Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, a traveling woman

On that marvelous bus tour that we took with Yrsa last week, I learned about the first European woman to come to North America—or Vinland as she and her fellow Norsemen called it.  With Yrsa’s permission to horn in on her territory, I am going to report what some quick research yielded about life of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir.  Most of what I report here comes out of “The Saga of Eirick the Red” and The Saga of the Greenlanders,” which—if one pieces them together and takes a few liberties with exactly how many husbands she had—will give us an idea of Gudrid’s life.

For a long time, Gudrid’s story was thought to be pure myth, even after the discovery of the Viking longhouse in Newfoundland.  It wasn’t until 2001, and the discovery of her house in Iceland, precisely where the sagas said it was, that historians began to take seriously the reports of her adventures.  Viz—

Born in Laugarbrekka, Iceland in 980, Gudrid grew up to earn the nickname Vidforla, the Far-Traveler.  She may have traveled more miles than anyone—man, woman, or child—during her time. 
The sagas tell us that her first love was a young man named Einar.  But her father refused his permission for them to marry because Einar was the son of a slave.  Oh, the dishonor!  But then Papa went broke and the to avoid the scandal of that, he took his daughter and along with thirty others followed Erik the Red to Greenland. Half the company died of plague along the way, but Gudrid and her daddy made it and there she married a Norwegian, who also promptly died. 

Lief Eiriksson, Lief the Lucky, soon showed up, planning a trip to Vinland, now Newfoundland.  Gudrid, at that point a widow, married Lief’s younger brother Thorstein and went along on the journey, but an illness devastated the ranks of the settlers and Thorstein died. 

Here is where the sagas take a paranormal turn.  Thorstein came

back from the dead and told Gudrid that she would go to Norway and then back to Iceland, that she would marry again, to another merchant, that she would travel south on a pilgrimage, and that she would eventually return once more to Iceland and found a church.  Gudrid, in fact, did has the ghost predicted, but with a big detour.

In Norway, she married the merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni and promptly convinced him to take a party of settlers back to Vinland.  They got together a group of sixty men and five women, some livestock, and crossed the sea.  In Vinland, Gudrid gave birth to the first European child born in the New World—Snorri Thorfinnsson.  Thorfinn and Gudrid soon took their baby back to Greenland.

After Thorfinn died, Gudrid converted to Christianity, made that pilgrimage to Rome, where she may have met the Pope.  By this time, Snorri was married and settled in Iceland.  On her return from Rome, she returned to be near him, built a church, and lived out her days as a nun and an anchoress. 

A Scottish writer, Margaret Elphinstone wrote a novel about Gudrid—The Sea Road.  Nancy Marie Brown’s The Far Traveler: Voyages of Viking Woman gives a nonfiction account of the life of this remarkable woman.

Hooray for traveling women!

Annamaria - Monday