It’s time to meet the real Vikings—not the storied kings, raiders, and saga heroes but the ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, slaves, seers, travelers, and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world.
Historian, writer, and BBC broadcaster Eleanor Barraclough digs into the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture through artifacts such as a comb engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system, a pagan shrine found deep beneath a lava field, a note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern, and doodles on birch bark made by an imaginative child. Barraclough brings to life this vast, rich world that spanned centuries and spread from the 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.
Barraclough’s latest book, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (W.W. Norton), is available for purchase.
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