71 pages • 2-hour read
Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Love”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of antigay bias in history.
Bergen, Norway c. 1200
Barraclough imagines a scene near a waterfront where traders gather. A man is getting drunk in a tavern, and a woman named Gyda sends him a message on a short length of wood: “GYDA SAYS THAT YOU SHOULD GO HOME” (69). By 1200, most people knew how to scratch basic runes on wood, bone, or stone. These rune sticks provide traces of emotions, words, and deeds from everyday life.
Most rune sticks archaeologists have today—including the message written by Gyda—come from Bryggen, a medieval harborside in Bergen, where they were found after a fire in 1955. They include notes about drinking, fighting, and potty humor; one carries a message about changing sides in a civil conflict.
Love and Lust
Rune sticks unearthed from churches reveal secret messages. One suggests a love triangle: A man called Havard asks someone to marry him if she doesn’t want to be with Kolbein. Scratches through the runes and its hiding place between the floorboards where women sat for mass suggest the woman tried to hide the message. On another, a poem uses the sounds of runic letters to hide a secret within their meanings: The writer cannot sleep because of a woman named Gudrun.
Barraclough writes that a “substantial range of Old Norse words existed to express non-normative sexualities, identities and practices” (74) but these are much less likely to appear recorded in runes, even encoded like the poem about Gudrun. The language suggests society enshrined male-female roles while acknowledging that not everyone conformed to them, and certain stories depict Norse gods as fluid in regard to sexuality and gender. Loki transforms into a mare to have sex with a stallion, and gives birth to the eight-legged horse Sleipnir; Thor disguises himself as a bride; Freyja is rumored to have a host of lovers including her own brother.
Though the gods did these things, to accuse someone of transgressing the bounds of accepted masculine or feminine roles was considered an insult. However, explicit punishments for sexual acts or sexual identity don’t appear until the medieval conversion to Christianity, suggesting societal attitudes followed religious ones. Other runes demonstrate that love and lust didn’t always follow societal rules: One suggests a “clever” woman could take a lover and one pines with love for another man’s wife.
Little Ones
Little survives in the record about pregnancy and childbirth. Barraclough surmises that women made requests of female protective spirits and offerings to Frey and Freyja. A small bronze figure discovered in Rällinge, Sweden, is thought to depict the god Frey; the identification comes from Adam of Bremen’s description of the pagan temple at Uppsala from the 1070s. Adam describes the statue of Frey in the temple as fashioned “with an immense phallus” (79) matching that on the bronze figure from Rällinge. Adam was a Christian missionary describing pagan customs, whose work is best known for its lurid descriptions of “manifold and unseemly” activities, including human sacrifice. However, archaeological digs confirm Uppsala was an important site, and fertility deities matching his description of Frey appear in cultures all over the world.
Euphemisms in medieval Norse texts describe pregnant women as “not light” and “not strong,” or one who “does not walk alone” (80) but they don’t reveal emotions; historians must rely on inference to identify where women sought comfort or assistance. A tiny figure of a baby carved from amber might be a talisman against danger or simply a teething toy. The Old Norse poem Sigrdrífumál, featuring the Valkyrie Brunhild and the hero Sigurd, references “helping runes” that can be used to ease labor pains, and another poem describes a character singing spells to help her laboring friend. A fragment of a possible helping rune on a silver square may have been a protective amulet.
Later artifacts address Christian figures with similar messages. Icelandic manuscripts venerate St. Margaret; many surviving copies are small enough to have been carried or held close during a birth and similar artifacts existed in other parts of medieval Europe. Barraclough infers these talismans would have felt essential in a period when death was a distinct possibility for mother and child, citing the grave of a young woman and a full-term infant on the Orkney island of Rousay that is filled with valuable grave goods.
Artifacts like high chairs and cups provide limited evidence of children’s lives. However, over a dozen birchbark artifacts preserved in the swampy location of Novgorod were created by a boy named Onfim in the 13th century. Onfim’s sketches, drawn beside his lessons, depict him as a warrior and a monster, riding horseback or standing beside his father. Barraclough reads between the lines, imagining Onfim as a student who doodled when he grew bored, reaching through time to share something of himself.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Travel”
The Gokstad ship is an iconic image of the Viking Age, unearthed by two teens in Norway during the winter of 1879-1880, nearly a thousand years after its use. Its style is characteristic of early Nordic shipbuilding and it likely saw many voyages. During one of these, a crewmember scored the outline of his teenage foot, complete with toenails, into its planks. Barraclough uses this foot as a symbol of the journeys that characterized the Viking Age.
