Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough — bogged down in Norse culture

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In Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem “The Grauballe Man”, a human sacrifice victim unearthed from a Danish peat bog “seems to weep/ the black river of himself”. Pickled and mummified, bog bodies offer us a link to the past at once tangible, intimate and alien.

In her second book about Norse culture, historian Eleanor Barraclough calls these bogs “gateways between worlds”. They spit forth objects that sometimes tell us more about a very distant culture. Operating “right at the edge of what we can possibly know about the people of the past”, she attempts to show the Norse world and its diaspora in richer detail than familiar stories of heroes and plunder generally allow.

Embers of the Hands focuses on the lives of ordinary people during a period that traditionally begins with the first seaborne pagan raids on western Christendom and ends with the Norman Conquest. Roughly “750 to 1100”, but Barraclough would encourage us to think of these boundaries as porous. Scandinavia was already “a culturally fluid, interconnected world” from the height of the Roman empire, she argues, while Viking custom clung on in Greenland into our Tudor period.

Ninth-century York — specifically a site marked out for a new branch of Lloyds Bank — provides ‘the largest piece of fossilised human faeces ever discovered’

The book’s title comes from a lovely phrase in Old Norse poetry evoking gold rings on fingers. The historian and BBC broadcaster uses it here to stand for “the glowing remnants” of a culture she finds in artefacts, written accounts, pollen records, ice cores and forensic analysis of human remains. Even human waste. Ninth-century York — specifically a site marked out for a new branch of Lloyds Bank — provides “the largest piece of fossilised human faeces ever discovered”.

The stories these remnants tell can be reassuringly medieval. A wooden “rune stick” from 1200s Bergen conveys an urgent message from a woman to her husband at the mead-house: “Gyda says that you should go home.” On the other side of the stick is the man’s indecipherable reply, to be conveyed back to her via messenger — the equivalent of a Viking Age drunk text. In Christian Iceland, cutting-edge midwifery involved strapping a manuscript about St Margaret to a woman’s thigh during labour.    

Other finds are deeply distressing. Barraclough’s descriptions of the evidence for human sacrifice in burial mounds — specifically involving the enslaved, who made up between “20 per cent and 30 per cent of the Scandinavian population” — had me feeling like I’d just watched five episodes of Luther.

Embers of the Hands promises a look into the “varied existences” and “diverse experiences” had by long-dead people “of different ethnicities, sexualities, classes, ages and abilities”. It’s an admirable project, with an awful lot to deliver. The promise also implies things about the social liberalism of Viking communities that is at odds with the book’s conclusions.

Barraclough shows us the skeleton of a chieftain with fused vertebrae; leather shoes made for a disabled woman who lived to be about 80. But readers expecting, say, stories of historic gay individuals will be disappointed. Evidence of Nordic homosexuality amounts only to the existence of prejudice against it. All we have is the odd homophobic joke or piece of slander on a rune stick, and written laws, albeit ones recorded in Christian times, punishing not just people who had gay sex, but punishing people who insinuated other people had gay sex.

Pagan Viking culture wasn’t necessarily more open-minded than neighbouring Medieval Christianity along gender lines either. It was a form of insult to say a Norse woman carried weapons, because this was considered manly. But we do meet seeresses, richly buried throughout the Nordic world with ritualistic staffs, jewellery, pouches of cannabis seeds and tapestries depicting scenes of sacrifice. Barraclough’s reconstruction of domestic labour, meanwhile, is the book’s central triumph.

It’s hard to infer much about the “experience” of even the most visible, culturally mainstream Vikings, because we have such scant access to their interiority. No contemporaneous first-hand accounts from the Scandinavian homelands exist. Everything was written by Christian Icelanders or repulsed outsiders. But this book brings us as close to an intimacy with a strange past as we are likely to get.

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough Profile £25, 384 pages

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