Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
A toy boat, a comb, a runic insult scratched in wood, isotopes in teeth. Barraclough builds the Viking age from small objects rather than from sagas and kings.
Sagas and kings dominate most accounts of the period, and Barraclough sets them aside in favour of the debris of ordinary life. What emerges is a world of farmers, traders, children and enslaved people rather than raiders, reconstructed from objects small enough to be overlooked and durable enough to survive a thousand years underground.
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Maria Popova
as historian Eleanor Barraclough recounts in her altogether fascinating book Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (public library), it wasn’t until decades after the excavation that researchers realized the Newfoundland wood samples were a once-living record of solar activity.
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