Histories of the Vikings have been around for a long time, though it’s hard to see how anyone will improve on Neil Price’s outstanding The Children of Ash and Elm (2020). Nevertheless, they all tell what is by now a familiar story. The timeline is fixed; the evidence is in; we know about the rulers and the raiders and the ‘great Vikings’ (as I call them in my 2018 book, Laughing Shall I Die). What can be added? We need to go further afield.

Eleanor Barraclough’s last book, Beyond the Northlands (2016), did just that, looking in all geographical directions, including the Vikings’ rarely remembered ‘wild north’, beyond the Arctic Circle, where hunters went in search of the ‘white gold’ of the Viking age, walrus ivory. Barraclough clearly had an adventurous time researching her topics. No one who has been inducted into the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society of Hammerfest, which knights you with the penis bone of a walrus, and has followed this up by going skinny-dipping in a Greenland fjord, can be accused of being a mere library person.

Now she has decided to dig deeper and bring out the ‘hidden histories of the Viking age’. The term ‘embers of the hands’ was originally a kenning or circumlocutory phrase for gold. Barraclough uses it to stand for ‘the personal fragments and everyday detritus of lives long past … away