Embers of the Hands

Embers of the Hands is brilliantly written, evoking the wonder of an entire civilisation. — Tom Holland, author of Pax and co-host of The Rest is History

A wondrous, gorgeously-written book. — Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred

Splendid - an intimate portrait of the Viking Age. Highly recommended. — Neil Price, author of The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Takes us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world. — Dan Snow

Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country. Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people—children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers—who inhabited the medieval Nordic world.

Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe, and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders, and ethnicities. It is told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.

For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of this extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.