Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Hardback) - Eleanor Barraclough

A new and original history of the Viking Age, told through the objects that defined the lives of its people - from powerful leaders to naughty teenagers

'A scholarly delight, every page glittering with insight ... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 'Brilliantly written ... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland, author of Pax and co-host of The Rest is History 'A wondrous, gorgeously-written book' Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred '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.

About the Author

Eleanor Barraclough is a historian, writer and broadcaster based at Bath Spa University, where she is Senior Lecturer in Environmental History. Previously, she was Associate Professor in Medieval History and Literature at Durham University and a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford. She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. A BBC New Generation Thinker, Eleanor presents radio programmes and is also the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Thanks to her BBC documentaries, she has jammed with Viking musicians, dunked herself in a frozen lake in search of immortality, and been knighted with a walrus penis bone in the arctic.