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Eleanor Baraklough is an historian and writer who explores the cultures of the medieval north.

That is to say, the people who are part of the Viking age.

Now, surely something comes to mind for you when you hear Viking, as she says in her book, there's a lot of heavy lifting for the word.

Maybe you're thinking about big hairy invaders in long ships with battle axes and adorned

helmets.

But Barakleff's latest book is about the everyday people of this world, not that raiders

as much as the farmers and the kids.

She sees history as fluid, like a river that flows and shifts with each turn.

And these streams don't always have a clear beginning.

In one chapter of the book, she offers three beginnings, including this one.

We're going to start with the beginning that actually takes us back several decades before what

we think of as traditionally the start of the Viking Age. And it's an Agatha Christie-style murder

mystery that involves a gaming piece that's been placed into the mouth of a dead man. And it's

just the size of an apricot.

It's made from animal bone.

And there's a nail made of iron running through the top.

This is a king piece from a board game that was popular in the Viking Age called Nefertafal, which means fist table.

And it was placed in the mouth of this young man, maybe somewhere between 25 or 35 years old.

He died brutally.

On his skeleton, there are blade wounds on his bones of his arm and his hip. And he was buried in a ship, which feels like a very Viking way to be buried, except he

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