The Sea Road

This is the story of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who sailed beyond the end of the world, gave birth to the first European to be born in the Americas beyond Greenland, voyaged to the court of the King of Norway and made a pilgrimage to Rome. Her tale is so extraordinary that I was irresistibly drawn to the parallel of Poilar Crookleg, whose first sentence I have echoed above.

Expanding on her source material in the Icelandic sagas, Elphinstone in The Sea Road has Gudrid’s story framed by a Praefatio and Postscriptum written by Icelandic monk Asgar Asleifarsson who is - at the behest of Cardinal Hildebrand for the sake of some ephemeral Vatican political intrigue - taking down the memories of a Gudrid now a grandmother. On her dark (to show more Icelanders) appearance - though in Italy she is fair - she says, “Now it makes no difference. Old women are the same the world over.” The text is mostly Gudrid’s as supposedly written down by Asgar but there are occasional scenes observed in the third person and rendered in italics.

Elphinstone’s handling of her tale is exquisite. The characters live on the page and the relationship between Gudrid and Asgar is deftly portrayed. Despite his replies to her never being transcribed we still get insights into his thoughts and feelings. There is a prefatory list of principal characters which is unnecessary as there is never any difficulty in distinguishing them.

Gudrid was born just after Christianity had come to Iceland and on the death of her mother was fostered out by her father to his sister’s home. She herself was baptised when she was fourteen. There is tension between the old religion and the new in Iceland and Greenland both and some in Gudrid herself. Her first crisis comes when she is asked as a young girl to help a witch (this is the word used in the text) by singing along with the old songs.

Her father Thorbjorn, a friend of Eirik Raudi (Eric the Red) had always hankered after adventure and finally undertakes the voyage to Greenland taking Gudrid with him. Though of course the winters are harsh, through Asgar Gudrid tells us that “Eirik’s land is better than any she saw till she went to Norway” and at least till the time she left, “There have been no killings in the Green Land.” Leif Eiriksson, Raudi’s son, has by this time discovered Vinland. Gudrid might have been married to him but for his dalliance with an earl’s daughter in Ireland. Instead she marries another of Raudi’s sons, Thorstein, with whom she made her first voyage to Vinland, but he falls sick one winter in Greenland and dies along with Grumhild, the wife of their host Thorstein the Black. The two survivors spend five months in the same hut with the dead bodies, haunted by their ghosts. “In that place the dead watched everything,” she tells Asgar. “All that winter we were outside the boundaries of this world of yours,” and, “You look as if my callous attitude shocked you, and yet you’d not be shocked at all if I were a man and told you I’d wiped out a whole settlement in blood feud.” Spirits were never very far away in Gudrid’s world. “The launching of a ship is no place for new gods.” It is with a second husband, Thorfinn Harlsefni, come to the Green Land to make profit, that she again sails to Vinland and this time beyond.

Among Gudrid’s many insights we have, “You think there is a pattern to the way people behave... But I have never got to know any household well, when I didn’t find out quite soon that they don’t keep to the pattern..... the pattern doesn’t exist. I’ve never met a family that behaved normally. Have you?” which may be a comment on Tolstoy’s dictum about happy families. Then we have, “Girls are much harder to deal with generally but as far as I can make out boys of that age never think about anything except sex.” Make that boys of any age perhaps.

The Sea Road is a wonderful reminder that the Dark Age world was not as parochial as we might believe; a magnificently told tale about an extraordinary woman and extraordinary times, yet times which to Gudrid herself were unexceptional. show less

This is excellent historical fiction about an 11th century woman who is part of a group that travels to what is now North America and lives there for a couple years. She is telling her story to a scribe in Rome after living an adventurous life. The idea is that her time in this unknown land is valuable to hear about and should be transcribed before she makes her way back to Iceland.

Gudrid lives in both Iceland and Greenland and later in Norway, but the focus is her life growing up in Iceland and then her marriages and travels to the new world. The descriptions of the scenery and the land are really beautiful and I was completely swept away in her story.

