eowynshelmet 's review for:

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough

3.5

informative

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There is some excellent information here and interesting tidbits (the Vikings were great graffiti leavers and some of the drawings reproduced in the book are quite astonishing). I appreciate that this is supposed to be a book about common people, not the known leaders. But the approach has limitations. The author ends up saying, in different ways, "we really don't know" so often that I wondered why put this together at all if there is nothing to be drawn from the research.