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

Greenland—just as it seems she had when Thorstein Eiriksson set off on his Vinland expedition. We learn how far Karlsefni sailed, about the wind and the weather, the bears and whales, the wide beaches, the wine grapes, the wild wheat, the pasturelands, and the trees. We read about arguments that sent one ship back north and one (or two) farther south. We meet the Skraelings, the saga term for the native people, and watch the Vikings trade with them, then fight them, then flee from them. We discover that Karlsefni’s ship is the only one of the three to return to Greenland. But about Gudrid there is only an afterthought. We read: “Snorri, Karlsefni’s son, was born the first autumn; he was three when they left.”
    Green Gudrid is given a slightly bigger role. Not only did she give birth to Snorri in Vinland, she tried to make friends with a native woman. There is no echo of this event in the other saga. The only overlap between the two versions—the only shared memory of Vinland—concerns Snorri’s birth and the Vikings’ decision to abandon their settlement after three years. They'returned to Greenland. From there Red Gudrid and her family sailed directly to Iceland, while Green Gudrid first detoured to Norway. In both sagas, the family settled in the Skagafjord valley in the north of Iceland, where Gudrid had a second son.
    Exactly where in Skagafjord they lived is still under dispute, particularly by the farmers who currently inhabit the two places in question.
    The Saga of Eirik the Red
notes that Karlsefni’s mother thought he had married beneath him. She did not care to share her house with Gudrid. Karlsefni’s family farm was a large estate called Reynines, “Rowan Ness.” Gudrid apparently spent at least the first winter somewhere else.
    The Saga of the Greenlanders
only hints at in-law trouble, but identifies the “somewhere else.” Rather than taking over Reynines, the saga says, Karlsefni bought a nearby farm called Glaumbaer. After Karlsefni’s death, Gudrid farmed at Glaumbaer until her son Snorri married. Then she went on a pilgrimage to Rome.
    We have no corroborating record of her pilgrimage, although guestbooks in monasteries along the recommended route list other women travelers with Viking names: Vigdis, Vilborg, Kolthera, and Thurid, for instance, visited Reichenau monastery in Switzerland during the eleventh century (at about the same time as the monk Hermann was writing his treatise on the astrolabe there). That Gudrid might have gone to Rome is therefore plausible, but not certain.
     
    Asking not
Are the sagas true?
but
Are they plausible?
will never tell me if Gudrid had a lovely singing voice or if, in Greenland, she was rich or poor. But historians and literary scholars collating the sagas with other scattered documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as church records, annals, and books of law, have revealed many other plausible details about her life and times. I can guess what luxuries Einar brought to Iceland, and even what some of these goods cost: Twenty pounds of beeswax was worth as much as a cow. I also know that Gudrid—rich or poor—spent her days milking cows and making cheese, spinning wool and weaving cloth. While milk was the foundation of the Viking diet, homespun was the culture’s chief export. When Einar left Iceland to go trading in Norway, each of his crewmen most likely took along a length of homespun two miles long and weighing two tons as “spending money”—all of it woven by women.
    But to let me imagine more of Gudrid’s life—to truly see that turf house sitting like a low hill in the jewel-green field—the medieval sagas must give way to modern science. The sagas hold memories; archaeology can provide me with facts and physical objects. But archaeology, in Iceland especially, is a political sport. Fashions come and go. Whereas a hundred years ago every archaeologist in Iceland was bent on proving the sagas literally true, down to