I really enjoyed reading Nancy Marie Brown's The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman. I think I am so slow reading nonfiction because of the vast amount of information an author has to present to the reader. Certainly in this case there is much to think about and digest. Although Brown writes about a Viking woman named Gudrid who lived around 985 and crossed the Atlantic multiple times, the book is really about so much more than that. Brown pieces together the story of Gudrid's life, or what might have been her life, through many sources--Icelandic Sagas, archaeological digs, and her own wanderings and interviews with historians and other experts. Gudrid is somewhat elusive, but Brown manages to provide a very plausible argument for what her life may have been like. As well there is much discussion about the lives of 10th century Vikings in general and it is quite interesting.
The Vikings were all over the place. Not just Norway, but the Hebridean Islands, Iceland, Greenland and even New Foundland (possibly all along the North American coast) amongst others. These are some of the places Brown touches on and visited. There is archaeological evidence to prove their presence in these locales. It had to have been a harsh life--especially trying to live in places as unforgiving as Iceland and Greenland where there really are not a lot of natural resources. Gudrid made her way to all these places. Even at the end of her life she made a pilgrimage to Rome.
There are so many quotable passages in this book. Brown truly does impart a great amount of information. She obviously did her homework (and did it well) and you definitely get the feeling that this is a subject that is very dear to her heart. She goes from subject to subject seamlessly and then wraps things back around to where she initially began. Her writing style is chatty but knowledgeable, and for me I never thought it was dull (it was a great follow up to Kristin Lavransdatter). Because I love needlework I am always naturally interested in anything to do with textiles, and I marked a few passages that I thought I'd share. Brown talks about a burial ship discovered in Norway, in which was found the bodies of two women, one likely a queen and the other her servant. The cloth a queen would have worn might have been made of wool, silk and/or linen.
"Light, supple fabrics that clung to her form and draped elegantly, woven of several different textures in thread counts as high as 150 threads per inch."
If you are a needleworker you can appreciate how finely woven a cloth of 150 threads per inch is. Very, very fine. The highest thread count I can even work on when I am stitching on linen is 40 threads per inch, and that is pretty tiny. Granted this is cloth that would be made into a dress perhaps, but still can you imagine weaving that? And what would a Viking woman have worn?
"Based on the evidence of other burials, under their wool gowns the women would have worn an ankle-length shift or chemise of finely pleated linen, pinned at the throat with a small bronze or silver brooch. Linen, being made of plant fibers, decays more readily than wool, and little of it remains. But traces of linen are often preserved pressed into the backs of brooches, where contact with the metal has protected them. Archaeologists have also deduced that the Oseberg queen wore a linen headdress--impressed into a clump of feathers on the bed was the shadow of a lacy, open weave. The linen could have been white and glossy; linen smoothers have been found in many other Norse women's graves. Made by flattening a single fist-sized droplet of dark glass, these smoothers were still used in Norway and Scotland in the nineteenth century instead of irons."
Weaving/making cloth was an integral part of a Viking woman's life. At one point it was even used as legal currency. Brown spoke with experts from Copenhagen's Center for Textile Research about a Viking woman's work:
"Even if they had slaves to do their spinning, Viking women had to watch. They had to know it was good enough. What is Gudrid's status? If she was rich, she would be doing mostly sewing and embroidery. Rich women did some spinning, but they never did weaving--at least, they were not producing everyday textiles. But I'm quite sure Gudrid learned how to do it all. We see, historically, that it's important for all women to know how to produce fine cloth. Textiles are often used as gifts. It's a sign of a woman's status that she could produce excellent textiles."
The expert goes on to say:
"It's not so strange that textiles were so valuable and that people appreciated them so much as gifts. For just two Viking Age costumes at Lejre, one male and one female, we had to produce 40,000 meters of thread. For one sail for a ship, around 100 square meters in size, we had to produce over 300,000 meters of thread. It's endless meters of thread."
Some of the work these women did literally would take years. She talks about weaving in some detail, and it sounds like such careful, painstakingly meticulous work. It almost seems like for the women who did it, it was their life. But it was an important aspect of their lives as it was one of the few commodities that was available for trade from somewhere like Iceland. Reading these sections puts me in the mood to read a couple of books that I acquired over the holidays; Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth . Although I have a couple of other nonfiction books I need to get to first, these two are close to the top of the pile otherwise.
If you have any sort of interest in archeology, Viking history, women's history you might also enjoy The Far Traveler. It's immensely readable (not at all dry and stuffy), and though I've mentioned lots about clothmaking, there is really an amazing lot of other information to be had here as well. Too much for me to try and mention in one post! My only disappointment is the lack of any sort of illustrations. There might not have been much to see really at these archaeological sites, but reading about them and the artifacts found makes you want to see them as well.