The novel, Gudrid's Fortune, presents a most timely topic. Recently enthusiasts celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of the Vikings' landing in North America and their role in making contact with Native Americans during the Middle Ages. Magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and Mercator's World have written recently about the Viking voyages. Two medieval manuscripts of Iceland, the Greenland Saga and Eirik's Saga, and ancient maps preserved at Yale University offer proof. Exhibits have been on display in museums in America. The splendid exhibit entitled, "Vikings: the North Atlantic Saga" was housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Later the exhibit moved on to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and elsewhere. PBS featured a two-hour Viking show on "Nova" in recent years. Not to be left behind, Icelanders launched a replica of a Viking ship manned by Icelandic sailors. They set sail Jun 17, 2000 from Reykjavik's medieval port to follow the same route taken by the mariners of the first millennium. They headed first for Greenland, then they continued in their square-sailed ship to the shores of Canada and New England, ending their quest in New York City in October 2000. All these modes, magazines and sagas themselves, television shows, maps, and the replica of the medievel ship serve as harbingers for the new novel, Gudrid's Fortune. These real-life people, the Vikings, considered by fellow-Europeans to be mere marauders, actually opened the gates to the Age of Discovery almost 500 years before Columbus stepped foot on our continent. Gudrid's Fortune offers a new and more accurate version of the discovery of America.