On Water
Ship-graffiti and rune sticks testify to the movement of Vikings by water. Longships are scratched into the walls of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. At Bergen a piece of juniper wood is carved with a fleet of longships and the runic inscription “here goes the sea-brave” (96).
People had smaller boats for traveling up fjords and rivers, fishing vessels, and large cargo boats. In the archaeological record, these survive as high-status burials; in the written record, skaldic verses sing the praises of high-status individuals. Barraclough acknowledges they reveal little about experiences of travelers who were not among the elite.
Archaeological expertise and reconstructions of Viking ships reveal the technology used to build them and what it would have been like to sail one. Those on ships would have eaten salted and pickled fish and meat, and drank beer, sour milk, or rainwater. They had no privacy for relieving themselves or sleeping. Navigation relied on knowledge of landmarks, stars, and the position of the sun.
Those aboard were men, except for captives bound for enslavement. Women were left at home, but Barraclough argues that the stereotypical Viking aboard his ship “was part of a web of familial and cultural connections, often with women and children at the centre, that transmitted cultural values down the generations” (102). She cites a poem from Egils saga, where the hero Egil is supposed to have composed a verse when he was aged six that begins, “My mother said / I would be bought / a boat with fine oars” (101) to suggest the culture of sea travel influenced children from their earliest days, passed on by their mothers’ stories.
Women and children were sometimes a necessity aboard ship despite the dangers they faced. According to Landnámabók (The Book of Settlement) written in 13th-century Iceland, of 25 ships that set out for Greenland, only 14 completed the voyage. Archaeological evidence indicates the danger of the journey; a grave in Greenland memorializes a woman who died on the voyage and whose body was consigned to the sea.
Those who made it to Greenland had more arduous struggles ahead. The distance was far between settlements and the economic bounty of walrus ivory lay beyond the Arctic Circle. Demand from as far as Novgorod and Baghdad meant that walrus-traders likely overextended the supply and had to make increasingly dangerous travels to find more.
On Land
Numerous artifacts from the Lendbreen ice patch in Norway reveal its location in a mountain pass was once a well-traveled highway, used most heavily in the middle of the Viking Age. Researchers found the excrement of countless small horses used for travel, and personal items include a mitten from the 9th century, a shoe made of animal hide from the 11th century, and a wooden walking stick. People used it from late winter through early summer, when snow made it easier to glide on sleds and skis; cairns mark the way, and a stone shelter offers relief from bad weather. Other artifacts there are mundane objects necessary for domestic life and weaving.
North of Lendbreen, wooden skis with birch bindings date to the early 8th century. 500 years later, the Norwegian text Konungs skuggsja described “men who are able to tame trees and boards, so that […] a man, who is no fleeter than other men when he is barefooted or shod merely with shoes, is made able to pass the bird on the wing” (109). Prehistoric petroglyphs in Arctic Norway depict individuals on skis or snowshoes hunting elk, providing further evidence that skiing was an ancient mode of travel used across millennia.
Surviving tales about Norse gods in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda include travel as a theme, and many stories center on the importance of hospitality. Odin offers advice urging travelers to use their common sense and hosts to care for those who are chilled and weary. In parts of the world where the weather could be harsh, this was the difference between life and death.
Onwards
Picture stones on Gotland show warriors arriving in the afterlife on horseback. Stories say they joined Odin or Freyja, whose halls in the afterlife were Valhalla and Folkvang. High-status individuals were buried with modes of travel, including sleds and wagons. A ship burial in Oseberg from 834 held two women with several options, including a wooden cart decorated with cats, Freyja’s sacred animal. Though the burial happened in the summer, iron spikes attached to their horses’ hooves indicate travel over ice. The Norse underworld was known as Hel, meaning a place that was concealed or covered, and the Prose Edda says the road to Hel lies “downwards and northwards” (118), explaining why the women’s horses were prepared for an icy journey.
