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at least two hundred years after the event, the seer is described in wonderful detail. She wore a long blue gown and a black lambskin hood lined with white cat’s fur. She had catskin gloves, too, with the fur inside, and carried a brassbound staff. Both her gown and her staff were adorned with jewels. She could eat only the hearts of animals, one of each kind, cutting them up with her ivory-handled knife and picking them up with her brass spoon. She could sit only on a cushion stuffed with hens’ feathers. To invoke the spirits, she needed a helper to sing certain magic songs. Only Gudrid knew them, and she sang them expertly. Charmed by her singing, the spirits gathered and revealed many things, among them Gudrid’s future: “Your path leads to Iceland, and from you will come a large and worthy family, for shining over your descendants I see bright rays of light”—a reference, scholars believe, to her two great-grandsons and one great-great-grandson who served as bishops in Iceland in the 1100s.
    The next summer Red Gudrid and her father sailed farther north to Eirik’s settlement at Brattahlid (“Steep Slope”). Fifteen years earlier, before Eirik had been banished from Iceland and went off to settle Greenland, he and Gudrid’s father, Thorbjorn, had been best friends. Their reunion was joyful. Gudrid and her father joined Eirik’s household until their own house could be built, on a piece of land Eirik gave them, right across the fjord. They ended up with a farm as good as or better than the one they had left in Iceland, all the goods they had brought on their ship plus whatever had belonged to the people who had died, and the ship itself. By the standards of the day, they were quite well off.
    Green Gudrid, on the other hand, was alone and destitute after having been shipwrecked and plucked off the icy rock by Leif Eiriksson on his way home from discovering Vinland. She was said to be the wife of the captain of the ship, a Norwegian merchant named Thorir. In return for the rescue, Leif took for himself everything that could be salvaged from the wreck. He invited Gudrid and her husband to stay with him, but that winter sickness set in. Gudrid’s husband and most of the other people Leif rescued died—as did Leif’s father, Eirik the Red. Leif became the leader of the Greenland colony. Gudrid, with no one else to turn to, became his ward. She owned nothing. There is no mention of her singing or her bright future (though that will come).
    Strangely, for both the Red Gudrid and the Green, the rich and the poor, the result was the same: She soon married Leif’s younger brother Thorstein.
     
    A little book written in the 1970s, called in English
The Saga Mind,
explains how to accommodate such additions and contradictions. The saga writers, says the Russian literary historian M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, “strove simultaneously for accuracy and for reproduction of reality in all its living fullness.” Or, as Icelandic saga scholar Vesteinn Olason wrote more recently, in
Dialogues with the Viking Age,
when a saga writer added something from his imagination, he was not “inventing” something new, but “finding” something that had always been part of the story.
    This concept of truth mingles our ideas of history and of art—the record of what actually happened with the truth a good novel can tell you about yourself and the world around you. The Old Icelandic word
saga
mingles them, too: It was applied indiscriminately to tales that sound like sober history and to ones we can easily peg as fiction. Saga-truth assumes that both Vinland tales are at bottom “accurate,” based on stories passed down from generation to generation from Gudrid's day to the 1200s.
    Memories are not myths, points out Gisli Sigurdsson, who teaches folklore at the University of Iceland. In 1988 Gisli published the controversial
Gaelic Influence in Iceland;
the Gaelic “gift of gab” led him to explore other storytelling cultures for