Is Freydis Real?

Freydis Eiriksdottir is set to become America's favorite "real valkyrie," thanks to Netflix's "Vikings: Valhalla." But is she real? That is, is she a historical figure?

I don't think so.

I've written a book on warrior women in the Viking Age: The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women.

I've also written a book on the two Icelandic sagas in which Freydis appears: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman.

In The Real Valkyrie, I argue that Freydis's predecessor as America's favorite valkyrie--Lagertha in the History Channel's "Vikings" series--was based on a real historical figure. Her story is told by Saxo Grammaticus in his history of the Danes. It's hyped. It's co-opted to make a political point about the inappropriateness of women in battle. But if you accept that the men named by Saxo are real--men like Ragnar Lothbrok, whose feats are also hyped--you have to accept that Lagertha is real too.

The writers of the Icelandic sagas didn't follow the same rules as Saxo, however. They were not writing history.

"Saga" derives from the Icelandic verb "to say." It implies neither fact nor fiction. Some sagas could be shelved as history, others as fantasy: over 140 medieval Icelandic texts are named "sagas."

Compared to some, the two that mention Freydis--The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders (known collectively as the Vinland Sagas)--are bare-bones. As I wrote in The Far Traveler, their plots don’t hang together. Their settings and characters are weak. Their use of folk-tale motifs--fortune-telling, belligerent ghosts, one-footed humanoids--is clumsy and repetitious. They read like sketches from a writer’s notebook, not finished works.

Both sagas tell of the Viking voyages to North America around the year 1000. Both highlight the feats of men like Leif Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, though the real explorer, as I've argued elsewhere (here,here,and here), was a woman named Gudrid, known today as "the Far Traveler." Despite the fact that the sagas say hardly anything at all directly about her, Gudrid is at the heart of both tales.

As Richard Perkins suggests in "Medieval Norse Visits to America" (Saga-Book 28 (2004): 26-69), the stories about Gudrid were likely collected by her great-great-grandson, Bishop Brand, in the late 1100s. The Saga of Eirik the Red may have been commissioned about a hundred years later by another of Gudrid’s many descendants, Abbess Hallbera, who oversaw a convent in northern Iceland.

Gudrid was a Christian--one of Iceland's first nuns. Her life story was meant to be "a guide for noble women" and "appropriate reading matter" for nuns.

Which, given the nature of one of the famous stories told about the Vinland expeditions, was a problem.

Gudrid and her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni led an expedition of three ships to North America. They stayed three winters, exploring Newfoundland and around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It was in the Miramichi River valley, archaeologist Birgitta Wallace thinks, that they met the native people they called "Skraelings," or "skin-wearers."

At first, they successfully traded with Skraelings. Then Karlsefni made a diplomatic mistake. The next time the Skraelings arrived at the Viking settlement, they came in overwhelming numbers, girded for war.

At this point in The Saga of Eirik the Red, Gudrid disappears, and another woman—strong-minded, adaptable, brave, and pregnant—conveniently shows up. She is called Freydis and is said to be Leif Eiriksson's illegitimate sister.

Freydis appears in only one scene in this saga, here, as the Vikings flee:
"Freydis ran after them but fell behind because she was pregnant. She was following them into the woods when the Skraelings reached her. She saw a dead man in front of her…. His sword lay beside him. She picked it up and got ready to defend herself. When the Skraelings came at her, she drew her clothing away from her breast and slapped it with the sword. At this the Skraelings grew afraid and ran back to their boats and rowed away."

As I wrote in The Far Traveler, this fighting technique has a long history in Celtic lore—one that Gudrid could have heard of from her Scottish grandfather. In the ancient Irish epic, the Tain Bo Cuailnge, when the hero Cuchulainn attacked the fortress of Emain Macha, the women “stripped their breasts at him.” Said the queen, “These are the warriors you must struggle with today.” Cuchulainn, shamed, “hid his countenance” and was captured.

Such an action is in character for the Gudrid we have come to know by then in The Saga of Eirik the Red. It might be too racy, though, for a role model in a saga written for young nuns. I can see a squirming churchman attributing it to another, lesser woman, the fictional Freydis.

