71 pages • 2 hours read
Eleanor BarracloughEmbers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2025A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Home”
Seeking a Home
The earliest settlers in Greenland built a settlement that centuries later would be engulfed in layers of sand and gravel, preserved for archaeologists who named it “the Farm Under the Sand.” The author compares their journey to colonizing the moon—a hostile landscape, where they would need as many familiar items and supplies as possible in order to survive.
The scarcity of resources and lack of habitation makes Greenland special, she argues: The settlers had to start from scratch, and evidence of their habits is undiluted by outside influence, as the frigid climate and unfarmed soils preserved the archaeological record. Organic materials that would not survive in other regions are relatively plentiful here, outlining traces of domestic life.
Home From Home
The Old Norse word heimr means both “home” and “world,” and this juxtaposition aligns with a culture in which home was both the safety of the farmstead and the adventure of exploration. The Medieval Warm Period, from 800 to 1000, made weather milder and more conducive to sea travel.
Erik the Red was the first-known European in Greenland, arriving as an outlaw exiled from Iceland for murder. Greenland is mostly covered by ice, and the sun doesn’t fully set in summer or rise in winter, with a very small area suitable for farming. The first families made their home in the “Eastern Settlement,” a sheltered spot close to the southern tip of Greenland. Later settlers created the “Western Settlement” closer to the modern-day capital of Nuuk, along deeper fjords with less arable land and a shorter growing season.
The true resource of Greenland lay in the “Northern Hunting Grounds,” where colonies of walrus provided skins and tusks to be traded for goods Greenlanders could not get from their environment, including metal and timber for building. Trade in walrus ivory became the strongest tie between Greenland and the rest of Scandinavia and Europe. Calculations suggest journeying from the settlements to the hunting grounds took two weeks to a month.
Calling on the double meaning of heimr, Barraclough explains that it took the world to make a home for them, meaning their survival was made possible by cultural, economic, and psychological ties to the Norse world in the east.
Making a Home
The Western Settlement had shallow farmland but ample freshwater, and it was closer to the Northern Hunting Grounds than the Eastern Settlement. However, it lacked access to any timber for building. Greenlanders had to rely on driftwood or wood imported all the way from Norway. The journey farther west to Labrador (called Markland or “Forest Land” by Greenlanders) was across a treacherous sea. Thus, the earliest longhouses were made from supplies they had, with foundations of stone and walls of turf up to two meters thick to keep out the cold. Since temperatures were too harsh for most livestock, Greenlanders depended on hunting.
Home Is Where the Hearth Is
The family unit included all those who lived on a farm. A married couple and their children usually formed the center, with extended blood relations and any laborers. Some laborers might be seasonal and move from farmstead to farmstead; in Iceland, “Moving Day” fell at the end of May, but whether this custom was replicated in Greenland is unknown. Multiple households might live on one farmstead and share communal celebrations.
Heat was essential: A device unearthed from Norse dwellings throughout the Atlantic is a small stone box that had room inside for burning turf with sides that protected against sparks flying out, which could be carried from room to room for warmth. For light, they filled lamps with seaweed and seal oil. Near the fireplace at the Farm Under the Sand, archaeologists found a stone used for grinding flour, a surprise because there was little to no access to bread. Archaeological fragments and pollen records suggest some wealthier households attempted unsuccessfully to sow grain, so it was only available when it could be imported.
The Warp and the Weft
The weaving room is equated with the Old Norse word dyngja, which refers to women’s quarters. Runes on weaving equipment bear the names of both men and women, but there is no way to know whether this indicates a blurring of gender roles where men took part in the weaving. The weaving room at the Farm Under the Sand provides a wealth of items used in the complex process of making cloth, and the loom here is the largest discovered in the North Atlantic. Loom weights from Norse Greenlandic farms bear runic inscriptions connected to Christian devotions, as Greenland was strongly Christian early.
