Embers of the Hands Quotes

“the past has a tendency to get boiled down to important dates when important things happened to important people. But the personal, intimate parts of people’s lives matter every bit as much as the famous, dramatic, narrative-defining ones. It’s through these little fragments of lives lived, the bits and pieces that fell between the cracks in the floorboards, that we are able to reach out through space and time, to the humans of the past. We listen to the brief flashes of their stories like blurred radio signals that cut out and pick up interference from other stations. Among the white noise, the vanished moments sucked into time, are lives lived, events experienced, emotions felt.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“When we’re thinking about those who fell between the cracks of history, this is most consistently and inescapably true of the enslaved.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“For most of human history, great women have stood in the shadows of great men (and mediocre men, and bad men).”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“It’s extraordinary to think that so little survives of the very process that enables societies, cultures and histories to continue at all. Throughout human history, women–from the highest to the lowest social standing, under all sorts of circumstances, in all sorts of locations–have been pregnant and given birth, often in mind-boggling amounts of pain, always with the very real possibility of death or serious injury hanging over them. Yet so little remains that might serve as a witness to that experience. And so many who fell between the cracks of history are not only the ones who were physically pregnant and gave birth, but also the many others who helped them get through labour, helped raise the children, helped pass on the knowledge and the stories and the values that would be transmitted to the next generation. The people, in other words, who were responsible for the fact that there is any history to talk about in the first place.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Sometimes these traces tell us a lot about what their lives were like, at other times they give us only the briefest glimpse. Clothes, toys and gaming pieces, combs, trash and treasure, love notes and obscenities carved into slivers of wood: the sort of intimate ephemera that connect us to the people of the past. These are the ‘embers of the hands’ of this book title: the glowing remnants that survive when the bright flame of a life has vanished.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“In reality, history is more like a great untamed river: a flowing entity, shifting and branching, merging again, wild and unpredictable. Its streams do not always have clear beginnings or endings. Nor do they always stay within the geographical boundaries set out for them on a map. And the ordinary humans bumped and bounced along by its currents do not always know where they are, let alone where the river is taking them.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Although Viking Age culture was largely non-literate, the chief exception to this was runes, which lie at the intersection between text and object.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“in the centuries leading up to the Viking Age, Scandinavian society seems to have become increasingly stratified, with power, status, wealth and land concentrated in the hands of fewer (male) individuals. Alongside this, it has been suggested that these high-status men had access to multiple partners in the shape of wives and concubines, thus taking many of the available women off the table. 12 Adding to this problem, it is possible that there was a social preference for male babies, to the point where unwanted female babies might be abandoned or not equally cared for, thus skewing the sex ratio still further. This meant that young men slightly further down the pecking order (but still with enough capital and social standing to have access to a seagoing vessel, travelling gear, supplies and weapons) needed to accumulate status and wealth if they were going to stand a chance of establishing a household, finding someone willing to marry them and making some babies.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Viking Age culture was non-literate but had strong oral traditions.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Written sources from within the Norse world itself came later, once Christianity had reached the far north. This means that evidence such as Norse laws, mythological texts, genealogies, poems and saga stories only starts to appear in the twelfth century, while most surviving manuscripts are even later than this. The fact that any of this material survives at all is extraordinary”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“This is tricky, because it means such sources were written from the perspective of those outside the Norse world, often on the receiving end of their worst behaviour. They were also written by those with different cultural backgrounds, different religious traditions, and the prejudices that these differences brought. In the case of western Europe, such writers were predominantly Christian clerics describing bloody raids by pagans on undefended religious sites or complaining about incoming settlers. And in the case of Arabic writers who encountered various incarnations of the Norse on their travels, we need to allow for their own interpretations of and reactions to unfamiliar customs, make space for misinterpretation and miscommunication. Yet without these texts, we would know very little about what went on during the Viking Age,”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“This is tricky, because it means such sources were written from the perspective of those outside the Norse world, often on the receiving end of their worst behaviour. They were also written by those with different cultural backgrounds, different religious traditions, and the prejudices that these differences brought. In the case of western Europe, such writers were predominantly Christian clerics describing bloody raids by pagans on undefended religious sites or complaining about incoming settlers. And in the case of Arabic writers who encountered various incarnations of the Norse on their travels, we need to allow for their own interpretations of and reactions to unfamiliar customs, make space for misinterpretation and miscommunication. Yet without these texts, we would know very little about what went on during the Viking Age, especially when Scandinavians went out into the world.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“if these texts are roughly contemporary with the events they describe, then the one language they are not written in will be Old Norse.