Nancy Marie Brown: Uses history and archaeology to shed light on a character from Icelandic sagas
In “The Far Traveler,” Nancy Marie Brown tries to solve the mystery of a beautiful woman named Gudrid who appears in two Icelandic sagas and crossed the North Atlantic, from Iceland and Greenland to Newfoundland and Norway, eight times. Who was this intrepid woman, and why did she roam off the edge of the known world? Thousand-year-old clues lie scattered about, but few are conclusive.
Brown’s springboard and inspiration are the sagas, filled with revenge killings, out-of-wedlock births and the predictable craziness of communal life in a cold country. Though these tales, written in the 1200s, are unreliable and largely unreal — they contain references to trolls and warlocks — they have led archaeologists to many a Viking farm, church or gravesite.
As time passes there’s less to find, of course, but technology is helping researchers, and thus Brown (whose previous book, “A Good Horse Has No Color,” was about Icelandic ponies), create vivid narratives from the shards — stories about Viking economies, technologies and sexual politics — and determine why some outposts of these hearty northerners disappeared after surviving more than 400 years. To reverse engineer the Viking diet, for example (and thus learn where Vikings traveled, what they planted and how many people a region could support), researchers collect and examine pollen grains, seeds, fleas and lice. Radiocarbon dating of animal bones and tallying the headless fish in garbage heaps show how those diets changed.
Read entire article at NYT Book Review
Brown’s springboard and inspiration are the sagas, filled with revenge killings, out-of-wedlock births and the predictable craziness of communal life in a cold country. Though these tales, written in the 1200s, are unreliable and largely unreal — they contain references to trolls and warlocks — they have led archaeologists to many a Viking farm, church or gravesite.
As time passes there’s less to find, of course, but technology is helping researchers, and thus Brown (whose previous book, “A Good Horse Has No Color,” was about Icelandic ponies), create vivid narratives from the shards — stories about Viking economies, technologies and sexual politics — and determine why some outposts of these hearty northerners disappeared after surviving more than 400 years. To reverse engineer the Viking diet, for example (and thus learn where Vikings traveled, what they planted and how many people a region could support), researchers collect and examine pollen grains, seeds, fleas and lice. Radiocarbon dating of animal bones and tallying the headless fish in garbage heaps show how those diets changed.