Letters from Iceland is title on a travel book made up of a series of letters by W. H. Auden and MacNeice that they wrote during their trip to Iceland in 1936. I am not going to write about this book, but about what a friend of mine from Iceland wrote to me once when I wanted to visit her:

Few people take interest in Iceland, but in these few the interest is passionate. We live maybe surrounded by ice, but we are like geysers. The remoteness of our contry in combination with its political and Viking history, make it just to be an amazing place visited by people with strong and very hyper romantic preconceptions.

I am neither hyper nor romantic, but I still want to visit Iceland - partially because of Gudrid, but partially because of what I saw and heard in this movie:

Most people know that Vikings explored North America five hundred years before Columbus. They recognize the name Leif Eiriksson and his father Eirik the Red, who discovered Greenland in 985 and set up a settlement there. But fewer have heard of the voyages of Gudrid, so called The Far Traveler. Her name appears in “The Saga of the Greenlanders” and “The Saga of Eirik the Red“:

She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her second husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland’s founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid’s second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At summer’s end, the crews beached their ships on a grassy shore and built a longhouse out of turf; there Gudrid gave birth to her son Snorri. For three years they explored their Vinland, or “Wine Land.” They found salmon and halibut, tall trees and lush grasslands, wine grapes, and a grain like wheat. They saw islands full of eider ducks, bears, or foxes, mountains and marvelous beaches, fjords with fierce currents and wide tidal lagoons. And they met strangers whose language they could not understand, strangers who had never seen an axe or a bull, who were delighted by the taste of milk and traded packs full of furs for thin strips of red wool cloth; strangers who fought with stone-tipped arrows and whose numbers were overwhelming. After three years, the Vikings abandoned their settlement more

“The Far Traveler” written by Nancy Marie Brown tells the story of Gudrid, an Icelandic woman whose travels took her to Greenland, Rome and North America. With the help of scientists, archaeologists and 21st century technology, Nancy Marie Brown uncovers Gudrid’s travels who have been the subject of myth and legend until recently. I got this book from Goran, and was pleasantly surprised finding out much more about Viking culture and how their women were praised for being brave and tough, just like the men. From today on Gudrid is my favourite female hero in history.

Gudrid and her son Snorri at the National Park of her homestead in Laugabrekka, Snaefellsness

PS: A great lecture and a slideshow by Nancy Marie Brown

From today on, you can find us on National Geographic Everyday Explorers website too. We have uploaded two videos so far. One of them is video from our trip to Mostar, Tekija and Pocitelj in Summer 2007:

PS: Pocitelj, Herzegovinian pearl engraved in a cliff, is still my favourite city in Herzegovina. 

“Afternoon in Pocitelj” by Izo Rokolj

This unique settlement has been listed as a possible UNESCO heritage site. Its recently reconstruction has returned the town to its original form. Besides its stunning oriental architecture and Ottoman touch, Pocitelj is home to the longest operating art colony in southeastern Europe . Artists from around the world gather here to paint the shiny red pomegranates and figs that grow in abundance on the hills of Pocitelj. The Hadzi-Alija Mosque has been reconstructed as well as the Sisman-Ibrahimpasina Medresa and the Gavran Kapetanovic house, all of which are open to visitors. The most striking object in Pocitelj is the Sahat-kula, a silo-shaped fort that towers from the top of the hill above the town. It housed watchmen and military to guard against possible invasion from the Neretva Valley … more 

While reading Kraig’s post about greatest and most famous travel adventures in history, I suddenly remembered that I forgot how amazed and happy I was while reading “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils” when I was about seven years old. Since the days of Hans Christian Andersen nothing in Scandinavian literature could be compared to this remarkable book written by Selma Lagerlöf (maybe only Pippi Longstocking but many years later).  Selma was Swedish novelist who in 1909 became the first woman and also the first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The book about Nils Holgersson Thumbietot and his adventures was first published in 1906, and it has been translated into thirty-seven different languages.  The book was commissioned by the Swedish Ministry of Education, which wanted a book to teach children about the country they were growing up in, about its geography and its history, its people and its animals.

Once there was a boy. He was, let us say, something like fourteen years old; long and loose jointed and towheaded. He wasn’t good for much, that boy. His chief delight was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief. It was a Sunday morning and the boy’s parents were getting ready for church. The boy, in his shirt sleeves, sat on the edge of the table thinking how lucky it was that both father and mother were going away so the coast would be clear for a couple of hours. “Good! Now I can take down pop’s gun and fire off a shot, without anybody’s meddling interference,” he said to himself.

PS: Unfortunately, I couldn’t find english version of Nils Holgersson’s wonderful adventures: