Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age – Barraclough Eleanor (2024)

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…