Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
Beautifully written prose. Admittedly not a main interest of mine, but I enjoyed the look into every day lives so distant from and similar to my own.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
This is a wonderful book of mostly social history based on archaeological finds all around the Viking world. It tells the story of Viking expansion, but also the story of how people lived, died, played and ate, wrote to each other with rune sticks and wore clothing to beat the Arctic winds. The writer is a gifted storyteller and brings this to her history writing in the best way. I will never forget the birch bark drawings of Onfim. Anyone who is a parent will recognise those classic hands with stick fingers like an outstretched rake. The author gets up close and personal to the human faces and human feelings behind the Viking legends. HIGHLY recommended. It was deservedly longlisted for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction 2025.
adventurous
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
My husband takes his Viking heritage rather seriously so I thought I’d read this book to learn more about it
I had no idea Vikings had such meticulous grooming habits. I thought the well manicured beards and elaborate braids were “Hollywood” on the various shows around Vikings but this book and the artifacts suggests otherwise. This is just one example from the book.
I found it all rather fascinating and would recommend to anyone who enjoys history, anthropology, archeology, Vikings etc
The book is a bit of a slog and felt like a textbook at times. It is informative and I’m not sure I would have gotten far without the audio. Or perhaps I would have just flipped around looking for interesting bits.
Thanks netgalley
I had no idea Vikings had such meticulous grooming habits. I thought the well manicured beards and elaborate braids were “Hollywood” on the various shows around Vikings but this book and the artifacts suggests otherwise. This is just one example from the book.
I found it all rather fascinating and would recommend to anyone who enjoys history, anthropology, archeology, Vikings etc
The book is a bit of a slog and felt like a textbook at times. It is informative and I’m not sure I would have gotten far without the audio. Or perhaps I would have just flipped around looking for interesting bits.
Thanks netgalley
dark
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
Highly informative but not as lyrical as the opening pages suggest. This would make a great reference book for anyone studying the Viking Age, especially if they're interested in learning about previously overlooked people like women, children, and the enslaved. (More info below.)👇
Welcome to my ARCHEOLOGICAL DIG through this book. 🔍 Here are the fun facts I dug up while reading:
PROLOGUE
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough makes bogs sound like the prettiest places in the world. She writes of mosses changing from lime green to rusty orange. Mirrored pools with feathery white cotton grass and the yellow flowers of bog asphodel. And cherry red lingonberries and tawny brown mushrooms. Honestly, if she wrote an entire book about bogs, I'd read it. 🥰
CHAPTER 01
We have Vikings to thank for about 700 English words, including knife, skull, window, egg, and glitter. ✨
Thanks to advances in DNA research, two Viking Age bodies on either side of the North Sea were determined to be related and have now been reunited. I can't help but wonder: What if they hated each other? Like, imagine if you loathed a relative so much that you crossed the North Sea to get away from them and centuries later scientists reunited you. Forever. 💀😂
CHAPTER 02
Vikings practiced medical magic and believed protective charms (inscribed with runes) would keep them safe from sickness or pain seemingly caused by supernatural dwarves. (I know that sounds made up, but I swear it's in the book.)
Stellar quote:
Welcome to my ARCHEOLOGICAL DIG through this book. 🔍 Here are the fun facts I dug up while reading:
PROLOGUE
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough makes bogs sound like the prettiest places in the world. She writes of mosses changing from lime green to rusty orange. Mirrored pools with feathery white cotton grass and the yellow flowers of bog asphodel. And cherry red lingonberries and tawny brown mushrooms. Honestly, if she wrote an entire book about bogs, I'd read it. 🥰
CHAPTER 01
We have Vikings to thank for about 700 English words, including knife, skull, window, egg, and glitter. ✨
Thanks to advances in DNA research, two Viking Age bodies on either side of the North Sea were determined to be related and have now been reunited. I can't help but wonder: What if they hated each other? Like, imagine if you loathed a relative so much that you crossed the North Sea to get away from them and centuries later scientists reunited you. Forever. 💀😂
CHAPTER 02
Vikings practiced medical magic and believed protective charms (inscribed with runes) would keep them safe from sickness or pain seemingly caused by supernatural dwarves. (I know that sounds made up, but I swear it's in the book.)
Stellar quote:
"For most of human history, great women have stood in the shadows of great men (and mediocre men, and bad men)."
CHAPTER 03
Vikings enjoyed lewd humor so much that they carved crude jokes into wood.
There's a holy figure associated with birth named St. Margaret, and the story goes that she was once swallowed by a dragon and then ripped her way out of its belly like a chestburster from Aliens. 🩸
CHAPTER 04
Two of the most valuable collections of pagan mythological stories are a thirteenth-century Icelandic text called Prose Edda and a collection of poems called Poetic Edda. ✍️
CHAPTER 05
According to Viking myth, the mischievous god Loki once transformed himself into a sexy mare and lured a giant's horse into the woods for a quickie. 🐴
Vikings believed that a lava-dwelling giant named Surt would one day raze the earth with a flaming sword. This info is accompanied by more beautiful writing from Barraclough, this time about a volcano 🌋 (the spatter and dance of molten earth, hissing lava scorching the moss, etc.). Honestly, she needs to write a nature book because I would gobble that up!
CHAPTER 06
Vikings only bathed once a week (on Saturdays).
One day during the ninth century, a Viking took a poo that later fossilized. At 20 cm long and 5 cm wide, it's the largest piece of fossilized human feces ever discovered. 💩 (It's called the Lloyds Bank Coprolite if you care to Google it.)
"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."
CHAPTER 07
There's an old Norse legend that says a man peeps inside the women's quarters on the eve of battle and sees a group of Valkyries weaving on a grotesque loom made of swords and arrows and human entrails, and with severed human heads as warp weights. They use this loom to decide who will live and die in the coming battle.
"The existence of these stories is important. They are about women as complex, rounded humans: as friends sharing confidences, as spurned and vengeful lovers, as figures with the ultimate power of life and death."
On the important role women played in daily life, Barraclough notes that women did all the weaving of sails and clothing.
"Take away the textiles and the women, and you have some naked men in a rowing boat."
CHAPTER 08
Wordplay, poetry, and storytelling were central to Viking culture. Wordsmiths were held in high esteem, especially if they wrote skaldic verse, a "fiendishly complex type of poetry [...] of riddling wordplay where surreal imagery and twisty ambiguities must be unpicked before the meanings reveal themselves." For example:
"...'the dark betrayer of wood-bear of old walls' feels like it might refer to some grim and ancient mythological being, but it turns out that the creature is only a cat (the 'wood-bear of old walls' is a mouse, betrayed by the feline that wishes to kill it.)"
Vikings enjoyed solving riddles and playing board games. 🎲
CHAPTER 09
This whole chapter on enslaved people is terribly sad, so these aren't fun facts, just interesting ones...
During the Viking Age, people found themselves enslaved for myriad reasons: some were kidnapped and enslaved, others were born into slavery, and some people who had fallen on hard times surrendered their freedom to pay off a debt.
Some provincial law codes discuss the penalties for impregnating another person's slave. But these clauses didn't protect the enslaved woman; rather, they were meant to protect the person who benefitted from her labor. 😡 The person who impregnated the enslaved woman was responsible for her until she was able to go back to working for the person who enslaved her.
CHAPTER 10
Close to the southernmost tip of Greenland is a Norse settlement where a treasure trove of European medieval clothing was found. The clothes belonged to everyday, ordinary people (as opposed to the clothes of the rich and powerful) and can be viewed at the National Museum of Denmark.
informative
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
informative
slow-paced
informative
fast-paced