Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

(Hardback, Main)

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'Brilliantly written ... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland, author of Pax and co-host of The Rest is History

'Splendid - an intimate portrait of the Viking Age. Highly recommended.' Neil Price, author of The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

'Takes us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world.' Dan Snow

Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country.

Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people - children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers - who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.

For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.

Reviews

'Brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived, a history of the Vikings that deploys their material legacy - from combs to slave collars, from skulls to sundials - to evoke the wonder of an entire civilisation.' - Tom Holland, author of Pax and co-host of The Rest is History

'Eleanor Barraclough's splendid new book offers an introduction to the ordinary people of a time best known for its kings and warlords, getting up close and personal with the things that mattered to them. In lively prose she ranges from Greenland to Baghdad, showing us bar-rooms and bedrooms, daydreaming children at their lessons, gossiping neighbours, the scars of war, and much more besides. An intimate portrait of the Viking Age that is thoughtful, vivid and warm, while ignoring none of its hardships - highly recommended.' - Neil Price, author of

'Barraclough has a gift for taking us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world.' - Dan Snow

'Praise for Beyond the Northlands:' - TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017

'Adventurous scholarship.' - Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

Eleanor Barraclough is a cultural historian, broadcaster and writer based at Bath Spa University, where she lectures in Environmental History. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she is the author of Beyond the Northlands: Vikings and the Old Norse Sagas, and has appeared regularly on radio, work which has lead to her variously being knighted with a walrus penis bone, bewitched in Sherwood Forest, chased by imaginary zombies through the basement of the BBC and dunked in a hole in the ice in a quest for immortality.