The writing is a bit slow and dense, but I thought it worked really well for the show more story. I liked the details of life and felt the book worked as an imagining of what life could have been like a thousand years ago. show less

The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone - a retelling of events from the Icelandic sagas, that was recommended by several people on a holiday in Iceland.

I finished this book today, having read it in double-quick time as I found it very hard to put down. "The Sea Road" is the story of the travels of Gudrid, an 11th century Viking woman born in pagan Iceland. She went to live in Greenland before going on a voyage to Vinland, where she became the mother of the first European child to be born in America. The story is framed by her pilgrimage to Rome as an old woman, where she tells her story to an Icelandic monk called Agnar, who writes down a Latin translation for a cardinal.

It is a re-telling of happenings from several of the Icelandic Sagas show more as the Vikings explore the lands of the Northern Atlantic. As the sagas are rather minimalist in their story-telling style, they lend themselves well to being re-told, as the novelist has room to flesh events out, without changing the basic story. I enjoyed the way that the story was told to the monk, with Gudrid's digressions into how warm it was in Italy and her questioning of Agnar about his life and various theological issues. He never writes down his answers, so you just get her question, a row of asterisks and then her reactions to whatever he has said. This is a surprisingly effective technique. show less

This wonderful, evocative novel tells the story of a remarkable woman. In her youth, Gudrid was one of a small company of settlers who sailed west beyond the known world to the shores of Vinland, a country of grain, grapes and timber, with the ambition of setting up a traders' camp there. Now an old woman, she has turned her face east and made a pilgrimage from the borders of the world to its centre, in Rome, where she is invited to tell her life story to a young Icelandic monk so that it can be written down for the edification of the Church. Gudrid's world is one where the boundary between the human and the spirit worlds is fluid, and where a voyage beyond the charted waters of the mortal realm might well take you into the domain of show more the gods. Over the course of a long Roman summer she conjures up the ice and bleak beauty of her childhood and youth in Iceland and Greenland, and the community of brave men and women who lived there, culminating in the story of one of the greatest expeditions into the unknown in history.

Elphinstone adds conviction to her story by steeping every page in a sensitivity to the cultural mores and the folklore of 11th-century Iceland. This is a period when Christianity is still finding a foothold in these wild places, and Gudrid's world is one where the new Christ sits uneasily alongside the enduring traditions of Thor, Hel and the ghosts and demons whose unquiet souls roam the landscape. It's eerie in parts, adventurous in others, but never less than captivating; and Gudrid is an attractive and compelling narrator. Highly recommended for anyone interested in early medieval Europe and fans of the sagas - but also for those who simply enjoy fine writing. A dignified, elegant treat of a book.

For a longer review, please see my blog:
http://theidlewoman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-sea-road-margaret-elphinstone.htm... show less

This is a book I will read again and I highly recommend it for High School ages through adults. It is the story of the life and travels of the Viking age woman explorer, Gudrid of Iceland. The characters and events are based on accounts of events in the Icelandic sagas: Eirik’s Saga, Graenlendinga Saga and Eyrbyggja Saga. She was the most traveled woman of the world in the Viking age, having traveled from Iceland and Norway to Greenland and North America and then on to Rome. The book is written as the dictation of the elderly Gudrid in Rome, to a young monk originally from Iceland. The author’s prose weaves details of the everyday, the spiritual and the geographical environment into an outstanding historical novel. Anyone who has show more ever lived in and appreciated the beauty of the North will love to read this. Several times I stopped and re-read passages in this book because of not only the depiction of the natural world but because of the literary beauty of it. That is a rare thing for me. I am very interested in reading her other works after reading this. show less

This book promised more than it delivered. I wasn't looking for a summary of Gudrid's life; I was expecting more of her journeys, perhaps touching on her life story. I was glad there was at least something on Vinland. I did revel in any physical descriptions of Icelnd, Greenland, and Vinland. They were beautiful.

I have enjoyed reading this book a lot. I read another book not so long ago that almost completely overlapped this one in subject, but was nowwhere near as good. Gudrid felt like a very real and likeable woman to me by the end. I liked her a lot and could really believe everything she had to say.