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.

Trolls: An Unnatural History, by John Lindow

What is a troll? That's the question answered (sort of) by the very first troll on record, a troll-woman who accosted the 9th-century Viking skáld Bragi the Old on a deserted forest track late one night and challenged him to a poetry match.

Trolls call me moon of the dwelling-Rungnir, she declaimed: giant's wealth-sucker, storm-sun's bale, seeress's friendly companion, guardian of corpse-fjord, swallower of heaven wheel: what is a troll other than that?

In an earlier post I talked about how difficult it is to understand Viking poetry (see "The Viking Art of Poetry"). What do these kennings--giant's wealth-sucker, storm-sun's bale--mean? John Lindow, in his book Trolls: An Unnatural History (Reaktion Books 2014), only explains one of them: swallower of heaven wheel means "swallower of the sun or moon," which in Norse mythology is a wolf.

Is this troll a wolf? A shapeshifting werewolf? A wolf-like monster? Who knows--all that matters is, it's scary. Says Lindow, "The exchange between Bragi and the troll woman forms a paradigm that will often recur: a threatening encounter, in a place far from human habitation, between troll and human, with the human emerging unscathed in the end."

The trolls always lose. Remember that. It will help when you see how long-lived and nasty these creatures can be.

Through the Viking Age, the Saga Age, and into Iceland's Sturlung Age, when the Icelandic sagas were being written, trolls were a kind of malevolent land spirit. A woman who throws a love token away is said to have given it to the trolls. A warrior swears, "May the trolls take me if I never again redden my sword with blood." These trolls were "associated with the Other," Lindow notes: "the mysterious, inexplicable, and unknowable. … Or to put it another way," he adds later, "as the giants are to the gods in the mythology, so trolls are to humans."

Not until the later Middle Ages, will trolls take on the form familiar to us, the kind of ugly, stupid monster that appears in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit or J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. In Illuga saga Griðarfóstra (written as late as the 15th century), an Icelandic youth enters a cave in search of fire. He hears the heavy footsteps of the cave dweller and sees a decidedly un-wolflike troll woman:

He thought a storm or squall was blowing out of her nostrils. Mucus was hanging down in front of her mouth. She had a beard but her head was bald. Her hands were like the claws of an eagle, but both arms were singed and the baggy shirt she was wearing reached no lower than her loins in back but all the way to her toes in front. Her eyes were green and her forehead broad; her ears fell widely. No one would call her pretty.

This paragon of ugliness persists in our imagination largely due to folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, who published a collection of Norwegian fairy tales in the 1840s. There we read: "'under that bridge lived a big, ugly troll, with eyes like pewter plates, and a nose as long as a rake handle.' Everybody knows this story," says Lindow. It's "The Three Billy Goats Gruff."

Of the ugly troll woman in the Icelandic cave, Lindow remarks: "What I find most striking about this description is the blurring of categories: male/female (beard and bald head), animal/human (claws), immodest/chaste (her garment). Such blurring suggests powerful operation of the imagination in creating the degree of otherness as it plays with the very shiftiness of trolls."

Blurring, otherness, shiftiness--and ugliness--these are the characteristics of the trolls that populate Scandinavian folk tales. In Sweden, "The trolls could change their shape," wrote folklorist Gunnar Olof Hylten-Cavallius, "and take on any sort of form whatever, such as hollowed-out trees, stumps, animals, skeins of yarn, rolling balls, etc."

Adds Lindow, "Trolls come at night. The night belongs to them, and they belong to the night." That's why--as Tolkien taught us--trolls turn to stone if the sun hits them. Actually, Lindow points out, that's only true for Icelandic trolls. According to Hylten-Cavallius, in Sweden it's giants whom the sun turns to stone. When Swedish trolls see the sun, they burst--pop!--and disappear.

Blurring, otherness, shiftiness, ugliness, and now darkness--or invisibility--or a dread of the light of truth… It didn't take long for literary artists to seize on the metaphor of the troll. When the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1867 sent Peer Gynt into the Hall of the Mountain King, the troll-king asked, "What is the difference between trolls and humans?"

Answered Peer, "There is no difference, as far as I can tell. Big trolls want to cook me and small trolls want to claw me--same with us, if they only dared."

Norwegian author Jonas Lie said the same in his collection of stories, Trolls, published in 1891. In an introduction, he wrote: That there is something of the troll in human beings, everyone knows who has an eye for such things. It is situated inside in the personality and binds it like the immoveable mountain, the fickle sea, and violent weather...

