Enquanto os aspirantes a Thors e princesas guerreiras saem em busca de pilhagem no Halloween nesta quinta-feira (31/10), Lynn Noel se prepara para retratar uma heroína viking sem espada, martelo, escudo ou rancor.
Diga olá a Gudrid, a Maravilhosa, a primeira mulher européia a se estabelecer e ter um filho na América. Noel compartilhará a saga da pioneira viking em palavras (inglês), em músicas (nórdico antigo e outros dialetos escandinavos, enquanto toca uma lira) e em fantasias na noite de domingo na Latham Memorial Library em Thetford Hill (EUA).
“Gudrid is an explorer,” Noel, a former Thetford resident and alumna of the Parish Players and Dartmouth College who now lives west of Boston, said last week. “When you study real women who leave everything they know to go into the wilderness, you learn that they don’t go for church or country. They don’t go to plant the flag. They don’t go to claim territory or property.
“They go for adventure. They go for freedom. They go for independence.”
As best researchers can piece together, Gudrid went with her trader husband to a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of what is now the Canadian-island province of Newfoundland between 1009 and 1012 A.D. Almost 1,000 years later, two women, archaeologists from Norway, unearthed a ring-headed pin from a cloak, made from bronze, and a spindle whorl for hand-spinning cloth — the clearest evidence yet that women made the journey west from Iceland and Greenland.
“Gudrid and the women of that expedition spun and wove all of the cloth for all of the sails for those Viking trips,” Noel said, “and the cloth that everybody wore, the shrouds for men and women who died in the New World.”
While majoring in geography and minoring in women’s studies at Dartmouth in the mid-1970s, and while pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin, Noel soaked up all she could learn about woman adventurers and explorers. She was particularly taken with the Vinland Sagas — Icelandic manuscripts that, among other things, detailed Gudrid’s gifts not only as a seamstress and a trader but as a singer.
Combining her growing body of knowledge with her own skills as a folk singer and a longtime heritage interpreter at historic sites, Noel took the next logical step during a research visit to Newfoundland in the late 1990s. Invited to deliver a lecture on a cruise ship — as a fellow at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies — Noel performed for the first time the one-woman show she’s been refining and sharing ever since.
Along the way, Noel developed a series of shows, A Woman’s Way, including the tale of Lisette Laval, a French-Canadian fur trader who paddled a birchbark canoe west-to-east for 2,300 miles across North America in a single year during the early 1800s.
For now, their stories are a labor of love for Noel, who makes her living as a data-management consultant.
“This has always been my calling, never my occupation,” she said. “I’m a geek by day, and a Viking by night.”
Lynn Noel performs her one-woman show Gudrid the Wanderer on Sunday night at 7, at the Latham Memorial Library on Thetford Hill. Free.
FONTE: Valley News
https://www.vnews.com/One-woman-show-re-imagines-Icelandic-heroine-29744554
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