The Far-farers: A Journey from Viking Iceland to Crusader Jerusalem Book

Victoria Clark's The Far-Farers is a journey through time and space. As she follows in the footsteps of Thorvald the Far-Farer, an Icelandic Viking convert to Christianity who made an epic pilgrimage from his native land to Jerusalem, she also recalls the 11th-century world of social change and religious conflict in which he lived. Clark writes better as an historian than as a travel writer. Her central contention that events in 10,00 laid the essential groundwork for the rest of the millennium may be arguable, but her thumbnail sketches of popes, kings, scholars and holy warriors are vivid and convincing, and she moves briskly through a century that began with a German emperor and a pope peacefully cooperating in the task of uniting Christendom and ended in the bitter fighting of the First Crusade. When describing her own experiences on her journey, she is less compelling. Like many travel writers (Paul Theroux, for one), she has the knack of meeting oddball and potentially interesting fellow wanderers but she doesn't always succeed in bringing them to life on the page. She seems more comfortable with her 11th-century characters than she does with her contemporary pilgrims and travellers. The Far-Farers is an ambitious book. It doesn't fulfil all its ambitions but, as it moves smoothly between past and present, it provides an enjoyable revelation of the parallels between the two. --Nick RennisonRead More