Embers of the Hands

Shortlisted for the 2025 Wolfson History Prize Longlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Non-fiction A Times Best History Book of the Year 2024 'Every page glittering with insight... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook 'Brilliantly written... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland 'Takes us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world.' Dan Snow 'A fascinating tour ... Barraclough looks beyond the soap-opera sagas to those lost in the cracks of history' The New York Times 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.