Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir

Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir was a Norse woman described in the Vinland sagas as a traveller from Iceland and Greenland to North America. She was the mother of Snorri Thorfinnsson, traditionally regarded as the first European child born in Vinland.

The sagas later place Gudrid on pilgrimage to Rome and in religious life in Iceland. Although the narratives mix memory and legend, she has become a prominent symbol of women’s participation in Norse migration and exploration.

In William T. Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, Freydís Eiríksdóttir and Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir emerge as rival centres of the story, each carrying a different vision of what the new country might become. The Vinland Sagas, translated by Leifur Eiriksson, makes Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir one of the central travellers in the Norse accounts of Greenland and Vinland, following the voyages, settlements and family networks through which her remarkable life is preserved.