Embers of the Hands - Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

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 the other people who inhabited the medieval Nordic world-not only Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia- 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. It''s also a history of humans on an extraordinarily global stage, spanning the centuries from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.

About the author

Eleanor Barraclough is a historian and broadcaster, and the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Based at Bath Spa University, she previously held academic positions at Oxford and Durham, and studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a BBC New Generation Thinker. She lives in London.

Product details

• Authors: Eleanor Barraclough, ELEANOR BARRACLOUGH
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 19.09.2024
• EAN: 9781788166744
• ISBN: 978-1-78816-674-4
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 162 mm x 236 mm x 36 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book; History, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Material Culture, HISTORY / Europe / Medieval, European history: the Vikings