Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age [Hardcover]

A The great success of this book is that it finds the little fragments of lives lived, the bits and pieces that fell between the cracks in the floorboards, and constructs a story that helps us comprehend the messiness of the period, in all its wonders as well as its horrors. Barracloughs expositions are dense with fact but animated by garrulous humor. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this wonderful book& is that it captures the sheer strangeness, the ultimate unknowability, of the distant past. Its tempting to imagine that if you stand on the shore of that island in Estonia, staring out across the waves and tasting the salt in the sea air, youll somehow catch the spirit of those first seafarers A history of the Vikings unlike any other, this is a scholarly delight, every page of which glitters with insight. Eleanor Barraclough surveys the great sweep of life in the northern world between the 8th and 11th centuries, poring over everyday artefacts from religious pendants and carved rune sticks to graffiti, board games and childrens toys. And although shes terrific on the details of riddles and hair-combs, shes even better on the sheer strangeness and unknowability of the distant past. Barraclough is excellent at describing these landed places, with their thickly squelching carpets and rounded hummocks of moss shade. These kinds of passages crop up throughout the book, breathing life into the physical world of her subjects. If each individual artifact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles& adds depth to the traditional portrait of Viking culture. Endlessly fascinating, authoritatively informative and, above all, great fun. People love the blood-soaked sagas that chronicle the deeds of Viking raiders. But Barraclough, a British historian and broadcaster, looks beyond those soap-opera stories to uncover lesser-known details of Old Norse civilization beginning in A.D. 750 or so. Barraclough keeps on expanding our horizons. Ell,