The two women were easily switched: “Some people say that Bjarni and Freydis stayed behind,” one manuscript copy of the saga says, while Karlsefni explored to the south and met the Skraelings. A different copy of the same saga puts it: “Some people say that Bjarni and Gudrid stayed behind.”

Providing another clue that Karlsefni would not have left Gudrid behind and taken Freydis, the saga is clear that the only child born in Vinland was Gudrid and Karlsefni's son Snorri. Just before his birth, the saga notes: “The men were now constantly at odds, and all the quarrels were over women.” The lonesome bachelors were pestering their few married friends to share their wives. Would Karlsefni leave Gudrid in another man’s arms for a year? Would Gudrid stand for it?

It seems clear to me that Gudrid, not Freydis, was the woman with Karlsefni when he scouted to the south. It was Gudrid, not Freydis, who revealed herself to be a woman in hopes of surviving the Skraelings' attack.

But churchmen, like Saxo, have long had a problem with women bearing swords. By doing so, he bemoaned, they "were forgetful of their true selves." When they "desired not the couch but the kill," they "unsexed themselves."

Sometime in the 100 to 300 years between Gudrid's death and the writing down of her sagas, this sword-wielding Freydis becomes the main actor in another story of exploration, told in The Saga of the Greenlanders.

While in The Saga of Eirik the Red you have to read between the lines to realize Gudrid organized an expedition to Vinland--and owned one of the three ships--The Saga of the Greenlanders clearly says that Freydis did so.

Her expedition is a disaster. She breaks her agreement with her Icelandic partners, accuses them falsely of having abused her, and has them all murdered. When her weak-willed husband refuses to kill the women in the Norwegian's crew, Freydis does it herself: "Give me an axe," she famously says.

Freydis is "the epitome of evil," says scholar Robert Kellogg; "a woman of treacherous deceit," adds Judy Quinn. Her wickedness is unmotivated--except by her greed. "She stands for the other great anxiety: the disruptive power of sex," notes Michael Pye. She "represents the bad old days, the heathen past," writes Judith Jesch, "that, according to the author, is now mercifully replaced by the light of Christianity."

She is "an entirely fictional figure invented to act as a foil to the pious Gudrid," concludes Perkins.

How Perkins reached that conclusion--with which I wholeheartedly agree--is a good lesson in how to tell fact from fiction in an Icelandic saga.

First, look at the genealogies: Unlike Gudrid, Freydis has no long list of descendants in the vast saga genealogies. If she truly was the sword-wielding pregnant woman who fled from the Skraelings, her child is never named or mentioned again. We know nothing about the family she married into, either.

Second, look at geography: The account of Freydis's voyage to Vinland adds nothing to our understanding of where exactly Vinland is or how to get to it. Instead, it seems to be based on a different disastrous voyage to Greenland that ended in murder and feud.

Third, look at the repercussions: For Freydis and her husband, there are none. No revenge is taken for the murders; no feud arises. Her actions have no effect. After she returns to Greenland, we hear only that Leif Eiriksson was displeased and "no one thought anything but ill of her." She certainly didn't accompany Leif to England, as in the "Vikings: Valhalla" show.

Says Perkins, "On the whole, then, it seems unlikely that either Freydis Eiriksdotttir or [her husband] Thorvardr ever existed in reality and it is therefore equally unlikely that they took part in any expeditions to North America."

Which does not mean that this lusty, greedy, haughty, adventurous woman with an axe--and maybe a sword--has not continued to inspire readers and writers for a thousand years. Why do we so like Vikings--even the evil ones? As Sofie Vanherpen writes, "Now, more than ever, we need heroes. We need fearless men and women, who are larger than life."

For more on my latest book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

An Old Story, A New Saga

Monday was the official publication date of my young adult novel The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. It's been a long time coming.