He writes of seeing the troll inside an old lawyer: a strikingly wooden face, eyes like two dull opaque glass stones, a strangely certain power of judgment, not liable to be moved or led astray by impulses. His surroundings blew off him like weather and wind; his mind was so absolutely certain … Trolldom lives in that stage inside people as a temperament, natural will, explosive force.

Trolls in modern literature not only "threaten us from the outside," says Lindow, "but they can lurk inside, too."

Which brings us to today's trolls: Internet trolls. According to one list Lindow quotes, the wilderness of the web is populated by "plain trolls, bashing trolls, smartass trolls, non-caring trolls, opinion trolls, 12-year-old trolls, blaming trolls." They continue to be ugly, shifty, fearing the light.

"In the old tradition, people who spent time in the world of the trolls described it mostly as unpleasant," Lindow concludes, "and I cannot say that my brief visit to the world of today's trolls was in any way pleasant. Yet I experienced, ever more strongly, the fact that we cannot truly know trolls. If we could, they would not be trolls. This holds for the very first trolls, found in Viking Age poetry, through the trolls who populated the wilds of Scandinavia, to the trolls in books, films, and the Internet. Trolls are what we are not, or what we think we are not. Or was Jonas Lie right? Could there be a bit of troll in each of us?"

Trolls: An Unnatural History by John Lindow was published in 2014 by Reaktion Books.

Fridrik Erlings's Boy on the Edge

Some books stay in my mind long after I've finished them. Some books stay in my soul. Fridrik Erlings's Boy on the Edge is one of these.

Written for young adults and translated by the author himself from Icelandic, Boy on the Edge is the story of big, ugly Henry, with his club foot and his stutter and his fear of reading aloud, son of an abused, alcoholic mother who is little more than a prostitute. Sounds bleak, but it's not. It's one of the most uplifting books I've ever read. Henry does not find happiness; Henry earns it.

Shunted from school to school, bullied past the breaking point, Henry snaps. Tragically, the person he hurts is the only one he loves: his mother. He is sent away to a reform camp run by a half-crazy evangelical minister on an isolated sheep-and-dairy farm far out in the Icelandic countryside. Arriving, scared, silent, resentful, he has his first brief hint of a future that could be different: The minister's wife, Emily, is making pancakes.

Writes Erlings: "There was this wonderful smell he'd never smelled before, and the sound of batter being poured gently into a frying pan, where it crackled briefly in melted butter, giving off an amazing scent."

Despite the pancakes, all is not well on the farm, either. The minister is a tyrant; Emily is unfulfilled. They have different visions for their reform school--and vastly different methods. The minister preaches hellfire and damnation and locks misbehaving boys in a dark basement room, visiting only to kneel with them in prayer. Emily, instead, teaches Henry how to milk the cows, feed the sheep, and clean up the manure: He was the King of Dung, collecting the dues from his subjects, filling the wheelbarrow. … He was somebody. Who would have thought? 

Of course, the thrill of being the King of Dung wears off. But throughout the book, the peaceful rhythms of the farm, the glory of the nearby sea, the danger of the sea cliffs, the pounding of the rain, the treacherous lava field, with its ruts and cracks, the brutal butchering of the bull, the happy cavorting of the cows in the spring, the serenity of the moon in the vast night sky, and the busy-ness of the little birds play counterpoint to Henry's efforts to understand himself.

The rain showers arrived from the ocean and the snow melted into the lava. One day a green knoll of moss appeared from under the snow and the southern winds rounded up the fluffy clouds and made them gallop across the sky. 
The promise of spring laughed in a brook and whispered in the yellow grass at the swamp. It shook the ptarmigan in flight with a playful gust of wind, which made it spring into the air, brown-breasted and white-winged.

Henry tries hard to make friends with some of the other reform-school boys, only to be disappointed over and over again. Ultimately, his striving for friendship leads to disaster--as, simultaneously, the fabric of the reform-school is unraveling. Then, in a tense and brilliant ending, Erlingsson allows Henry, almost in spite of himself, to succeed, finding not only friendship, but love.

Like Halldor Laxness's Brekkukotsannall, published in English as The Fish Can Sing, Boy on the Edge uses a child's coming of age to examine the failings of society, contrasting city and country, new ways and old, and reaching a compromise in which tradition can be honored and modernity embraced. How should we live in the world? How should we love one another? The answers are in Boy on the Edge.

Boy on the Edge by Fridrik Erlings was published in the U.S. by Candlewick Press in 2014. It received a starred review as one of the best books of the year from Publisher's Weekly, which judged it "poetic and powerful." I highly recommend it.