelander and that her progeny will be “promising, bright, and praiseworthy, sweet and fine-smelling.”
    Both the Red Gudrid and the Green—these seventeen-year-old widows—convinced the farmer not to keep her to replace his dead wife, but to ferry her back to the main settlement in the spring, to her father (who died soon afterward, in the Red version) or to her brother-in-law and guardian, Leif. Both Red Gudrid and Green Gudrid knew she was destined for greatness—the idea that her future had been foretold was so fixed in the collective memory that both saga authors mentioned it, and the author of the Red version clumsily did so twice.
    When the promised Icelander arrived the next autumn, captaining a merchant ship, Red Gudrid was fabulously wealthy. She had inherited Thorstein Eiriksson’s share of the farm at Lysufjord, as well as her father’s farm and her father’s ship. As a widow, she had the right to decide where she would live and whom, if anyone, she would marry. She chose to live at Brattahlid with Eirik the Red. Green Gudrid was marginally better off than she had been when she arrived in Greenland, the survivor of a shipwreck. She had inherited Thorstein’s share of Eirik the Red’s estate, but Leif was in control of it. She lived at Brattahlid as Leif’s ward. But rich or poor, Gudrid married the Icelandic merchant, Thorfinn Karlsefni, whose nickname means “the stuff a man is made of” or “the makings of a man.” Once again, the two sagas hold a memory in common.
    Then a curious thing happens in
The Saga of Eirik the Red:
Karlsefni sails for Vinland and Gudrid disappears from the story. This is Red Gudrid, the rich Gudrid, the one who caught the young merchant's eye, who took part in the seance, whose fate we have followed in such detail. From the words on the page, you would think she had stayed behind in