A "brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived" (Tom Holland) history of the Viking Age, told through the everyday objects of ordinary people

A Times best History Book of the Year 2024 'Every page glittering with insight... [a] wonderful book' Dominic Sandbrook 'Brilliantly written... evokes the wonder of an entire civilisation.' Tom Holland 'Takes us beyond the familiar into a real, visceral, far more satisfying Viking world.' Dan Snow 'A fascinating tour ... Barraclough looks beyond the soap-opera sagas to those lost in the cracks of history' The New York Times It's time to meet the real Vikings. A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child. From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world. Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate.

"A rich trove ... This book brings us as close to an intimacy with a strange past as we are likely to get" - Financial Times

"Endlessly fascinating, authoritatively informative and, above all, great fun" - Times Literary Supplement

"If each individual artefact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles... adds depth to the traditional portrait of Viking culture" - New Yorker

"A fascinating tour ... Eleanor Barraclough looks beyond the soap-opera sagas to those lost in the cracks of history" - New York Times

"Barraclough keeps on expanding our horizons" - Literary Review

"Barraclough's book is a scholarly delight, every page glittering with insight as she surveys the great sweep of life in the northlands between the 8th and 11th centuries ... Perhaps the greatest virtue of this wonderful book, though, is that it captures the sheer strangeness, the ultimate unknowability, of the distant past" - Sunday Times

"Vibrant ... Beautifully written, with immersively evocative prose and a wry turn of phrase, this is a hugely enjoyable overview [of the Viking Age]" - World Archaeology

"A wondrous, gorgeously-written book, breathing the Vikings into intimate, incandescent life: from glittering treasure to lost ephemera, racy runes to hidden tombs, Barraclough reveals people both endearingly familiar, yet sometimes also bafflingly, even unnervingly, strange" - author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

"A fascinating journey through all facets of the Viking world - especially what ordinary people experienced - beautifully collated from tiny bits of real evidence from archaeology (well illustrated) and linguistics (using texts in Old Norse, Old English, and runes; and even word-histories). We feel first-hand the hardships of sailing and farming so far north, of the captives, and of women cooking and endlessly making cloth, clothing, and huge woollen sails for the boats - evidence that used to be ignored." - Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years

"Barraclough's Viking world is extraordinarily intimate - a rich tapestry of lives and things interwoven in lively prose. From board games to buried ships, and from the graffiti of bored teenagers to runic stones, this is history made material" - author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of the Eighteenth Century