Description

Longlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction

A Times best History Book of the Year 2024

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

Publisher Review

Brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived, a history of the Vikings that deploys their material legacy – from combs to slave collars, from skulls to sundials – to evoke the wonder of an entire civilisation. — Tom Holland, author of Pax and co-host of The Rest is History A wondrous, gorgeously-written book, breathing the Vikings into intimate, incandescent life: from glittering treasure to lost ephemera, racy runes to hidden tombs, Barraclough reveals people both endearingly familiar, yet sometimes also bafflingly, even unnervingly, strange — Rebecca Wragg Sykes * author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art * Barraclough has a gift for taking us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world. — Dan Snow Eleanor Barraclough’s splendid new book offers an introduction to the ordinary people of a time best known for its kings and warlords, getting up close and personal with the things that mattered to them. In lively prose she ranges from Greenland to Baghdad, showing us bar-rooms and bedrooms, daydreaming children at their lessons, gossiping neighbours, the scars of war, and much more besides. An intimate portrait of the Viking Age that is thoughtful, vivid and warm, while ignoring none of its hardships – highly recommended. — Neil Price, author of The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings A fascinating journey through all facets of the Viking world – especially what ordinary people experienced – beautifully collated from tiny bits of real evidence from archaeology (well illustrated) and linguistics (using texts in Old Norse, Old English, and runes; and even word-histories). We feel first-hand the hardships of sailing and farming so far north, of the captives, and of women cooking and endlessly making cloth, clothing, and huge woollen sails for the boats – evidence that used to be ignored. — Elizabeth Wayland Barber * Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years * Barraclough’s Viking world is extraordinarily intimate – a rich tapestry of lives and things interwoven in lively prose. From board games to buried ships, and from the graffiti of bored teenagers to runic stones, this is history made material — Madeleine Pelling * author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of the Eighteenth Century *