In search of Icelandic lore

IN “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Jem Finch shows off his knowledge to his sister, saying that the Egyptians “invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming.” Atticus tells Scout that if she deletes the adjectives, she’ll have the facts. Something similar can be said about archeology: Findings are often massaged, editorialized and sensationalized. “The Far Traveler” has a lot of wishful thinking in it -- which is a pity, because there’s a good book beneath the rubbish.

Writer Nancy Marie Brown participates in an excavation on Glaumbaer farm in Iceland, said to be the last home of Gudrid, a woman who appears in “The Saga of the Greenlanders” and “The Saga of Eirik the Red.” According to the ancient stories, Gudrid also lived for three years in Vinland, the Viking colony in North America, where she gave birth. Brown seems terribly keen, in a feminist way, to write herself into the tale as the lass who excavated Gudrid’s Iceland house, and she pushes the narrative toward that end.

Is it Gudrid’s house? Maybe. Archeology has no way of knowing for certain. A close reader of Brown’s book will note that most of the Viking saga library was lost and that the writings that are left do not always agree. When Brown fumes that an excavator has destroyed a corner of “Gudrid’s house,” head archeologist John Steinberg quickly corrects her: “I think the case for saying the longhouse at Glaumbaer is the referent for the story in the sagas is true. Whether the story is true is another question.”

What Steinberg knows that Brown doesn’t is that archeology requires diplomacy. It can be tough to sift the truth from what people hope is true. At a fair, Brown sees a “Viking tent. . . . The seven-foot-long bed was full of rumpled furs and blankets.”

Vikings almost certainly didn’t sleep on such resplendent beds. Furthermore, Steinberg’s survey of Glaumbaer suggests that the Icelanders may have missed many turf houses and even inadvertently destroyed ancient farmsteads. Because Icelanders pride themselves on their descent from democratically inclined farmers and set great store by their past, this is of concern. Watching Brown wander around gushing like a starry-eyed American when someone else’s national identity is at stake is strangely charming -- like finding Harpo Marx in a china shop.

The oddest thing is that Brown misses the dig’s social tension. When museum curator Sigridur Sigurdardottir suggests that the scientists’ taekni, or technology, might not work because “[t]here are a lot of elves here . . . and trolls, too,” it’s probably more an in-your-face gesture than the expression of a genuine belief. Most likely, the polite Ms. Sigurdardottir wouldn’t have minded if trolls had devoured the American archeologists whose taekni was proving the Icelanders mistaken on several counts. Dreadfully embarrassing!

Brown also has a few facts amiss. “Medieval women, everyone knows, did not stray far from home,” she writes. Not entirely true: Women went on enough overseas pilgrimages that the Knights Hospitallers had rules of conduct to deal with those who gave birth en route. Brown also states that remote sensing devices and metal detectors enable archeologists to map whole settlements; in truth, although these forms of survey are a great boon, their data usually need to be backed up by digging. One service Brown performs is her questioning of the recent idea, proposed in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” that one reason the Greenlanders starved was because they would not eat fish. Diamond’s theory may be another example of archeology serving an agenda, not the truth: The darling of conservationists, he holds up the death of the Greenland settlement as an example of humans ruining a landscape, then being too stubborn to adapt and survive. According to Brown, the archeological findings don’t bear this out.

The book soars when Brown leaves the dig and discusses Icelandic archeology and the sagas, which she has an ear for reproducing. People from cultures in which one’s sense of family goes back for many generations often find New World amnesia strange (and sometimes suspiciously convenient). In Iceland Western culture has been in place, undisturbed, for 1,100 years. The Icelanders have never lost that sense of a community extending through time. A few shipwrights in Iceland still practice skills the Vikings used. Lacking books, people can keep knowledge (such as the location of Glaumbaer farm) intact for a thousand years, as long as their society remains in place.

When Brown sticks to the facts, her lovely ear for storytelling outshines her other agendas. Despite herself, she demonstrates that it’s possible to appreciate wonderful stories without forcing them to say what you want them to say. Though believing that spin is unnecessary is, for some writers, as difficult as believing in elves and trolls.

Laurel Maury is a New York-based writer and critic.