Barraclough circles back to the outline of the Viking foot on the Gokstad ship, noting its toenails. According to Snorri Sturluson, the nails of dead people were used to build the ship Naglfar; the ship’s arrival at the field of battle would commence Ragnarok, or the end of the world, so people would do best to keep their nails trimmed and contribute as little as possible to its construction.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In these two chapters, the author focuses on using The Role of Artifacts in Reconstructing Historical Narratives to make inferences about Viking life. To do so, she continues using narrative techniques and symbolism that convey the emotional weight behind the historical evidence.
The vividly imagined scene at the trading post in “Love” is rendered using figurative language and supported by meticulous historical and archaeological research to reconstruct the past. The chapter begins:
The air is always sour and heavy with the smell of stockfish and fish oil. Inside the wooden warehouses, headless dried cod are stacked thickly like firewood, split stiffly to the tail, the colour of yellow-gray parchment […] Destined for sailors’ bellies and far-flung cooking pots, these pungent delicacies have been making northerners rich for centuries. Honey, wheat, wine, textiles and glassware arrive in ships and are unloaded. Fish and furs replace them onboard and leave for southern lands. But the smell remains, mingling with the stench of raw sewage and rotting rubbish (67).
The physical details of the scene include items historians know were traded throughout the Norse world, but Barraclough’s inferences about the visceral experiences of people who lived and worked at busy trading centers, and those who prepared, consumed, and traded in the raw materials, invite readers to imagine what it would be like to be there—not just as an observer, but as a participant.
Such details reveal a sense of intimacy and empathy, developed by the narrative about Gyda calling someone home from the tavern, so the author is able to connect runes on wood to a scene that might be familiar today. From here, she dives more deeply into runes about people who didn’t make it into the official narrative, examples of “the sort of messy gossip that goes hand in hand with the human condition, but rarely survives for posterity” (76). Though she outlines what is known about Viking Age gender and sexuality from artifacts and surviving clues in the language, she avoids imposing an interpretation, reminding the reader that doing so is often a mirror reflection of the modern world rather than an understanding of how love and lust motivated people in the past.
Her interest in sexuality leads to an examination of pregnancy as the result of love and lust. As something discussed among and experienced by women, Barraclough says looking for clues about pregnancy and motherhood puts us “right at the edge of what we can possibly know about the people of the past” (78). In trying to trace women’s experiences, she relies on mentions of religious rituals in the written record, helping runes and sagas, and artifacts from throughout the medieval world, touching briefly on ideas she will explore more thoroughly in “Belief” and “Bodies” while acknowledging that, when it comes to pregnancy, there are more questions than answers.
Even the site where a woman is buried beside her infant raises questions about the context and the people left behind, which Barraclough says evokes an unwritten and emotional history. Her exploration of Onfim’s drawings also seeks out the emotions behind the written history; imagining a child whose attention wanders and who draws what he sees around him mirrors what a child today might do. Here, she includes examples of his artwork so that readers can draw their own connections.
In “Travel,” the symbol of the foot carved into the Gokstad ship takes several meanings, representing literal movement through the world and the metaphorically hidden people behind the legendary histories of Viking warriors. Since the size of the foot carving suggests it was made by a teenager, and because the ship burial was discovered by teenagers, Barraclough draws parallels through time and space, noting “every historical era has its bored teenagers. Sometimes they deface priceless ships. Sometimes they break into burial mounds” (93). Her tone becomes more casual as she shifts between these observations and the established facts of Viking movement throughout the world.
Beyond the known facts of travel, Barraclough considers The Nature of Social Structures and Daily Life in Viking Society as she examines the broader meaning of the longship within the culture. She again centers women and children in her examination of Egils saga and its warrior’s childhood dreams of the ship he would sail and adventures he would have. The phrase “my mother said” ties the experiences of adult Viking warriors to the dreams and stories of their childhood days, or the stories their wives would pass on to their own children. She highlights women as powerful actors who maintained the home and the cultural narrative, ideas she will expand upon in coming chapters.
Stories and artifacts are also central to the author’s examination of travel over land and to the afterlife, including what they reveal about social structures and values. The domestic items found along the Lendbreen ice patch, the women in the Oseberg ship burial, and the legends retold by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda introduce key ideas about religious belief and societal structures the author will explore further in “Belief” and “Home.” By coming full-circle to the foot carving from the Gokstad ship at the end of the chapter and its possible connection to tales about Ragnarok, the author segues into the ways belief shaped society and culture.
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