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

I mean: to sing or not to sing. As a kind of follow-up to yesterday’s post about music for movies, I’ll continue up on the same path in this post. This has to do with our nomadic ears, adventurous time and blogpost that I saw at Moe’s place which reminded me of my first encounter with Norewgian folk songs. When I came to Norway in 1993 namely, I saw an interview with Agnes Buen Garnås and Jan Garbarek. They were talking about old Norwegian vocal tradition. They called it kveding and explained that kveding was a style of unaccompanied singing evolved over the past centuries in rural Norway. The roots went back to Gregorian chant and to the Viking Age. Agnes could tell that kveding was disinguished from classical singing by a flatter tone with no vibrato and with rich ornamentation.  Then she started to tell a story about a man who slept for 13 days and had dreamt about his descent into Hell from Draumkvedet. She was actually telling by singing, and she sang just three of 59 verses. The day after that day I bought Agnes’ and Jan’s album ‘Rosenfole’, and my journey through Norwegian landscape could start. I hope your will start here.