This is John Batchelor, speaking with the author, Eleanor Barakloff, the new book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.

This is approximately 750 AD to 1100 AD, the German Sea, what we now call the North Sea.

The Angles and Saxons had settled into what we now know as Great Britain, the British Isles.

Here come the Norsemen.

Raiders first, and then, Eleanor tells the story of the great heathen army,

and Alfred the Great, and making making a deal beginning of the Vikings settling down

embers of the hands is Viking talk for gold but now farming here's eleanor to explain the transformation

of the raiders really good raiders, really good raiders, into really

good farmers. Much more of this later in the new week. What's sometimes called the Great Heathen

Army that like Mitchell, Harrah in Old English, arrives in around 865.

And it's been suggested that actually, rather than thinking of it as one big invading force,

it's more useful to think of it as smaller mobile war bands with different leaders,

which makes it much more possible for them to essentially, you know,

nipping through the waterways, they can overwinter, and then they can keep going inland,

and they have then the element of surprise. They can also sort of split up. Some can head north,

some can head south, and that makes it much more difficult to predict what's going to happen.

And that seems to be the case.

As you say, kingdoms start to topple.

And then you end up with this very interesting situation

where we have to bring in Alfred the Great, as he's later known, as King Alfred.

And he ends up essentially, you know, that there are other people about. So, you know, the problem is that the main textual sources for the time, particularly the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is written very much from Alfred's perspective. So of course, he's going to make sure everyone knows just how important he was. But even so, there's truth in that.

We get to the point where he is the only, or his sort of, you know, his forces are the only ones

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