The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday
Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history
Vikings and valkyries have captivated our imaginations for centuries, with greater and lesser degrees of historical accuracy. But as so often happens, the very people reading Snorri Sturluson or the Sagas of Icelanders today are the ones who were left out of history to begin with—the ordinary people doing the quietly heroic work of farming, midwifing, blacksmithing, and any number of difficult daily tasks. In her new book, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, the historian Eleanor Barraclough puts ordinary people at the center of the story. The sagas may tell of “warriors scrubbing beer kegs and Valkyries pouring glasses of wine in the afterlife,” but the exploits of the everyday Viking were every bit as interesting. Their stories bring to life a world of “wood, wool, flax, bone, stone, leather and antler, hand-wrought and fashioned”—a world that remains endlessly captivating, from the runes women carved to fetch their lovers home from the pub to the scribblings of a wee child.
Go beyond the episode:
- Eleanor Barraclough’s Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
- Read the source materials: The Sagas of Icelanders, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Ibn Fadlan’s travel writing,
- Historical fiction we love: Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (trans. by Tiina Nunnally), Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, S. G. MacLean’s Damian Seeker series
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