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“We need to remember that our written descriptions of Norse pagan practices and beliefs come from outside the system. Texts from the Viking Age itself were written by Christian or Islamic writers from other parts of the medieval world. They tended to be openly repulsed by whatever they deemed ‘pagan’, and reluctant or unable to understand it on its own terms. Later texts from within the Norse sphere itself were written well after the conversion to Christianity. This makes it difficult to know whether these accounts actually reflect what people did, said or believed centuries earlier.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“The Norse world converted to Christianity far later than most of northern Europe. This means we have far more information about their pre-Christian beliefs and practices than, say, those of Anglo-Saxon England before the conversion. But on the other hand, this can lull us into a false sense of security.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“if we truly want to understand the Viking Age, this pop-culture familiarity might work against us. Over the years, film-makers, novelists and artists have selected, repackaged and made relatable specific bits of a world view that really ought to feel uncomfortably weird to a modern audience. Even before we start thinking about the Norse gods, our first task is to acknowledge this strangeness. This was a world in which the concept of ‘supernatural forces’ itself had no meaning, since gods and spirits were very much embedded in the physical world, as real and obvious as sunshine, wind or gravity. They might be invisible, but their power could be felt; and since they existed, perhaps they could be influenced.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“It’s ironic that we know more about Scandinavians abroad in this period than about what was happening in their homelands.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Captives and enslaved people were there from the beginning of the Viking Age. They have been there from the beginning of this book, too, often hidden between the lines, depicted on the Inchmarnock hostage stone, embedded in the Irish annals and their records of captives seized. The women taken from Étar in 821. Tuathal and the reliquary of St Adomnán, carried off from their monastery in 832. The Abbot of Armagh and his companions, taken by the Vikings to their ships. Some were sold back to their communities if the ransom was high enough. Others were sold on to slavers.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“The human responsible for bringing this poo into the world probably thought that this was an end to it. Little did they know that its story would still be unfolding over a millennium later.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“So is a fossilised human poo from ninth-century York, or Jórvík, as the Vikings called it. At 20 centimetres long and 5 centimetres wide, this monster is the largest piece of fossilised human faeces ever discovered. It is often known as the Lloyds Bank Coprolite because it was found on the site where the bank was planning to build a branch. Usually, historical human faeces are preserved in a big communal mush, such as at the bottom of a latrine. So the survival of a lone turd is actually a marvellous opportunity to find out something about a single individual from the past.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“In other words, feud and murder might be more stereotypical Viking activities, but they were hardly going to put bread on the table.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Take away the food they cooked, preserved and stored for the voyage, and you have some naked hungry men in a rowing boat. Take away the children that the women gave birth to and cared for, and before long you will have just a boat.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Sometimes it is hard to get excited about spheres historically associated with hidden women’s labour. Mundane, repetitive domestic work has not been given much attention in most traditional history books, and certainly not as much as it deserves, given the fact that very little else would exist without it. Without the textile production that went on within every home, there would have been no Viking Age at all, no expansion across the islands of the North Atlantic. As we’ve seen, heimr means both ‘home’ and ‘world’. The fact that the Norse were able to transplant one to the other depended on what women did in the weaving rooms, among many other things. You can’t sail across an ocean without a sail. Or without tough waterproof clothing. Or, in fact, without any clothing at all. Take away the textiles and the women, and you have some naked men in a rowing boat.†”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“the Icelandic annals for the year 1189 report the arrival of Asmund kastanrazi (a nickname that has been translated as ‘wiggle arse’)”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“The phrase ‘embers of the hands’ comes from the Viking Age itself. It’s a kenning, a little word puzzle that poets–called skalds–tucked up in their fiendishly intricate verses. A kenning describes something familiar in a roundabout, often metaphorical way.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“they are called ‘rune sticks’–but also bone and stone. These are not the intricately decorated, professionally carved runic inscriptions that we find on memorial runestones, intended to be read and admired by all who passed by. These are ephemera: the scrappy Post-it notes, everyday text messages and crude toilet graffiti of their time. And the biggest haul of these runic inscriptions–nearly 700 at current count–comes from Bryggen, the medieval harbourside at Bergen in Norway. They were found by archaeologists after some of the wooden buildings were destroyed by fire in 1955.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“This isn’t a history about the exceptions to the rule: the powerful players and half-historical legends whose lights burned brightly and whose names and deeds of derring-do were commemorated in epic sagas and praise poems. It’s a history of the everyday humans who fell between the cracks of history, told through the little bits and pieces that survived the vagaries of time and quirks of fate. At best, some of them might merit a metaphorical footnote in the annals and legends of history. But for the most part this is about those who were never in the stories in the first place. They may have sat round the fire telling and listening to the stories, or caught snatches of these tales as they brought in the food and cleared up afterwards. They may have missed the stories because they were outside answering the call of nature or getting up to indecorous activities under cover of darkness. Or they may have been listening to the distant laughter and chatter from beyond the warm circle of firelight because they were never invited in the first place. In other words, this is a history of the Viking Age with the ordinary humans left in.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age