num_pages: 306
description: Five hundred years before Columbus a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland no one believed that the details of Gudrids story were true. Then in 2001 a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering womans last house buried under a hay field in Iceland just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques and tracing Gudrids steps on land and in the sagas Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spannedand expandedthe bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse. 
language: English
title: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
publisher: Harcourt