When his father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Don Lago realized that the stories and traditions of his Swedish ancestors would be lost along with the rest of his father’s memories. Haunted by this inevitable tragedy, Lago set out to fight back against forgetting by researching and reclaiming his long-lost Scandinavian roots. Beginning his quest with a visit to his ancestral home of Gränna, Sweden, Lago explores all facets of Scandinavian America—Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Icelandic—along the way. He encounters Icelanders living in the Utah desert, a Titanic victim buried beneath a gigantic Swedish coffee pot in Iowa, an Arkansas town named after the famous Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, a real-life Legoland in southern California, and other unique remnants of America’s Scandinavian past. Visits to Sigurd Olson’s legendary cabin on the banks of Burntside Lake in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Carl Sandburg’s birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois, further provide Lago with an acute sense of the Scandinavian values that so greatly influenced, and continue to influence, American society. More than just a travel memoir, On the Viking Trail places Scandinavian immigrants and their history within the wider sweep of American culture. Lago’s perceptive eye and amusing tales remind readers of all ethnic backgrounds that to truly appreciate America one must never forget its immigrant past.

While the other Vikings love to holler and howl and battle and brawl, Leif prefers spending time by himself atop the beautiful fjord. But when it's time for the Viking Games, everyone must participate. Will Leif let down his clan . . . or surprise them? Highlighting the value of nature and earthly wonders, best-selling author Laura Gehl teams up with illustrator Timothy Banks to remind readers to stay true to themselves and to look at things from a new perspective.

Adrian Payne spent more than fifty years guiding and hunting on the Great Northern Peninsula. The Vikings, who came to the shores of Newfoundland in the 11th Century, hunted caribou and trapped fur-bearing animals in this rugged, untamed wilderness. Generations later, outfitters like Adrian Payne believe they are walking in the footsteps of these legendary Norsemen, and here he pays homage to them with stories of adventure and daring rescue in the wild. When the Vikings overwintered in the New World, specifically in Newfoundland, they had truly found paradise. The ocean was full of cod and other species, and the rivers were full of salmon and trout. The forest was full of fur-bearing animals. There were shiploads of timber to take back to their homel

A classic of northern exploration and adventure, LAST PLACES is Lawrence Millman's marvelously told account of his journey along the ancient Viking sea routes that extend from Norway to Newfoundland. Traveling through landscapes of transcendent desolation, Millman wandered by way of the Shetland Islands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. His way was marked by surprising human encounters--with a convicted murderer in Reykjavik, an Inuit hermit in Greenland, an Icelandic guide who leads him to a place called Hell, and a Newfoundlander who warns him about the local variant of the Abominable Snowman. By turns earthy and lyrical, LAST PLACES is an ebullient celebration of the exotic North.