Nancy Marie Brown > Quotes

“Twenty years before, she had sailed west from Greenland off the edge of the known world. She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland’s founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid’s second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At”
― Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

“All illustrate the “theory of courage,” which Tolkien called “the great contribution of early Northern literature,” meaning both Icelandic and Old English literature. It is a “creed of unyielding will”: The heroes refuse to give up even when they know the monsters—evil—will win. For that is the big difference between Snorri’s Ragnarok and the Christian Doomsday. Odin and the human army of Valhalla do not win.”
― Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths

“Before books, there were stories. In them was distilled the knowledge each generation wished to pass on to the next. Storytelling was (and is) a form of power. It was time binding: it linked then to now. Told eloquently, at the right time to the right listeners, a story shaped the future." -The Real Valkyrie”
― Nancy Marie Brown

“My bald pate bobs and blunders, I bang it when I fall; My cock’s gone soft and clammy And I can’t hear when they call.”
― Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths

“The Icelanders were struck by the number of times I'd visited their country: That trip, in 2009, was number fourteen. Hjalti came over and quizzed me, in Icelandic, patiently reframing his questions until, with my limited grasp of the language, I finally understood, but still some were hard to answer: Why do you come here so often? I kept Icelandic horses at home, so it wasn't just the riding. How to explain that, in Iceland, I was a different person? At home, I was a master of words and grammar. Here, I spoke like a child. I was spoken to as a child. They told me stories.

I love the sagas, I said, all the old stories.

Hjalti nodded, satisfied, but I knew it wasn't a complete answer. In 1992, I attended a lecture at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Iceland, Gillian Overing noted, the center is the margin. Geography is inside out. People settle on the temperate edges of the island, while its interior is a glacial desert, cold, inhospitable, and not even crossable most of the year. "What kind of self," she mused, "might these places reflect?" What kind of self has wilderness at its heart?”
― Nancy Marie Brown, Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth

“And that age was known as the Golden Age, until it was spoiled by the arrival of the women. —Snorri, Edda”
― Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths