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Books

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

By Nancy Marie Brown
Harcourt, 2007
ISBN: 978-0151014408

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid’s steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned—and expanded—the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.

Read our interview with Nancy Marie Brown

Go to the Author’s Website, including an excerpt from the book and other resources

Listen to the Author giving a reading in this podcast from Cornell University

Read a review from the New York Times

Read a review from Off the Beaten Track

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