I can still remember where I was when I read my first Icelandic saga. It was Njal's Saga, in translation, and I was at my aunt's house for Thanksgiving during my second year in college in 1978. I was sitting on the staircase, hiding from my family so that I could continue reading this book that had enthralled me. I went on to learn Old Norse and I started visiting Iceland at least every other year beginning in 1986.

For 20 years, however, I made my living as a science writer for a magazine published by Penn State University. I used to say I led a double life-science by day, sagas by night. One day in 2002 I was sitting at my desk at the university when a professor called. He was among a team of archaeologists who had discovered a Viking Age longhouse on a farm in northern Iceland.

I asked, "Which farm?"

"Glaumbaer," he said.

I was probably the only science writer in America who would reply, "You mean the farm of Gudrid the Far-Traveler?"

That was the genesis of my first book about Gudrid, a nonfiction book called The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman, published in 2007. (You can read the article I wrote about the Penn State professor's work here.)

I had been looking for a way to combine science and sagas for a long time, and initially I thought I was writing a book about new techniques in archaeology using the story of Gudrid as an example. A few years into the project, my editor at Harcourt suggested I turn my idea inside out and write a book about Gudrid using archaeology as one source.

To do so, I had to study in depth the two sagas that mention Gudrid, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red, collectively known as the Vinland Sagas. These two sagas had never been my favorites.

Once I mentored a Penn State student for an independent study project on the sagas. He compared Gudrid to the women in several other sagas, and wrote: "Gudrid has one great shortcoming-she's rather bland. ... Many of the other sagas tell us enough about the characters that you get a good feel of how people lived their lives-and they are often interesting lives. Gudrid has none of these particularly intimate displays of her dealings with others-it's just assumed that she's smart and well-behaved. Being smart and well-behaved probably spells out being boring."

The more I studied the Vinland Sagas, however, the more I realized that Gudrid wasn't bland or boring--and probably not even well-behaved. These two sagas were simply written in such a way that Gudrid's story was hidden. That intrigued me.

One of the more frustrating things about these two sagas is that they contradict each other. In one saga she has two husbands, in the other she has three. In one saga she is rich when she arrives in Greenland, in the other she is poor. It was impossible, when writing nonfiction, to create a coherent narrative about her.

Also frustrating are the hints. According to one saga, Gudrid "knew how to get along with strangers." Later, that saga shows Gudrid in the New World, failing to communicate with a native woman. The implication is clear: If she couldn't get along with these strangers, no one could. Perhaps Gudrid decided the Vikings should abandon their colony.

Perhaps the Vinland expedition itself was her idea. She packed up and set sail there twice-with two different husbands. Although the sagas disagree on the particulars, her hand in the preparations each time is clear.

Writing nonfiction, I could only say "perhaps, perhaps." When The Far Traveler came out in 2007, I was very happy with it, but I didn't think it was finished. I immediately began thinking about writing a novel so I could bring Gudrid's story to life or, as one of my writer friends put it, "make it real."

Researching and writing my nonfiction book The Far Traveler took me, off and on, five years. Writing The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, my just-published historical novel, took me another eight years--even though all of my research was essentially done.

The biggest problem for me was genre: Who was I writing for?

In 2009 I began reading young adult novels--probably because my best friend, Linda Wooster, became the librarian at a local high school and started recommending books for me to read. One that I liked very much was Hush by Donna Jo Napoli, which told the story of the character Melkorka from the Laxdaela Saga. Reading it convinced me that the best audience for Gudrid's story were readers Gudrid's own age when she went exploring: between 14 and 21.

So I decided to learn how to write young adult fiction. One day I was talking to Andy Boyles, the science editor at Highlights for Children, who had bought a few of my nonfiction pieces, and he told me about a writer's conference at which Donna Jo would be a mentor. With the help of a scholarship from the Highlights Foundation and a Career Grant from the National Association of Science Writers, I signed up. I had three sessions with Donna Jo in which she helped me to structure the novel. She also gave me an invaluable gift: a deadline. If I finished a draft of the novel by a certain date, she would read it; if she liked it, she would send it to her agent.

