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God's Daughter (Vikings of the New World Saga #1)

Heather Day Gilbert

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Jan 25, 2014 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction

Most readers with any knowledge of early American history are aware that Viking sailors, faring south-westward from Greenland, discovered mainland North America (actually, Greenland itself is geographically and culturally-historically considered part of North America, while Iceland is considered the westernmost part of Europe), around the year 1000 A.D. No lasting settlements were made, but archaeologists have excavated the temporary settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in present-day Newfoundland ( Most readers with any knowledge of early American history are aware that Viking sailors, faring south-westward from Greenland, discovered mainland North America (actually, Greenland itself is geographically and culturally-historically considered part of North America, while Iceland is considered the westernmost part of Europe), around the year 1000 A.D. No lasting settlements were made, but archaeologists have excavated the temporary settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in present-day Newfoundland (probably the one referred to in the sagas as Straumsfjord). The Viking settlements in Greenland died out (literally, from starvation as the climate cooled in the "Little Ice Age") and left no written records, so our main contemporary sources for the Viking voyages to "Vinland" are two oral Icelandic sagas, committed to writing about 250 years after the events, which differ in details but basically present a common core of factual information. (The skalds who composed and transmitted the sagas weren't composing fiction; they were recording history for an aliterate society, although they sometimes garbled or misunderstood details.)

Evangelical Christian author Heather Day Gilbert has taken these sagas, coupled with serious research into the Viking history and culture of that era, plausibly reconstructed a unified picture of the events they present, and brought it to life in a masterful historical novel, the first in a projected series. Faithful to known facts, she uses her imagination to flesh them out, and to reconstruct believable personalities for the major and minor players in the events. (I've read modern re-tellings of the sagas, though not the sagas themselves, and could recognize persons and events here.) The focus here is the third Viking voyage to the new lands and its aftermath, and our present-tense, first-person narrator is Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, wife of expedition leader Thorfinn Karlsefni. Our setting is both the New World and Greenland (with a grim prologue set in Gudrid's native Iceland, where we share a formative experience she had to undergo at the age of 11).

As the sagas make clear, the voyages to Vinland were dangerous. This book gives us our share of dangerous situations, and the threat of danger is a constant reality. This can come not only from Indians --or Skraelings, as the Vikings call them-- but from potential rape and mutiny by elements within the Viking band, from the sea, and from wild and (imperfectly) domesticated animals. Hunger and disease pose their threats too, in a culture without antibiotics or antiseptics. (Gudrid's 24 years old at the time of the main story --and she's already been widowed twice, a circumstance not particularly unusual in her time and place.) But this is in the main a novel about human and family relationships, about personal growth, and about living one's Christian faith in a flawed world. (As a teen, Gudrid was trained to be a volva, a pagan priestess; but she's a Christian now, albeit one who can't read the Bible and has scant training in the faith, in a society where Christianity is spreading rapidly but still far from universal or deep-rooted.)

Gudrid is brought to life with wonderful vividness; I would have to describe this novel as one of the most psychologically realistic and nuanced that I've ever read! (Despite the impression the cover might create, she's not a swordswoman and isn't thrust into an action-heroine role here --but she IS a Viking; she's got inner strength and resolve in spades, as well as leadership abilities, and she doesn't back down from physically challenging situations, either.) Other characters are well developed, too. Gilbert's handling of her main character's internal life compares favorably with Henry James at his best, though her prose is much more readable and her focus better balanced between the inner and outer life. (Her writing also reminds me in some ways of another historical novelist I greatly like, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset.) She makes us feel the tense, claustrophobic, half-hungry atmosphere of Straumsfjord, and the pathos of what we know to be the doomed enclaves on Greenland. While she denies in her concluding Author's Note that she's an expert on Viking history, her research is clearly solid (I could recognize facts I already knew, as well as learning some I didn't). The Viking world is recreated here with its dark side not glossed over; we see the use of human sacrifice at times, the ugliness of slavery, attitudes of rabid sexism and racial/ethnic prejudice, acceptance of infanticide as a parental prerogative. (And we see all these things with recognition; allowing for outward cosmetic differences, general attitudes in our own post-Christian culture aren't much different from those of the pre-Christian or imperfectly-Christianized Vikings. :-( ). For me, this was a quick and thoroughly engrossing read, enhanced by my natural interest in my own Scandinavian heritage. (But I think readers of other ethnicities would find this just as absorbing.)

For readers whose interest in further reading about the Vikings is piqued by this novel, the list of helpful books and online sources in the Author's Note is a nice touch!

This book was already on my to-read list when I won a copy in a recent giveaway. I'll definitely be following the series as it develops, and I'm also going to be interested in exploring the author's contemporary mystery series. ...more

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Nov 19, 2017 Alandra rated it it was ok

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