Weaving rooms were tightly packed with women and children. A weaving sword found at another farm in the Western Settlement is scratched with a drawing that suggests children at play and may have been created by a child: Two little figures with swords and shields. In a weaving room at a Viking Age village in Norway, birch tar used as chewing gum bears imprints of children’s teeth.
Spinning and weaving feature in sagas and Old Norse myths and legends. The stories depict women as complex, fully-rounded humans who can be friendly confidants or vengeful lovers, and who have power over life and death. In one, a woman compares her morning’s work to her husband’s: She has spun 12 ells of yarn while he has killed her former lover. In another, Valkyries weave, using swords and arrows to make cloth from the entrails of the slain, choosing who will live and die in a coming battle.
Life in the Viking Age depended on textile production for clothes to protect against harsh climates and sails to power the ships that brought Vikings across the world. The poet Ottarr the Black wrote of a king cutting through the waves in his ship, the sail of which he notes was spun by women. Textile production was arduous and resource-consuming; research indicates it would take one person nine years to make a sail for a Viking warship, and a family of five would need the wool of 25-30 sheep to make enough clothes for one year. Clothing preserved in the permafrost of Greenland shows clothing was patched and repaired until it fell apart.
Wadmal, a dense twill fabric, became one of Greenland’s chief exports and was used as the main currency in Iceland, measured in ells. Thus, when the wife in the saga says she has spun 12 ells of yarn while her husband was out murdering, she reminds him she’s the one earning a living.
Pets and Pests
Pests in Greenland and elsewhere included lice, ticks, and other parasites that thrived in the generally unsanitary conditions of the period. In the weaving room of the Farm Under the Sand, nests of mice were found under the hearthstones. The skeleton of a cat on a farm in the Eastern Settlement suggests they may have been used to reduce mouse populations; cats were rare in Scandinavia at that time. Dogs were more common, used for protection and hunting.
Beyond the Homestead
In most of the Norse world, the nucleus of the farmstead was the farm itself, including human living quarters, animal shelters, and storage buildings. These were surrounded by infields, where crops were grown, and outfields, where animals grazed. Property lines were carefully marked with stone structures because land was a precious commodity. Larger pastures in the hills and mountains were used for summer grazing.
Greenland was the exception to this blueprint: Land was poorer and there were no summer pastures; populations were smaller and settled farther apart; land was cheap and plentiful. As a result, there was no need for property markers.
Livestock
As settlers adapted, they discovered which livestock would thrive. Goats and sheep were prized for milk and wool. Cows were a limited but prized option; they were the “portable wealth of the Viking Age” (209). The Old Norse word fe means both “cattle” and “wealth,” a meaning preserved today in the word “fee.” Cows were kept on the highest-status settlements, and at the bishopric in Gardar there were byres for 100 cows, which would have had to huddle indoors in full darkness during the months-long winter, feeding on expensive fodder.
Pigs were rare in Greenland and Iceland, but were common in places like York, where they thrived in a warmer climate and densely populated urban centers. Pigs were also popular in the Faroe Islands, where 140 place names reference them.
Wild Animals
Animals native to Greenland included reindeer, seals, wild birds, fish, and fox. Polar bears were prized for their skins, and beached whales provided meat, blubber, and baleen. In the Faroes, people participated in communal hunts for pilot whales that continue to this day. In Greenland, the primary communal hunt was for walrus.
From the variety of wild animal bones found at farmsteads, archaeologists conclude that Norse Greenlandic settlers ate whatever was available, most commonly reindeer and seal. Fragments of artwork show animals’ importance, from a delicately carved polar bear figurine to a wooden chopping board with walrus heads carved into one edge. Other ivory carvings might have been worn as pendants.
Adaptations and Endings
Other cultures lived in Greenland prior to the Norse settlers’ arrival, including Saqqaq and Dorset, but the island was uninhabited from about 0 CE to 700 CE. Later, the Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, likely met Norse settlers for the first time in the Northern Hunting Grounds.
