As you can hear from my voice, I'm in a state of high acceleration.

Yes, I am positively beside myself.

The reason that I can barely contain my enthusiasm is the Ikea Winter Sale,

for weeks of incredible bargains, the inexpressible thrill of finding precisely the right thing at the right price.

Sail now on, IKEA, the wonderful every day.

I'm John Batchelor, and I'm exploring mysteries in a book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Baraklough.

And we go now to reliquaries.

These reliquaries were found in graves, and they're part of a collection that is associated in Eleanor's telling with a place called Malhus

and the burial mounds give up grave treasures that you then interpret.

One of the things that comes immediately when you find a reliquary is that this is a high status

and you presume female.

What else do we read from the reliquaries, Eleanor?

So to really think about the significance of reliquaries and where they're found,

we have to think about where they came from.

And this takes back in a way to those first raids on monasteries such as Lindisfarne,

because a reliquary was initially something that

very much within a Christian context would have been used to house little bits and pieces of

sort of the saints or sort of other things associated with sort of the highest,

holiest levels of Christian belief.

And this meant that they were beautifully decorated, you know, beautiful patterns and a lot of metal and other decorative items, which is significant.

Because, of course, within a Christian context for the monks, what really mattered was inside

and how the outside was decorated was just a reflection of the importance of what was inside.

...