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Mountains Glacier. I have sat where Gudrid as a girl might have sat, watching the white birds circle and waiting for a ship to come in.
    Yet, daydreaming in the low summer sun, imagining what the place must have looked like when Einar unloaded his wares a thousand years ago, I bump up against the barrier faced by every reader of the sagas: Is it true?
    There are werewolves in the sagas, and trolls. Soothsayers, and warlocks who rule the weather. Ghosts who walk and strangle their foes—or give their widows charitable advice. Like Homer’s
Iliad,
the sagas were based on old tales told around the fire to enliven the long winter nights. Generations of storytellers can be counted on to elaborate—and to overlook.
    Who was there to write down what rich Einar said when he first saw Gudrid? Einar and his fancy clothes are never mentioned again, in this saga or in any other Icelandic source. Nor is Gudrid’s father reckoned among the chieftains in the other tales that take place on this peninsula. If Einar did not ask for Gudrid’s hand, if Gudrid’s father was not ashamed his money troubles were so well known, if he did not, therefore, up and move to Greenland—if this whole scene is fictitious—is the rest of
The Saga of Eirik the Red
fiction, too? Did Leif Eiriksson discover America? Did Gudrid live there and give birth to her son? Did she see Norway and Rome? Was she as plucky and capable, as adventurous and adaptable, as the stories imply? Are the sagas a true witness to the Viking world?
    Historians have debated this point since at least 1772, when the British explorer Sir Joseph Banks brought the literature of Iceland to the attention of the English-speaking world. There’s just so little to go on. No one in Gudrid’s society could read or write. Literacy did not come to Iceland until the Christian Church, made the official religion in the year 1000, set up schools in the 1030s. The first book in Icelandic was
The Book of the Icelanders,
a brief and sober history written by Ari the Learned in the early 1100s, based, he says, on the recollections of wise old women and men.
    The peak of saga writing came a century later. Thousands of fireside tales about kings and mythological heroes, about Iceland’s first settlers, and about men and women who had made names for themselves in one way or another were collected and gathered into manuscripts, some by masters of the literary art, others by beginners. Gudrid’s story is not found in the great sagas, the ones Jane Smiley places at the heart of human literary endeavor. It fills most of
The Saga of Eirik the Red,
which can be read aloud in less than an hour. Gudrid also appears in
The Saga of the Greenlanders,
which is even shorter and contradicts
The Saga of Eirik the Red
on several important points, especially concerning Gudrid’s early life.
    I think of the two girls as Red Gudrid (the one in
The Saga of Eirik the Red)
and Green Gudrid (from
The Saga of the Greenlanders).
Red Gudrid left for Greenland as a pampered, protected daughter, too good for young Einar’s offer of marriage. She sailed in her father’s ship, surrounded by his belongings and connections. Then her fairy tale ended. The ship wandered at sea all summer. The food and fresh water ran out. Sickness set in. Gudrid watched many of the people she knew and loved, including Orm and his wife, die miserable deaths. She undoubtedly grew up. Yet her social status was relatively unaffected. The ship made a safe landfall in southern Greenland just before winter, and Gudrid and her father were welcomed as guests by Eirik the Red’s cousin, who farmed there.
    At this point in the story comes an example of the antiquarianism in the sagas that so attracted Victorian writers like Sir Walter Scott. That winter, we read, the hunting was poor and meals were scanty. To learn how to alleviate the household’s hunger (or perhaps to take their minds off it), the farmer decided to hold a seance. Though the saga was written