I met Donna Jo's deadline. She liked the novel, but her agent did not. So the next year, I signed up for another workshop through the Highlights Foundation, this one with the editor who eventually published the novel, Stephen Roxburgh of Namelos. For one intense week, Stephen went over with me everything I needed to improve to make the novel publishable, and over the next year he checked in with me about once a month to see if I was making progress. He even came to my house for a visit.

Without these wonderful mentors The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler would still be in my closet where, I'm afraid, lie several other unfinished novel manuscripts. While making Gudrid's story come to life has been very satisfying, I find it is much easier to write nonfiction and simply say "perhaps."


The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler has been chosen as the 2015 INL Reads! selection of the Icelandic National League. Thanks to Rob Olason of the Icelandic National League, whose questions prompted these recollections.

Vikings in the Canadian North?

The Icelandic sagas tell of several Viking voyages to Vinland, or North America, a thousand years ago. Scholars have long agreed, though, that the sagas don't tell of every voyage--and they've long disagreed on where the Vikings went.

When I was researching my nonfiction book The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman in 2006, the scholarly consensus was that L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northwestern tip of Newfoundland, was the only authenticated Viking settlement in the New World. Birgitta Wallace, the lead archaeologist on the project, speculated that the Vikings traveled from there at least as far as south as the Miramichi River. (For her argument, see my post "The Case of the Butternuts.")

When I wrote my young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler (just published by Namelos), I followed Birgitta's suggestion and placed Gudrid and Karlsefni's house on the banks of the Miramichi.

If I'd listened to a different archaeologist, though, I might have sent Gudrid north. For there is now a second authenticated Viking settlement in the New World: on Baffin Island.

Ian Robertson, a reader of this blog, has been helpfully keeping me up-to-date with the work of Canadian archaeologist Patricia Sutherland, now affiliated with the University of Aberdeen. In 2009, Sutherland published an exciting paper reanalyzing some older finds from the Arctic North. She and her colleagues have now followed that up with a paper in Geoarchaeology that--at least for me--puts all other arguments to rest: There were Viking explorers on Baffin Island a thousand years ago.

Sutherland identifies four sites at which Norse objects--or, as she more carefully says, "objects associated with a variety of European technologies"--have been found.

Yarn spun from animal hair.

Bar-shaped whetstones.

Notched wooden sticks that look like Viking tally-sticks.

And now, a crucible used for making bronze.

This small, broken stone vessel was found at a site called Nanook. It was near "a large structure with long straight walls of boulders and turf and a stone-edged drainage channel." The indigenous Dorset people, a Paleo-Eskimo culture, did not build houses like this. The Vikings did, throughout the North Atlantic, including in Greenland.

Under two inches high, the crucible was carved from a gray metamorphic rock not found near Nanook. Among the possible sources are the west coast of Greenland.

When Sutherland and her colleagues examined the crucible under a scanning electron microscope equipped with an Oxford Energy Dispersive Spectra (EDS) system for chemical analysis, they found "abundant traces of copper-tin alloy (bronze) as well as glass spherules similar to those associated with high-temperature processes. These results indicate that it had been used as a crucible" in which copper and tin were melted, "probably for the casting of small bronze objects."

The Dorset Eskimos, who lived in this area throughout the Viking Age and until being pushed out by the Inuit in the 13th or 14th century, did not make bronze. In fact, no one in North America north of Mexico knew how to make bronze.

But the Vikings did.

To learn more, read "Evidence of Early Metalworking in Canada" by Patricia D. Sutherland, Peter H. Thompson, and Patricia A. Hunt in Geoarchaeology 30 (2015): 74-78.

Gudrid's Voyage to Sandnes

As I wrote last week, I did much of the research for my new novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, several years ago when I was writing my nonfiction book about Gudrid, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman.

One research trip that became a crucial scene in the novel was an actual voyage. I went by boat down the Lysufjord from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, to Sandnes, the farm Gudrid and her husband Thorstein Eiriksson returned to after their failed voyage to Vinland--and the farm where Thorstein subsequently died, so spookily.

The boat was owned by my friend Kristjana Motzfeldt and piloted by her friend Tobias, since Kristjana was on her way to Denmark.

