Review of Embers of the Hands; Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough
(Pub: Profile Books 2024; LJ doesn't give enough room for long book titles)
This is a history of the Viking Age with the ordinary humans left in.
This is an attempt to look at what we generally and inaccurately call the Viking Age (because, as she remarks, the ‘Age Roughly from 750–1100 CE During Which Those Primarily of Scandinavian Origins and Heritage Took Part in Raiding, Trading and Settlement Both Within and Beyond Scandinavia’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it) through the eyes and lives of ordinary people rather than warriors, church princes and warlords. This is the angle on history that I like best, and though the viewpoint of the ordinary is harder to come at, given that the quality were generally doing the recording, when one comes across “the ephemera: the scrappy Post-it notes, everyday text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time”, it can be immensely rewarding. After one of the innumerable fires in the Bryggen district of Bergen, in about 1200, a cache of rune sticks was found in a tavern. One of them read, on one side, “Gyda says you should go home”. On the other side, the recipient has attempted to reply, but being presumably too inebriated, has achieved only some indecipherable scratches.
This is the sort of thing that brings the past close to us and its people alive. So, on the timbers of the famous excavated Gokstad ship, does the tracing of the shape of a foot, complete with toenails, scratched into the wood by some bored oarsman when the ship was still in use. And the drawings on birch bark done by Onfim, a child in the Novgorod settled by the Swedish trader Vikings who became known as the Rus.
Rune literacy, in fact, was pretty widespread among these people and luckily for us they had a habit of marking their property, so that a wooden walking stick from around 1000 bears the marks “Ivar owns this”, while on the bottom of a reliquary (looted, most likely) are roughly scratched the runes “Rannveig owns this casket”. Women were particularly apt to carve their names into spindle-whorls.
Not all evidence is written, of course. One reason we know that children played in the weaving-rooms of Norse households is that “in the remains of a Viking Age weaving room at Bjørkum in western Norway, the imprints of little children’s teeth were found on birch tar, which seems to be the equivalent of chewing gum”. And the decline and fall of the Norse settlement in Greenland, starved out as the climate grew colder, is clear from the finds of butchered hunting dogs, eaten when their owners got desperate. An even grimmer indicator, in the ruins of the collapsed house of Sandnes, is that “no one had come back for the precious wood from the roof timbers.”
This is a proper, if readable, history, with notes, index etc. I have grumbled lately (and will again) about popular historians trying too hard to be chatty with embarrassing results. This author mostly manages to sound conversational without descending into slang, bar the occasional vulgarism like “quickie” which one could do without. She does tend to get sentimental about children, who are generally “little”, and animals, who are frequently “cute”. But she does not constantly bring herself in as a character, as too many similar writers do.
The focus on land-based and agricultural and domestic activities is a useful corrective to some accounts of this period from which you might suppose that men spent their whole time sailing and raiding, while women hardly existed at all. Rune messages have also been found in the churches of Norway, some scratched on pieces of wood as messages to someone else in the church (one, from the stave church of Lom, north of Bergen, looks like a proposal). In a church at Telemark, an entire runic poem scratched into one of the church’s wooden panels might indicate that tedious sermons are not a recent invention. A lot of research must have gone into finding all these marks of real life and to me at least they are more interesting than the doings of kings. One of the most moving vignettes concerns a volcanic cave in Iceland where people had evidently propitiated the fire-giant Surt, leaving many offerings in a stone boat. The last offerings, made about 20-30 years after Iceland’s official conversion to Christianity, included a lead weight in the shape of a Christian cross, a sort of final farewell before the giant was left alone for ever.
