Tea at Trianon: Gudrid: The Far Traveler

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, March 29, 2021

Gudrid: The Far Traveler

From Breakpoint:

As her name indicates, Gudrid was the daughter of Thorbjorn, a Viking chieftain in Iceland. A man named Einar proposed to Gudrid, but Thorbjorn refused on the grounds that Einar’s father was a slave. Instead, Gudrid married Thorir, a Norwegian merchant.

The family left Iceland for Greenland with Erik the Red, but bad weather delayed their arrival until winter. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, Leif Erikson rescued Gudrid and fifteen men and brought them to Brattahlid, Erik the Red’s colony. Thorir died of illness that winter, leaving Gudrid a widow.

One winter in Greenland during a period of dearth, Gudrid was invited to the home of a chieftain named Thorkel. A seeress named Thorbjorg came to prophesy, but she needed women to sing a “weird-song” (i.e. a magical enchantment). Gudrid admitted to having been taught the weird-songs by her foster-mother Halldis, but she refused to do so because she was a Christian. Thorbjorg and Thorkel pressured her to sing, and she gave in and sang the weird-song with an exceptionally beautiful voice according to the Saga of Erik the Red.

Some sources attempt to date Gudrid’s conversion to much later in her life after she returned to Iceland. However, this story shows that she came to her Christian faith early in life, probably in her childhood. Christian missionaries had arrived in Iceland in 980, about the year of her birth. They made only slow progress at first, though after Olaf Tryggvason, a native of Iceland, became king of Norway, he put increasing pressure on the Icelanders to convert, including banning trade with Iceland until they became Christians, taking hostages and threatening to kill them, and the like. In 1000, Christianity was made the official religion in Iceland. (Read more.)

From Smithsonian:

As a 17-year-old widow, Gudrid could’ve chosen where to live and whom, if anyone, she would wed next. Both sagas report that she decides to marry the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni, whose nickname means “the makings of a man.”

Gudrid sails to the New World with Thorfinn. There, they have a son, Snorri, and after three years, sail back home. Though one saga has the young family taking a detour to Norway, both accounts ultimately find Gudrid back in Iceland at a farm called Glaumbaer.

It’s only in Greenlanders that we hear what happens to Gudrid next. Now a much older woman, somewhere in her 40s or 50s, she embarks on a pilgrimage to Rome, making the journey almost entirely on foot before returning to her farm to live out her days as a “nun and recluse.” (Scholars aren’t entirely sure what being a Viking nun looked like in the early 11th century, as Brown points out in her biography of Gudrid.)

The Gudrid presented in both sagas is dignified and sensible. In Eirik, she’s the “fairest of women” and has a lovely singing voice. In Greenlanders, she’s described as knowing “well how to carry herself among strangers”—a reference to a later scene in which she speaks to an Indigenous North American woman. (Read more.)