Travel and Story – Part III: Travel that Creates Story

Far Travel

Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, also known as Gudrid the Far-Travelled, was an Icelandic explorer and one of the most famous Viking women to have ever lived. She crossed the Atlantic some eight times in her travels and in her elder years she made a pilgrimage to Rome on foot.

She was thought to be a beauty, married three times, once to the son of Eric the Red, brother of Leif Erikson. She was a woman of action, convincing her third husband to help her organize an expedition to Vinland, the land of Wild Grapes and while there in Canada, in the colony they established, her son Snorri was born, the first European person to be born in the Americas, 500 years before Columbus even began his voyage.

Gudrid must have been fearless and fierce in her endeavors, as was the way of Viking women, and it is known that she was also wise, as a Viking poet said, True wisdom comes to one who “has traveled far and knows the ways of the world.”

The travels of Gudrid became story, as told in the Saga of Erik the Red and in the Saga of the Greenlanders.

We also make story as we move through space and time. We make sagas of our own. Whether geographic adventures or inner journeys of the soul, the stories we tell gather weight as we communicate something of our true self and as we hone our voice.

Other women’s travel exploits and expedition quests have become the stuff of “herstory.” Botanist Jeanne Baret was the first woman to circumnavigate the world. Baret overcame the obstacle of the French navy’s restrictions against women on ships with her clever disguise, living as a male for three years aboard the ship in the 1700’s.

Annie Smith Peck set mountain climbing records in the 19th century becoming one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. She was an author, lecturer and suffragist. Her last climb was the 5,367 ft. peak of Mount Madison in New Hampshire at age 82.

Nellie Bly was a world traveler, a journalist and much more. Emulating the fictional quest as depicted in Jules Verne’s, Around the World in Eighty Days, she completed her circumnavigation of the globe in just 72 days. As a journalist, Bly’s journeys (The words, journalist and journey have the same root meaning, “a day ” or “du jour.” It seems Nellie Bly filled her “days” to the brim!) – Bly’s journeys were both exterior, as in world travels and interior, as in exploring the inner realm of the soul.

She is perhaps most well known for her work as an undercover investigative journalist in the 1880’s for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World. Bly devised a scheme to have herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum. Her exposé of the neglect and abuse that she witnessed and experienced entitled Ten Days in a Madhouse, prompted reforms in the field of mental health.

Her stay at the asylum was not the only instance Bly put herself in harms way in order to bring insiders’ knowledge to the outside world. She covered the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington DC in 1913. Hecklers threatened the march and 200 people were injured. Bly covered WWI at the Eastern front. She was one of the first foreign visitors to the Serbia/Austria war zone and when thought to be a British spy, was arrested.

Bly was one of the leading women industrialists for a time and also an inventor.

What “du jour” is waiting for you?

Writing Prompt for the Week: My Saga