Selected as a Times best history Book of the Year 2024
'Every page glittering with insight... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook
'Brilliantly written... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland
'Takes us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world.' Dan Snow
'A wondrous, gorgeously-written book' Rebecca Wragg Sykes
It's time to meet the real Vikings.A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child.
From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world.
Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate.
'Every page glittering with insight... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook
'Brilliantly written... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland
Author
About Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
Eleanor Barraclough is a historian, writer and broadcaster based at Bath Spa University, where she is Senior Lecturer in Environmental History. Previously, she was Associate Professor in Medieval History and Literature at Durham University and a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford. She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. A BBC New Generation Thinker, Eleanor presents radio programmes and is also the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Thanks to her BBC documentaries, she has jammed with Viking musicians, dunked herself in a frozen lake in search of immortality, and been knighted with a walrus penis bone in the arctic.