"You have a map, you know where you want to go, good, good," she said, brushing away my doubts. "Tobias will get you there"--despite the fact that he spoke no English (or Icelandic) and I spoke no Greenlandic (or Danish). His wife Rusina would be going, too, I learned as we reached the boat at 8:00 Saturday morning. "Beautiful!" she said, with an expansive wave of one hand, as we passed the dramatic mountains that marked the harbor mouth. It was her favorite (and almost her only) English word.

The Motzfeldts' boat was a seal-hunting boat, half enclosed. It had two seats, for pilot and copilot, a two-sleeper cabin in the bow, and an open rear deck large enough for landing a seal or two. It had two engines and a large gas tank. Cruising along at about eight knots, drinking coffee and eating Danish pastries, I realized that sailing to Sandnes in a Viking ship would have taken amazing skill.

The narrow Lysufjord (named for a kind of cod) heads due east for most of its length, the ice-gray mountains falling straight into the sea, with no beaches, no harbors, no skerries, no bays, nowhere to find safety if the wind should turn contrary--or the ship should sink. The cliffs' snow-streaks and striations puzzle the mind; the eye wants to find a meaning in the pattern. I began to see huge faces as the hours passed and the view refused to change. The sky was overcast, the silver sea glassy calm. A sense of distance eluded me until I saw a boat the size of ours looking like a speck, a seabird, between us and the gray cliff face. Ahead lay endless iterations of the same humped mountain, hill upon hill: I could see no passage in.

Finally, after almost four hours, the fjord divided in two. A dome-shaped mountain lay straight ahead, a low rocky toe reached in from our left. As we turned the point into shadow, the boat began humping the waves, "swimming like a seal," as Kristjana had warned me it might if the wind turned against us.

But the sides of the fjord soon softened. The snow had disappeared. Red-brown brush clung to gentler slopes, and here and there above a narrow beach were bright yellow-gold patches of grass that looked man-made: they were straight-edged, rectangular. You could spot Norse ruins from far away, I had read, if you looked for the lushest grass.

The water grew greener, more shallow. Birds were feeding along the edge of a sandbar, seemingly in the middle of the fjord. We went slowly onward, rolling sideways and, I soon realized, hugging the wrong shore. Across to the north I could see another great swath of winter-gold grass and the landmark I’d read about: "a small round rocky hillock, … a fine vantage place for looking for scattered sheep in the valley."

Creeping along the edge of the sandbar, we had to retreat back down the fjord quite a ways before we could come close enough to shore to launch our rubber dinghy. Luckily the wind was calmer now, and by the time we scraped the white sand beach, the sun had come out.

Tobias and Rusina, each carrying a bottle of soda and a handful of plastic bags, sauntered down the beach to gather mussels. I hurried off the opposite way, knowing we had very little time before the falling tide would strand our anchored boat.

Of course I lost track of the time, wandering about Gudrid's farm, musing on her life--suddenly I saw Rusina frantically waving. I ran for the beach.

If we had been in a Viking ship, sailing or rowing, we would not have made it back to Nuuk that night--one reason no one lives at Sandnes now. We had hardly shipped our anchor when the wind turned against us again. The boat began to buck and thump; Tobias gritted his teeth and concentrated on steering her straight. Four bone-jarring hours later, we came to the mouth of the fjord, into a suddenly calm and sunny evening, an iceberg floating like a big pale-blue swan in the distance. At the foot of the beautiful! mountain, Rusina finally got a chance to throw out a fishing line.

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler was published in Spring 2015 by namelos. See www.namelos.com or order from your favorite bookseller. You'll find the fictional version of this voyage in Chapter Seven.

Eirik the Red’s Greenland

Last week I celebrated the publication of my first young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler. If you read this blog regularly, you knew Gudrid already. Search on her name  or "Far Traveler" and you'll find a dozen posts.

That's because in 2007 I published a nonfiction book about Gudrid called The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman. ("Far Traveler" or "Far-Traveler"? That pesky hyphen! It's missing from the first book because the designer thought it looked ugly.)

