7/8: Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age Hardcover – August 29, 2024 by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 22 February 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Embers-Hands-Eleanor-Barraclough/dp/1788166744
magine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country.
Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of the other people who inhabited the medieval Nordic world-not only Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia- a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.
It's also a history of humans on an extraordinarily global stage, spanning the centuries from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.
1898
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchelor, continuing my conversation with Professor Eleanor Baraklov, who is an historian, a BBC broadcaster, as well as working at the Baas Spy University. |
| 0:12.0 | The book is Embers of the Hands. It talks about the Viking Age, roughly 750 AD to 1100 AD, but both sides, there's no certainty here, |
| 0:24.0 | because the magic of the Viking Age collides with the magic of the Christian conversion process. |
| 0:31.0 | We're now going to the geography, and the geography includes a big battle |
| 0:38.4 | a big battle |
| 0:39.6 | and a and a graveyard |
| 0:42.1 | that is a way of talking about the endings we begin with the big battle in ten sixty six |
| 0:48.8 | harold |
| 0:50.0 | of england |
| 0:51.4 | harold of norway and william |
| 0:54.0 | of normandy. |
| 0:55.0 | We need to establish, Eleanor, that Normandy is as Norse as anything in England, correct? |
| 1:01.0 | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 1:03.0 | Rallo was the founder of Normandy. |
| 1:06.0 | So we're talking about the Vikings at war with the Vikings, the traditions of all. |
| 1:11.6 | Yes, pretty much. Yeah, so Norman literally means Northmen. |
| 1:15.6 | What's interesting is it's a bit like when we were talking about further east. |
| 1:19.6 | What often happens when the North settled in an area is that they assimilate culturally really quickly. |
| 1:25.6 | And so by the time of William the Conqueror, as he, |
| 1:29.1 | you know, is shortly to become in our narrative, they are not, they're not Norse in that way. |
| 1:35.9 | They don't speak the language. But having said that, if you look at the Bayo Tapestry and how the |
| 1:41.1 | Normans are depicted there, their hairstyles are the hairstyles that we |
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