Solid book. Sometimes it was so dense with useful and interesting information that my brain would overload and I'd lose the thread of the story. I found it really helpful to have my computer nearby so I could look up images of the artifacts and videos of some of the activities, especially spinning and weaving - her descriptions are good but I just could not visualize wtf she was talking about when things got whorly and wefty. ( )

This book is why I only use 5 stars for an absolutely splendiforous book. This is one of them. Ms. Brown does not try to write a historical fiction novel or a speculative "who she must have been" book. Instead, she takes ways to research a life and puts them all together: Icelandic sagas, Viking history, archeology, and needlework. And creates a rich book that explains how Gudrid, a Viking wife, mother, and daughter, made a voyage across the Northern Atlantic ocean in about the year 1000, gave birth to a son, and made it back to Iceland 3 years later.

Along the way, we learn about Viking ship building techniques, how the forests yielded the particular tree with the particular V-shape to it to serve as the ship's ribs. Several trees, in fact. And a tree with a straight trunk, about 36' high, to serve as the mast. And how the nails were cut off once they were embedded, instead of bent down.

Then there is navigation through the Northern Atlantic, perhaps when the sun barely sets, without astrolabes, through the thick fog and possibly in pitching seas. Much of the archeological evidence about Vikings is from a prosperous farm, inhabited between 1000 and 1400, called "Farm Beneath the Sand" that was discovered in Greenland in 1991. It was later claimed by the Greenland tides 6 years later.

The map that accompanies this book is a brilliant viewpoint of an Icelandic voyage to Vinland, "Wine Land" which could be anywhere along the Eastern US coast. And Ms. Brown provides quotes and papers for all the researchers who claim what they think was *the* place where Vikings settled because, well, grapes. But the best evidence comes from northern Newfoundland in L'Anse aux Meadows where a sharpening stone and other Viking relics from the proper timeframe were found.

And the needlework! Thank the Goddesses of Threads that Ms. Brown put as much research into thread and cloth as she did into all the other discoveries and explanations! For the general public to know the painstaking way to take a shorn fleece, wash it, card it, then using a drop spindle to create thread. And the different whorls (disks) that are used to create the different thicknesses (or weights) of thread in drop spinning lends credence to the excavated homesteads where these whorls are found. They pinpoint the room, usually to the side of the Viking longhouse, where the women sat and spun, And wove. While I don't have a complete visual of a Viking loom, it is not a treadle loom. It's a walking loom. An estimate in the book is that a "hardworking weaver walked 23 miles every day."

What makes this book work on so many levels is the story-telling, the lyricism, of the words on the page. It is carefully crafted to give the history of a woman who lived a thousand years ago, who went on a dangerous voyage, and came home to create a prosperous farm, Glaumbauer, in northern Iceland that was excavated and researched in the early 2000's. ( )

should be subtitled Saga Archeology - well written, and in some spots even insightful, but a lot of what I would consider pure speculation, and which the author would probably admit is unavoidable in a book like this. Worth the read. ( )

I've read a lot of Icelandic Saga, so I was completely into this book. It's the story of the archeology behind the life of Gudrun, viking woman and far traveler. A very, very interesting book. ( )

I've been reading this book since the end of March, and I don't really know why I kept avoiding it all these months. I just felt that it was an interesting premise that somehow faltered. There was nothing wrong with the scholarship, or the writing, but it felt disjointed to me as if the author simply didn't know how to construct a narrative.

The story of Gudrid should have been riveting. This is a woman who traveled from her Scandinavian home to Greenland, Iceland, and the area of the Americas known to Vikings as "Vinland," for its wild grapes. In her old age, she made a pilgrimage to Rome and became a nun. But the book goes every which-way, bouncing from her life, to archeological information, to Erik the Red, and back again, never quite allowing the reader to come to know Gudrid on a level where we could feel engaged with her life and adventures. I recognize that there's scant information about her, but what there was could have been better used, in my opinion.

Still, if you're interested in Viking travels to the new world, this book does offer some insights, and that's not a bad thing. ( )