Embers of the hands : hidden histories of the Viking Age / Eleanor Barraclough.

Barraclough, Eleanor, author

London : Profile Books, 2024.

373 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (black and white, and colour), map (black and white) ; 24 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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.

9781788166744 (hbk)

948.022

DL65

948.022

English

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