By this I mean you'll be dozens and dozens of pages in with discussion on long house building or Viking weaving technology before you realise Gudrid has not been mentioned, even in passing, once. Simply put, this was not so much the tale of Gudrid rather Gudrid was the weak link for Brown to explore life and time of 10th century Iceland from a woman's perspective. The Far Traveler become my albatross and I couldn't shake myself from its grip. This book is bizarre in that the premise is good, the writing is good, but it took me nearly six months to finish which should have been a few days, maybe a week of solid reading.

To conclude: not the best book I've read of this type, but it did peak my interest in Icelandic sagas and Viking history, so I'll give it that. I finished the book still wondering what was so amazing about her, other than the fact that she traveled with men. While her tangents are interesting, and I certainly learned a lot about Vikings in general, I couldn't help being frustrated that I wasn't learning about Gudrid. The author spends a lot of time veering off into various directions, whether it's wondering how many sheep Eirik the Red might have had, or listing the items a Viking queen had with her when she was buried. I felt like the author had done all this research on Vikings and archeology and Icelandic sagas and didn't really know how to put it all together into a readable book that tells one cohesive story.įor instance, the book is supposed to be about Gudrid, this amazing Far Traveler who journeyed to the New World and visited Rome and such, but you only get snippets about her until over halfway through the book.

This was an interesting book, but it was also all over the place.

The Far Traveler by Nancy Marie Brown