There is much that glitters in Eleanor Barraclough’s learned excavation of Viking history, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. No surprise there. Her title comes from a metaphor for gold found in a Norse kenning, a type of figure of speech. She herself is a witty, sometimes earthy writer and a wiz at popularizing scholarly pursuits. (In 2013, she was named one of 10 BBC New Generation Thinkers for her ability to turn her research into programs for broadcast).
After an introduction with a sketch of Viking history, she takes up matters of love, belief, home, slavery, play, physical life and travel. By “travel,” she does not mean the oft-told tales of raiding parties of Viking barbarians like the one that fell upon the English island monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 C.E., launching, some say, the Viking Age. Instead she means “a web of connections that spanned cultures, countries and continents,” including exchanges with Eastern Europe and Turkey and the colonization of Iceland and Greenland.
Her interest is in the experience of common Vikings, the “everyday humans who fell between the cracks of history.” She tells their stories through well-crafted riffs on bone fragments, game pieces, discarded implements, farmstead scraps of material and other detritus that remain centuries after their deaths. A stick etched with runes informs us that a woman named Gyda wants her man home from the tavern. The surprising pervasiveness of combs and corroborating travelers’ accounts let us know that Vikings were unexpectedly well groomed. Other objects enable a reasonable reconstruction of what an older man in a brown woolen tunic looked like. Still others suggest the desperate hardships of living on remote farmsteads in Greenland as the climate changed and it became too cold to sustain farming.
Embers of the Hands is a stunning and perplexing adventure. Stunning because we have these sharp splinters from the past that tell us something about Vikings. Perplexing because our knowledge is so incomplete, so unstable, so subject to revision and change. With a revolutionary sort of scholarly caution, Barraclough even questions the boundaries of the so-called Viking Age; she proposes here three alternative beginnings and three alternative endings to the era. Instead of being a canal with compartmentalized locks, history “is more like a great untamed river,” she writes. Some readers will surely seek higher ground away from the torrents of time. Others will plunge into the deep.
