Overview

In 1911 a young American woman, who is a recent anthropology graduate of Barnard College attempting to discover what had become of the vanished Norse settlements in southern Greenland, finds herself instead in the far north of the country living at a trading post run by the famous Arctic explorers, Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen. Sivi Jorgensen, the book's fictional protagonist, becomes integrated into their very real world. A romantic encounter between the American woman and Knud Rasmussen causes her to remain in Greenland for the next seven years. While there Sivi has flashbacks of her Scandinavian heritage and the novel regresses to the era in Greenland of Erik the Red, which is also the initial period of Norse exploration in North America. The core of this midsection is an historically credible story of the attempts by Erik's three sons, Leif, Thorstein and Thorvald Eriksson, and later the Icelander Thorfinn Karslefni, to colonize Newfoundland and the Labrador. Part three returns Sivi to her home in NYC. She gets a job at the NY American Museum of Natural History, working with famous anthropologist Franz Boas, where she discovers some disturbing facts about the museum's collection methods of transporting Eskimos to the United States for study during the early part of the 20th Century. This is a fine historical novel. It brings to life important events often lost in obscure Medieval Icelandic texts, and asks questions about what is nature versus nurture that still resonate today.

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9781475057782

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Susan Dietrich lives in Maine. She has worked for many years as a journalist and an editor. Her first novel, Melisande, a fantasy, was published in 1999. The Viking's Daughter is her second.

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