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Embers of the Hands

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History
Unabridged   11 hour(s)
Publication date: 01/07/2025

F O R T H C O M I N G ! Available January

Embers of the Hands

Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

Available from major retailers
Digital Download ISBN:9781696618359

Summary

A "brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived" (Tom Holland) history of the Viking Age, from mighty leaders to rebellious teenagers, told through their runes and ruins, games and combs, trash and treasure.

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Product Description

In imagining a Viking, a certain image springs to mind: a barbaric warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorize the hapless local population of a northern European town. Yet while such characters define our imagination of the Viking Age today, they were in the minority.

Instead, in the time-stopping soils, water, and ice of the North, Eleanor Barraclough excavates a preserved lost world, one that reimagines a misunderstood society. By examining artifacts of the past—remnants of wooden gaming boards, elegant antler combs, doodles by imaginative children and bored teenagers, and runes that reveal hidden loves, furious curses, and drunken spouses summoned home from the pub—Barraclough illuminates life in the medieval Nordic world as not just a world of rampaging warriors, but as full of globally networked people with recognizable concerns.

This is the history of all the people—children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travelers, writers—who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, 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.

Author Bio

Eleanor Barraclough is a historian, BBC broadcaster, and writer based at Bath Spa University, where she is a senior lecturer in environmental history. She previously held positions at the universities of Oxford and Durham and studied at the University of Cambridge.