In one way, writing the nonfiction book was a prerequisite to writing the novel. I couldn't have written The Saga of Gudrid without first having written Voyages of a Viking Woman--or at least without having experienced the actual voyaging the earlier book required.

For instance, much of The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler takes place in Greenland. When I traveled to Greenland in 2006, I learned things my exhaustive library research had missed.

Writing in the early 1100s Iceland's first historian, Ari the Learned, described the discovery of Greenland, in about 982, this way:

"The land called Greenland was discovered and settled by Icelanders. Eirik the Red was the name of a man from the Breidafjord. He sailed from there to Greenland and claimed the land around what is now called Eiriksfjord. He gave the land its name and called it 'Greenland' because he said people would be more inclined to go there if it had a nice name."

It was academe's considered opinion, when I first read Ari's Book of the Icelanders 30 years ago, that in naming Greenland Eirik the Red had perpetrated a hoax. Ari practically came out and said it: Eirik's "nice name" was salesmanship, simple bait-and-switch.

Elsewhere, the Icelandic sagas have very little nice to say about Eirik's colony. A verse addressing a traveler headed to Greenland says:

I see death
in a dread place,
yours and mine,
northwest in the waves,
with frost and cold,
and countless wonders …

Trolls and evil spirits descended on Greenland in the winter, the sagas say, breaking men's bones and destroying their ships. One poignant scene describes a girl who came to Greenland accidentally, adrift on an ice floe; she stands on the shore on a summer's day and stares out to sea, dreaming of seeing the beautiful fields of Iceland again.

Greenland is indeed "more gray than green," as a visitor approaching by sea in 1835 described it. Flying over from Denmark I found it, in fact, more white than gray.

Yet Eirik may not have actually lied. Greenland still has little pockets of green that are as lush as Iceland must have been around the year 1000.

In 2006, I spent two weeks in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, on the seaward edge of a handful of long, twisting fjords that probe eastward 60 miles to the inland ice. It was here that the Danish missionary Hans Egede came in the 1700s, 300 years after the Viking settlements had disappeared, looking for lost Christian souls. Finding the culture totally Inuit, he reintroduced Christianity, wool clothing, wood-framed houses, and, so I was told, "good Danish food."

I visited Nuuk in mid-May, a week after "spring arrived," according to my hostess, Kristjana Motzfeldt, an Icelander married to a Greenlandic statesman. Built on a rocky spit three miles from end to end, the city of 15,000—more than one-quarter of the country’s entire population—sported no trees, no flowers. Old snow piles, gray with gravel, hid behind the bright-painted houses bolted to the bare rock. The reservoir was still iced over. The mountains that overlooked the town were sheer and ice gray, streaked with snow.

Yet the sun was hot and the air held a springlike mildness as I climbed the steep wooden staircases that linked the winding streets, most of which dead-ended in water. The children certainly thought it was spring: They waded barefoot in the bay. I took off my boots and dabbled my toes. It was refreshing.

You can read more about my trip to Greenland here:
"A Visit to Greenland" (March 13, 2012)
"Lambing Time" (March 28, 2012)

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler

“Well-written, thoroughly researched and adventure-filled, this story of a determined and very human young woman is timeless.”
–Kirkus Reviews (April 1, 2015)

That's the first review of my first novel.

Can you tell I'm thrilled? "Timeless." It tastes on the tongue like chocolate syrup.

Then again, just being able to type "my first novel" is a thrill. Sure, it's my sixth book. Shouldn't be such a big deal, but it is. It's not even really my "first" novel. That one was written 20 years ago and resides in my closet, alongside several manuscript boxes full of more-or-less completed pieces of fiction.

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler is the only one that's made it out the door and through the writing workshops (two of them) and past the agent and past the desks of the dozen or so editors who turned it down and back to me and out again to Stephen Roxburgh of namelos, who believed in it from the time it appeared in his Whole Novel Workshop (organized by the Highlights Foundation) and helped me turn it into the "timeless" book it became.

