The Far Traveler is a combination history, biography, and memoir based around the life of Gudrid, an Icelandic woman who travelled to Greenland and beyond over the course of her long life. I originally rated this 5/5 after the first 50 pages, but dropped it down to 3/5 because of the huge issue I had with Gudrid not being front and center.Īdditionally, Brown does provide pages and pages of notes, acknowledgements, and sources to further your reading of the period. Brown had a lot of opportunity to make Gudrid a part of the conversation, and she isn't even a full stop at the end of a sentence. I learned a lot about Viking age, and this book definitely whetted my appetite to learn more, but I know even less about Gudrid than I did when I started the book - which seemed to defeat the purpose.īrown admits in the beginning there is scarce information about Gudrid, just a few mentions in the sagas, but if you're going to explore the period of someone's life, shouldn't you at least tie them into the scene? And this is where I think the book failed. By this I mean you'll be dozens and dozens of pages in with discussion on long house building or Viking weaving technology before you realise Gudrid has not been mentioned, even in passing, once. Simply put, this was not so much the tale of Gudrid rather Gudrid was the weak link for Brown to explore life and time of 10th century Iceland from a woman's perspective.

The Far Traveler become my albatross and I couldn't shake myself from its grip. This book is bizarre in that the premise is good, the writing is good, but it took me nearly six months to finish which should have been a few days, maybe a week of solid reading. 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. I recognize that there's scant information about her, but what there was could have been better used, in my opinion. 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. In her old age, she made a pilgrimage to Rome and became a nun. 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. The story of Gudrid should have been riveting. 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. I just felt that it was an interesting premise that somehow faltered.

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.

The far traveler by nancy marie brown