This is the story of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, who sailed beyond the end of the world, gave birth to the first European to be born in the Americas beyond Greenland, voyaged to the court of the King of Norway and made a pilgrimage to Rome. Her tale is so extraordinary that I was irresistibly drawn to the parallel of Poilar Crookleg, whose first sentence I have echoed above.

Expanding on her source material in the Icelandic sagas, Elphinstone in The Sea Road has Gudrid’s story framed by a Praefatio and Postscriptum written by Icelandic monk Asgar Asleifarsson who is - at the behest of Cardinal Hildebrand for the sake of some ephemeral Vatican political intrigue - taking down the memories of a Gudrid now a grandmother. On her dark (to Icelanders) appearance - though in Italy she is fair - she says, “Now it makes no difference. Old women are the same the world over.” The text is mostly Gudrid’s as supposedly written down by Asgar but there are occasional scenes observed in the third person and rendered in italics.

Elphinstone’s handling of her tale is exquisite. The characters live on the page and the relationship between Gudrid and Asgar is deftly portrayed. Despite his replies to her never being transcribed we still get insights into his thoughts and feelings. There is a prefatory list of principal characters which is unnecessary as there is never any difficulty in distinguishing them.

Gudrid was born just after Christianity had come to Iceland and on the death of her mother was fostered out by her father to his sister’s home. She herself was baptised when she was fourteen. There is tension between the old religion and the new in Iceland and Greenland both and some in Gudrid herself. Her first crisis comes when she is asked as a young girl to help a witch (this is the word used in the text) by singing along with the old songs.

Her father Thorbjorn, a friend of Eirik Raudi (Eric the Red) had always hankered after adventure and finally undertakes the voyage to Greenland taking Gudrid with him. Though of course the winters are harsh, through Asgar Gudrid tells us that “Eirik’s land is better than any she saw till she went to Norway” and at least till the time she left, “There have been no killings in the Green Land.” Leif Eiriksson, Raudi’s son, has by this time discovered Vinland. Gudrid might have been married to him but for his dalliance with an earl’s daughter in Ireland. Instead she marries another of Raudi’s sons, Thorstein, with whom she made her first voyage to Vinland, but he falls sick one winter in Greenland and dies along with Grumhild, the wife of their host Thorstein the Black. The two survivors spend five months in the same hut with the dead bodies, haunted by their ghosts. “In that place the dead watched everything,” she tells Asgar. “All that winter we were outside the boundaries of this world of yours,” and, “You look as if my callous attitude shocked you, and yet you’d not be shocked at all if I were a man and told you I’d wiped out a whole settlement in blood feud.” Spirits were never very far away in Gudrid’s world. “The launching of a ship is no place for new gods.” It is with a second husband, Thorfinn Harlsefni, come to the Green Land to make profit, that she again sails to Vinland and this time beyond.

Among Gudrid’s many insights we have, “You think there is a pattern to the way people behave... But I have never got to know any household well, when I didn’t find out quite soon that they don’t keep to the pattern..... the pattern doesn’t exist. I’ve never met a family that behaved normally. Have you?” which may be a comment on Tolstoy’s dictum about happy families. Then we have, “Girls are much harder to deal with generally but as far as I can make out boys of that age never think about anything except sex.” Make that boys of any age perhaps.

The Sea Road is a wonderful reminder that the Dark Age world was not as parochial as we might believe; a magnificently told tale about an extraordinary woman and extraordinary times, yet times which to Gudrid herself were unexceptional. ( )

This book promised more than it delivered. I wasn't looking for a summary of Gudrid's life; I was expecting more of her journeys, perhaps touching on her life story. I was glad there was at least something on Vinland. I did revel in any physical descriptions of Icelnd, Greenland, and Vinland. They were beautiful. ( )

This wonderful, evocative novel tells the story of a remarkable woman. In her youth, Gudrid was one of a small company of settlers who sailed west beyond the known world to the shores of Vinland, a country of grain, grapes and timber, with the ambition of setting up a traders' camp there. Now an old woman, she has turned her face east and made a pilgrimage from the borders of the world to its centre, in Rome, where she is invited to tell her life story to a young Icelandic monk so that it can be written down for the edification of the Church. Gudrid's world is one where the boundary between the human and the spirit worlds is fluid, and where a voyage beyond the charted waters of the mortal realm might well take you into the domain of the gods. Over the course of a long Roman summer she conjures up the ice and bleak beauty of her childhood and youth in Iceland and Greenland, and the community of brave men and women who lived there, culminating in the story of one of the greatest expeditions into the unknown in history.

Elphinstone adds conviction to her story by steeping every page in a sensitivity to the cultural mores and the folklore of 11th-century Iceland. This is a period when Christianity is still finding a foothold in these wild places, and Gudrid's world is one where the new Christ sits uneasily alongside the enduring traditions of Thor, Hel and the ghosts and demons whose unquiet souls roam the landscape. It's eerie in parts, adventurous in others, but never less than captivating; and Gudrid is an attractive and compelling narrator. Highly recommended for anyone interested in early medieval Europe and fans of the sagas - but also for those who simply enjoy fine writing. A dignified, elegant treat of a book.

For a longer review, please see my blog:
http://theidlewoman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-sea-road-margaret-elphinstone.htm... ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/201232-sea-road-margaret-elphinstone.htm... ( )

I have enjoyed reading this book a lot. I read another book not so long ago that almost completely overlapped this one in subject, but was nowwhere near as good. Gudrid felt like a very real and likeable woman to me by the end. I liked her a lot and could really believe everything she had to say. ( )