Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
Eleanor Barraclough
Sep 2024 · Profile Audio · Narrated by Eleanor Barraclough
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10 hr 51 min
Unabridged
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Eligible
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About this audiobook
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.
For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.
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.
For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread 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 cultural historian, broadcaster and writer based at Bath Spa University, where she lectures in Environmental History. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she is the author of Beyond the Northlands: Vikings and the Old Norse Sagas, and has appeared regularly on radio and television, work which has lead to her variously being knighted with a walrus penis bone, bewitched in Sherwood Forest, chased by imaginary zombies through the basement of the BBC and dunked in a hole in the ice in a quest for immortality.
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