Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

Environmental historians examine interactions between human culture and the natural world, including the ways people shape their surroundings and the ways environmental changes force them to adapt. The field includes the overlap between the study of history through primary and secondary sources, and the archaeological investigation of remains, artifacts, and organic materials; archaeologists uncover and preserve evidence, and historians interpret that evidence in an academic context. Historians “are experts at recognizing, accounting for, and explaining not just records—but their context including bias, the social situation and attitudes and their importance to the overall record” (“What Is a Historian?” Environmental Science).

As an environmental historian, Eleanor Barraclough uses these methods to look beyond the pages of official history and piece together clues about daily life. She explains that “the historical record is capricious, and what survives is largely a matter of chance” (38). Rather than finding this discouraging, Barraclough delights in a methodology that threads together the surviving pieces to look at them from multiple perspectives.

Barraclough approaches contemporaneous accounts of Vikings with their contextual limitations in mind, examining the physical world to confirm or contradict them. She considers the way a shifting climate motivated Norse settlers to migrate, examines language and name changes as a byproduct of migration, and draws inferences about how and when Norse culture and settlement spread and what it valued.