Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“But the embers that I want to blow life back into in this book are rather different to the ones that kings such as Harald would have recognised and valued. Ours, no less precious, are the personal fragments and everyday detritus that remain of lives long past. They help us to uncover hidden histories and illuminate a world beyond the usual tales of raiders, traders, and rulers.”

Barraclough uses the kenning for gold to develop a metaphor central to her book and its title. The “detritus of lives long past” are the small items that were once treasured but then discarded, the pieces of trash that a careful archaeologist can turn into treasure mined for the secrets it reveals. Though the author will continue to reference powerful men like King Harald for historical context, most often she focuses on the things everyday people valued, introducing The Role of Artifacts in Reconstructing Historical Narratives. These sentences also introduce the reader to Barraclough’s style, using a prose that takes on poetic rhythms with the alliteration and rhyme in “raiders, traders, and rulers.”

“[This shows that] often the most effective way to approach the past (where possible) is to combine different sorts of source material and expertise […] It also allows us to hold two ideas simultaneously in our minds that may seem contradictory: the idea of a pre-conversion Viking Age defined primarily by raids, voyaging and settlement, and then a longer Norse period where the cultural and political mores of the Vikings still had a great deal of power and significance, but were slowly transformed as they faded away.”

Closing the first chapter, this paragraph outlines Barraclough’s methodology and her thesis. It sets the challenge for the reader: To be open to contradictory ideas and evidence, and to rethink existing impressions of the people who populated the Viking Age. The author’s use of the terms “Viking” and “Norse” is also significant, showing the two are not entirely interchangeable.