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler did have a substantial advantage over any other piece of fiction I've tried to write. Editors always say, "Write what you know," and I know Gudrid.

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler is based on 10-plus years of research into Gudrid’s life and times. Gudrid is mentioned in the two medieval Icelandic sagas about the Vikings’ adventures in Vinland, or Wine Land, around the year 1000. The Saga of the Greenlanders may have been written in the late 1100s—over a hundred years after Gudrid died. It was originally part of a longer, now lost, saga about Bishop Bjorn of Holar, who was Gudrid’s great-grandson. Another hundred years later, about 1295, a Saga of Gudrid was written to celebrate the founding of a nunnery by Abbess Hallbera, who was also descended from Gudrid. That saga has been lost too; all we have left is what’s now called The Saga of Eirik the Red.

These two sagas don’t agree on the particulars of Gudrid’s life, and they don’t tell us very much about her. She was born in Iceland, married in Greenland, and explored Wine Land; later (outside the scope of my novel, which focuses on her growing up), she visited Norway, returned to Iceland and raised two sons, and took a pilgrimage to Rome. She was beautiful, we are told, which means she was probably fair and blonde (dark hair being unattractive and red hair uncanny). She was intelligent, wise, and had a lovely singing voice.

Over the last fifty years, archaeologists have proved more and more of Gudrid’s story true. They have found the settlements where Gudrid lived in Greenland and Newfoundland; I visited both. In 2001 a team of archaeologists began working in northern Iceland. I volunteered on the project one summer as we uncovered a Viking house on the farm where the sagas say Gudrid finally made her home. The floorplan of the house looked like no other found in Iceland; it most closely resembled a house in Newfoundland.

I told the story of my summer working on the archaeological team in The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman, a nonfiction book published by Harcourt in 2007. I thought then that I had written all I could about Gudrid the Far-Traveler. Her spirit disagreed. As soon as that book came out, I began writing this one.

In spite of all my research--or maybe because of it--the story in The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler doesn't follow either of the two medieval sagas that mention her. Rather, it weaves a new story using them as warp and weft. Some of the details surprised me--that's one of the most fun parts of writing fiction, when the story takes control and writes itself through you.

For example, I didn't realize until I was well into writing The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler that Leif Eiriksson was the villain of Gudrid's story. Elsewhere on this blog I've argued that Leif shouldn't get all the credit for discovering America. (See "Who Discovered America?") Leif stopped here once--possibly by mistake--and never came back. Gudrid set sail for Wine Land twice, with two different husbands, intending to settle. She was the real explorer. I'm supposing that's where I got the idea that Gudrid and Leif were enemies.

With that in mind, other parts of Gudrid's story--parts the sagas left vague--fell into place for me. In my story, Gudrid was betrothed to Leif Eiriksson at her birth. All her life she has hated Leif, even though she’s never met this handsome son of the famous Viking Eirik the Red. She has hated the idea of Leif: the idea that she has to be a good wife to this stranger because of a vow her father swore long ago.

So when a handsome merchant comes to Iceland and asks for her hand, she prays her father will say yes. He doesn’t. As the story opens, Gudrid decides to defy him, running away to Greenland with her suitor. Her impulsive act ends in shipwreck and, within three years, to the tragic deaths of everyone she loves, including her suitor, her second husband, and even her father, leaving her at the mercy of a vengeful and violent Leif.

But Gudrid never gives up. Plucky, resourceful, and always willing to learn something new, she outwits Leif and at 19 marries the man she loves. Together they set out on the greatest of all Viking adventures: sailing into the west to the fabulous new land called Wine Land. Gudrid explores Wine Land for two years, until she meets the Native American girl who will become her friend and save her life—by sending her home.

The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler is written for young adults, ages 12 and up. I hope, indeed, it proves to be "timeless."

You can order The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler as a hardcover, paperback, or ebook directly from the publisher at namelos.com or order it from your favorite bookstore.

If you would like me to come speak to your school, book club, library, bookstore, or other group about Gudrid the Far-Traveler, let me know and we'll see what we can work out.