Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age: Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction

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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 the other people who inhabited the medieval Nordic world-not only Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia- 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. It's also a history of humans on an extraordinarily global stage, spanning the centuries from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.

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'A book that is entertaining as well as erudite... There is no doubting Barraclough's meticulous and insightful scholarship.' - Hana Videen

Author Bio

Eleanor Barraclough is a cultural historian, broadcaster and writer based at Durham University, where she is Associate Professor of Medieval History and Literature. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she has appeared regularly on radio and television, 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.