Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

"This one is interesting because it’s not a narrative history. It’s much more thematic. She uses material culture, the archaeology of individual objects, and goes into the individual lives reflected in those objects, but then comes out to revisit the big picture. It’s very cleverly done. It’s beautifully written. There’s lots of gentle humour in it. My favourite bit was actually talking about the archaeology of fabric production, where she says something like ‘without women to make the clothing and to make the sails, the Vikings would just be some naked men in a rowing boat.’ I loved that. She’s very interested in the whole range of people’s lives. She takes objects, some of them quite well known, like the Isle of Lewis chess set, which we probably all could recognize, from around 1200 AD. She goes from objects like that, or large carving – big, monumental stuff – to look at really tiny things, like a discarded mitten made of bits of old fabric, a chopping board decorated with carved walrus heads. These are the sorts of intimate detail of the past, which tell us a lot. We don’t know the big story of the Viking age as well as we might think, but we do have all these tiny bits and pieces, and she puts those together in a very compelling way. She’s got ‘Big History’ points too. So she talks about what an ‘age’ is. She talks about the Viking Age and how it doesn’t really work like that, as history overlaps all the time. But the focus remains on those personal stories, and that’s really strong. We get these little glimpses of what someone might have believed or thought, or what their life might have been like, and that tells you so much more about the Vikings than we knew before."