Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir

Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir sailed to North America around the year 1000, gave birth there to the first child of European parents known to have been born in the Americas, and later walked to Rome. She is known from the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, two accounts written in Iceland roughly two centuries after the events, which agree on her and disagree on much else. She was born in Iceland, went to the Greenland colony as a young woman, was widowed there, and married Thorfinn Karlsefni, with whom she joined an expedition to Vinland intended as a settlement rather than a raid - livestock, women and children aboard. The colony lasted about three years and was abandoned because of conflict with the people the Norse called skraelingar, who were far more numerous. Her son Snorri was born there. The sagas give her one of the strangest scenes in medieval literature: a woman from among the skraelingar approaches her, says her own name is Gudrid too, and vanishes when something startles the camp. Widowed a second time, she made a pilgrimage to Rome, returned to Iceland and became an anchoress at a church her son had built. The archaeological confirmation came in 1960, when Anne Stine and Helge Ingstad excavated Norse buildings at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, dated to about 1000 and unmistakably Scandinavian. The site is not necessarily the Vinland of the sagas, but it settled the argument about whether the voyages happened at all. Her descendants through Snorri include three Icelandic bishops, which is probably why the sagas remember her.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history