Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

by Eleanor Barraclough

WW Norton 2025

The season's first Viking book comes from historian Eleanor Barraclough, whose Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, attempts to shift the focus away from the more popular slaying-and-reaving image of Vikings. Instead, she wants to flesh out the other Vikings, the many people who were active parts of the Viking world but may never have wielded a sword or spitted an Irish monk for fun. This is a book about home life, religious beliefs, the making of food, the burying of the dead, and what Barraclough refers to as “the fierce and fabulous hair-care regime of the Vikings.”

She touches on fighting and seafaring; she could hardly do otherwise. She tries to imagine what those Viking voyagers experienced:

What seafarers ate and drank (mostly dried, salted and pickled fish and meat that would last for weeks, along with hard unleavened bread; beer, sour milk and rainwater). How they slept (when in coastal waters they might have had the luxury of tents to cover them, when on open seas they probably just hunkered down as best they could). How they went to the loo (in a bucket or straight off the side with a shipmate holding on to them for dear life to stop them from falling overboard if the sea was calm enough).

But the book is insistent that most Vikings had decidedly non-nautical concerns. “For most people living in the Viking Age and the centuries that followed, their experience of travel was most often a case of local practicality,” Barraclough writes. “There were family and friends to be visited and assemblies to be attended.”

Fittingly, 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. “In the warmer months, the mirrored pools are spiked with bright yellow flowers of bog asphodel and bladderwort, dotted with white feathery cotton grass,” she writes. “Snipe wade with their needle-long beaks, and creaking-bedsprings call, amorous marsh harriers tumble together through the sky.”

This strong, evocative prose line brightens up even the book's more theoretical, not to say ideological, extensions, which are never stronger than in the chapter titled “Unfreedom.” It deals with all the various kinds of slaves the Vikings took on their raids and kept at all rungs of their society, but even so, nobody in the chapter is actually called a slave. There are mentions of slavery, mentions of slavers, mentions of “enslaved people,” but no “slaves.” Thankfully, the chapter on childbirth doesn't seem to feature birthing people, but it was probably a close call.

Luckily, this kind of political-academic Newspeak is entirely contained in the course of the book, which is mostly a smart, empathetic attempt to reconstruct how Viking people lived and traded and ate and played (including chess: there's a good deal here on the celebrated Lewis chess pieces that were the subject of Nancy Marie Brown's wonderful 2015 book Ivory Vikings). It's touching to watch Barraclough try to summon these daily rituals and the ordinary people, neither warrior nor saga-heroes, who pursued them:

There are no records of the sort of knowledge passed quietly, matter-of-factly, between women: purple spikes of penny royal, yellow balls of tansy, and woody green angelica stems gathered to 'put yourself right.' More stories that would never survive because of the nature of who experienced them and who had access to them. We are right at the edge of what we can possibly know about the people of the past.

Embers of the Hands exists on that edge, and it makes for genuinely fascinating reading.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News