ANNEXING GREENLAND AND THE VIKING GHOSTS: 1/8: 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
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough (Author)
1770 GREENLAND
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.5 | Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:12.0 | This is CBS, I on the World. |
| 0:15.5 | I'm John Batchelor. |
| 0:17.2 | It is approximately the year 1,200 AD. |
| 0:21.3 | A man is in a tavern having a very good time, drinking heavily. |
| 0:27.1 | And suddenly he gets a message written in ruins on a piece of wood. |
| 0:33.5 | The message is very clear. |
| 0:36.5 | Gita says that you should go home. |
| 0:39.7 | How he responds to this is unknown, |
| 0:42.5 | but he does write a message in return |
| 0:44.8 | that I'm told by the author, Eleanor Barakoff, |
| 0:49.2 | doesn't make any sense. |
| 0:50.8 | However, we forgive him for being inebriated. |
| 0:54.0 | Thus, we're into the world that Eleanor takes on |
| 0:57.8 | in her new book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. You just heard one. |
| 1:05.3 | Who's Gita? And how much trouble is he in? Eleanor, your book is wonderful. Congratulations. Your reading of your book is |
| 1:12.7 | even more wonderful. I felt when you read about Gita and her beloved, you were having an especially |
| 1:19.7 | good time. What is that he was reading, the ruin carvings, and how do you interpret them? because they're symbols, they're like pictures. |
| 1:30.4 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:32.0 | Good evening. |
| 1:33.1 | Thank you so much for your kind words. |
... |
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