- Publisher: Profile
- Year: 2024
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 384pp
- Illustrated: Yes
- Dimensions: 239x162mm
- Condition: New
- Weight: 0.6kg
- ISBN: 9781788166744
- Product code: 538307
Embers of the Hands
Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
Eleanor Barraclough New Hardback Illustrated
Postscript summary
With a focus on ‘the everyday humans who fell between the cracks of history’, Eleanor Barraclough creates a sense of the Viking world. Following an introduction to the era she uses artefacts including a fragment of skull inscribed with runes asking Odin for help, a polished comb and remnants of a board game to shed light on the Vikings’ religious and cultural beliefs but also the domestic life of its people.
Product information
Full publisher description
Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction
A Times best History Book of the Year 2024
It's time to meet the real Vikings. A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child.
From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world.
Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate.
'Every page glittering with insight... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook
'Brilliantly written... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland
A Times best History Book of the Year 2024
It's time to meet the real Vikings. A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child.
From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world.
Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate.
'Every page glittering with insight... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook
'Brilliantly written... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland
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538307
Embers of the Hands
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With a focus on ‘the everyday humans who fell between the cracks of history’, Eleanor Barraclough creates a sense of the Viking world. Following an introduction to the era she uses artefacts including a fragment of skull inscribed with runes asking Odin for help, a polished comb and remnants of a board game to shed light on the Vikings’ religious and cultural beliefs but also the domestic life of its people.
Hardback
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Eleanor Barraclough
General
239x162mm
Profile
No
Hardback
European
