Lunch with a Viking
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If you could have lunch with anyone from the Viking world, who would you choose? Well, I reckon Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir would make a good choice (as well as being a less dangerous option than some other potential candidates): the farthest travelled woman in the world during the Viking age, she was daughter-in-law to Eirik the Red of Greenland, and a member of the Viking expedition which made a failed attempt to settle Newfoundland in the eleventh century. Elphinstone has clearly done her research carefully, and conveys a colourful picture of the day-to-day life of the Viking communities in Iceland and Greenland. However, this is the least of the book's pleasures. Predominantly, this novel is a triumph of voice: Elphinstone's Gudrid is a marvellous storyteller, and completely convincing as a character. Although always a fast-moving tale, the book is constructed with great care: what we are given is Gudrid's first-person narrative as transcribed by Icelandic monk Agnar, whose own not uninteresting life story is tantalisingly hinted at in his own pre-amble and summing-up, and in Gudrid's asides to him while telling her own story. Gudrid's story is intercut with short italicised passages describing what she chooses to omit; and this device works to telling effect. Both a ripping yarn and a careful character study, this is a book which should please a wide audience. It isn't entirely uncharted fictional water: there is Jane Smiley's excellent "The Greenlanders", and Canadian writer Joan Clark's "Eiriksdottir". However, Elphinstone's book is different in mood; and the choice of Gudrid as the central figure is felicitous. A breath of fresh air in modern Scottish writing, which still tends all too often towards urban grimness.
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Viking Sagas Brought To Life
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Anyone who has read any of the Icelandic sagas knows that they are often pretty dry reading, a virtual recitation of events. Margaret Elphinstone has clothed the bare bones of the Greenland and Vinland sagas with flesh and blood. Her central character is Gudrid, the first European woman to give birth in North America. Being a woman, albeit a most remarkable one, she is given short shrift in the sagas themselves. I read the two sagas after reading The Sea Road, and, although the source material runs to but a few dozen pages, I was amazed to find all the central events of the novel there--Gudrid's childhood in Iceland, life in Erik the Red's Greenland colony, the voyage to Vinland, and Gudrid's late-life pilgrimage to Rome (which provides the framing for the narrative). Elphinstone weaves the many peculiar events of the sagas--some accepted as historically accurate, some plainly unbelievable--into a whole and beautiful cloth. Being a woman's story, The Sea Road will appeal strongly to women, but there is enough blood-and-guts adventure to make the red-blooded viking enthusiast happy.
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Compelling, absorbing, moving.
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This historical novel stands head and shoulders above all the others set in the Viking era that I have read. Margaret Elphinstone's sensitive and intelligent writing makes this more than just a story about Vikings.
The characters are full, rounded and beleivable. The detail of time and place can make you feel you were there; one incidental description of a gentian closing it's petals as a woman's shadow falls across it, is the sort of attention to detail that marks a skilled story teller.
The history is right, the sources are identifiable and her understanding of Viking age society is clear. But you don't need to be a history buff for this book to appeal; it is a beautifully written story of a strong woman in a man's world.
Buy it, read it, read it again.
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Vikings in America explored through a woman's eyes
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Centuries before Columbus, Vikings possibly reached North America and gained a tentative foothold in Newfoundland, although the native inhabitants frustrated hopes of a permanent settlement. Through the eyes of the Gudrid, who sailed first from Iceland to Greenland, and thence to the New World, we are given a vivid insight into a frequently misunderstood culture at a time of crucial change. As Christianity extends its influence and it becomes politic to convert, the power of pagan Gods wanes slowly in these distant lands. Elphinstone gives a detailed picture of day to day survival in this harsh climate, and the rich oral and religious traditions of its people, enhanced by her haunting literary style and a deep feeling for landscape and the ways in which it shapes a culture. By framing Gudrid's life story as a narrative dictated to a monk of Icelandic origin in Rome, Elphinstone is able to draw contrasts between the syncretism of Viking faith and the more rigid doctrines of early mediaeval Christendom. In addition, compelling questions are raised concerning the very nature of storytelling, as a civilisation based on oral tradition confronts literacy. A remarkable novel, which deserves to be better known.
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