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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.