The Saga of Gudrid

An acclaimed monologue by Brynja Benediktsdóttir about the heroine Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, who bravely crossed the North Atlantic eight times around the year 1000. Guðríður joined an expedition to Vinland, settled there for a time and gave birth to the first European child born there. Later she walked to Rome to meet the Pope, and ended her life as a nun in Skagafjörður. The play is not only a travelogue but the story of a woman in a dangerous world who lets nothing stop her from broadening her horizons.

María was given the task of staging the monologue aboard the Viking ship Íslendingur at the Viking World museum. Daylight floods in through huge windows facing the sea, so she could not use the theatre’s magic tools – light, haze and sound – to create an illusion. In return, she had a real ship, a sail and a view of the ocean. To meet these conditions she created a new adaptation in which the narrator is the actor herself, in the present, rather than Guðríður a thousand years ago. This bridged past and present and brought in the reality of the place: the ship itself, its history and its voyages. María also worked with the actor Þórunn Erna Clausen to find her own way of telling the story – and as Þórunn Erna is a fine singer, they chose a path full of song.