The Secret Lives of Vikings

 

"In “Embers of the Hands,” the historian Eleanor Barraclough looks beyond the soap-opera sagas to those lost in the cracks of history.

EMBERS OF THE HANDS: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough

Vikings are one of history’s great cases of false advertising. The people we call Vikings mostly weren’t Vikings. The fierce mariners who swept out of Scandinavia in the late 700s and marauded for centuries through the North Atlantic and Baltic? They were only one part of a civilization defined by a shared language, Old Norse, in which víkingr just meant “raider.” As the historian Tom Shippey once put it, the term “wasn’t an ethnic label, it was a job description.” Talking about the Viking Age is like saying we live in the Navy SEAL Era.

All that is true enough, writes Eleanor Barraclough in “Embers of the Hands,” her survey of Norse life outside the longboat. Even so, she continues, “The ‘Age Roughly From 750-1100 C.E. During Which Those Primarily of Scandinavian Origins and Heritage Took Part in Raiding, Trading and Settlement Both Within and Beyond Scandinavia’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

People love the blood-soaked sagas that chronicle the deeds of (actual) Vikings. They love what Barraclough calls the “soap opera lives” of Norse gods. And they love colorful characters such as Erik the Red (who named his settlement project Greenland to make it sound enticingly lush) and Harald Bluetooth (after whom the wireless technology is named).

Barraclough, a British historian and broadcaster, focuses on the people left out of these “official stories,” on the aspects of life lost “in the cracks of history.” That mission, plus some jacket-copy hyping of “deeply subversive” “hidden” “secrets,” makes her book sound more revisionist than it is. In fact, it is complementary, not contradictory.

Barraclough relishes the sagas and the Norse wordplay known as kenning (“embers of the hands” is a kenning for gold). And she writes things like, “what would have been called, once upon a time, wenches” — using the antiquated word for effect even while keeping it at arm’s length.

But by picking through the pocket change of the archaeological record — combs, game pieces, graffiti, literal coins and even a piece of fossilized feces known as the Lloyds Bank Coprolite (it was found on the site of a new branch) — she reconstructs less celebrated aspects of the Norse world.

Grouped into thematic chapters such as “Love,” “Travel,” “Belief” and “Unfreedom,” her exhibits reveal a “culturally fluid, interconnected world” that stretched from North America to Central Asia.

Barraclough’s expositions are dense with fact but animated by garrulous humor. A stick scratched with runes takes us to the waterfront in Bergen, Norway, circa A.D. 1200: “Herring gulls cackle and wail as they fight for rotting scraps of fish guts on the jetty,” Barraclough writes, painting the scene. “It’s probably raining. It usually is.” Inside a tavern, a patron is apparently lingering.

Runes, which seem at first to have carried a charge of magic or secrecy, were by this era used for everything. Sticks were Norse Post-its, Barraclough writes, and the message on this one reads, “Gyda says that you should go home.”

Other runic inscriptions record curses, jokes and salacious gossip. Meager as they are, these writings are precious because they are more or less the only written sources we have from the Viking Age. No other text gives us as direct a line to the Norse themselves. The sagas, for example, were composed much later, in Iceland, by Christians.

Greenland’s landscape, icy and sparsely populated, preserves a uniquely rich trove of artifacts from the Norse who began arriving in the late 900s, their way eased by a temporary climate warming. Using the traces of their settlements, Barraclough explores their home life.

Weights from a loom, for example, reflect the absolute importance of the textiles made by Norse women. They were woven at home but a product of communal effort. By one calculation, it would have taken a single person nine years to make the sail for one Viking warship. “Take away the textiles and the women, and you have some naked men in a rowing boat,” she quips.

Barraclough does a nice job of imagining what went on inside these homes and their residents without pressing too hard, mindful that “looking at the past is like looking through a glass darkly: We can see shadowy images on the other side, but also our own reflections staring back at us.”

She is also skillful at connecting evidence of different kinds, as when documenting her claim that the Norse were known for their “excellent tresses.” From the sagas, she invokes the half-mythical King Harald Fairhair — who was formerly known as Tanglehair, having sworn not to use a comb until he unified his kingdom. From archaeology, she cites “often delicately crafted and intricately decorated” combs — the earliest runes we have are on a comb, as it happens — and an intriguing figurine of a longhaired woman. And from the historical record she quotes two different Anglo-Saxon clergymen grousing, in the wake of Viking incursions into Britain, about their countrymen aping the hairstyle of the foreigners.

What the later complainant called the “bared neck and blinded eyes” haircut can even be spotted, Barraclough notes, on the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It is a testament to the breadth of Norse influence, for the French-speaking Normans were in fact the assimilated descendants of Vikings who had invaded northwestern France. “Norman” is a version of “Northmen.”

Their victory in 1066 is often taken as the close of the Viking Age. But to round off her fascinating tour, Barraclough offers three alternative conclusions, the latest stretching into the 15th century. History isn’t a canal flowing neatly through locks, she stresses, but a “great untamed river.” It seems that “Age” — as if there were a single clearly defined era — is as much a misnomer as “Viking.”

EMBERS OF THE HANDS: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age | By Eleanor Barraclough | Norton | 384 pp. | $29" [1]

1. The Secret Lives of Vikings: nonfiction. Farrington, Timothy.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jan 1, 2025.