The environment was already marginal when Norse settlers arrived, and by the early 1300s it was much colder. Cloth shows people began to weave in different patterns to better protect against cold, and to weave goat hair with Arctic hare fur to keep in body heat. Ice cores show this was the coldest period in Greenland for a millennium; storms were more severe, making crossing to Norway more difficult. In Europe, the Black Death made travel even less likely. Walrus ivory became scarcer as the hunting grounds were depleted, and elephant ivory replaced it in Europe. Inland ice increased, and rivers filled with sediment.
Incrementally, people packed up and left for more hospitable climes. While the inhabitants of the Farm Under the Sand appear to have left purposefully, remains at other settlements reflect extreme cold and starvation. In one, the partial skeleton of a dog with butchery marks on its bones indicates the desperation of the situation. By 1500, there were no more Norse homes in Greenland; in 1990, two Inuit hunters discovered the remains of the Farm Under the Sand.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Play”
The Sound of Silence
Barraclough describes the remains of a half-finished stringed instrument like a fiddle. She says it is exciting that the instrument was abandoned partway through its construction because this suggests it was made where it was found, making it the oldest-known bowed instrument in the Nordic world and possibly all of Europe. Instruments like this likely originated in the Byzantine and Islamic areas of the world, meaning cultural diffusion was happening on a large scale by the time this instrument was abandoned in 10th-century Hedeby.
The Old Norse verb meaning “to play” encompassed a variety of activities including music, games, and sports. Verse by Earl Rognvald, ruler of Orkney until 1158, claims he is good at chess, reading, skiing, playing the harp, and writing poetry, confirming a historical truth that the elite had more leisure time than the poor or working class. People respected musical talent and bragged when they had it; a tuning peg from Sigtuna is inscribed with runes that name its maker. In Norse legend, the famous harp player Gunnar is thrown into a pit of snakes, where he placates them with his music until one strikes him in the heart. Images depicting this have been found in numerous Norse churches.
A traveler from Iberia described the singing of Hedeby’s residents as “the baying of hounds, only worse” (224); Barraclough speculates this could have been a form of throat singing or a Sami joik, and cultural differences were behind the traveler’s inability to appreciate it. Elsewhere researchers have found a variety of instruments, often made from wood, antler, and horn. Some are intact enough to identify by their modern equivalents the sounds they likely made, and some can still be played. The author imagines the cat from the Greenlandic settlement curled by the fire while fiddle music filled the dark winter nights.
Gerald of Wales in the 12th century described the residents of northern England singing a two-part harmony so common and simple even babies knew how to do it; he concluded this was a particularly Norse style of singing imported by Danelaw settlers whose habits were adopted locally. The oldest secular song from the Nordic world is recorded in the Codex Runicus from 1300, a set of laws. On the final page lines of verse describe dreaming of silk and fine fabrics.
Where Eagles Soar
Poetry, storytelling, and riddles were important in Norse culture. The Prose Edda says Odin stole the mead of poetry from the giants by transforming into an eagle and flying to Asgard with the mead in his belly, where he deposited it into two buckets. Those who drank the mead from the first bucket wrote beautiful verse, while those who drank the other wrote doggerel. Storytelling and poetry were central to all parts of society, and storytellers were popular figures at farmsteads and firesides.
The Cat and the Fiddle
In Greenland’s Eastern Settlement, artifacts provide scraps of poetry and encoded wordplay using homonyms. One four-sided stick from the turn of the 11th century, transliterated into the Roman alphabet, might read “On the sea that seemed to be, which you did not see on the sea” (233). The other sides of the stick reveal poetry with a kenning and an undeciphered code.
Similar runic inscriptions that play on words and homonyms have been found in Norway and Sweden; these likely circulated for decades or centuries before being written down. Others are riddles similar to that of the Sphinx, featured in saga competitions with Odin. The author argues the proliferation of wordplay points to its importance in Norse culture, and returns to the imagined cat in the Greenlandic settlement, this time listening to poetry.
Board Games
Riddles describe board games and their rules, which historians would otherwise be unable to understand. The preferred board game of the Viking Age was hnefatafl; other popular games made their way north from the Roman Empire centuries before the Viking Age. An Early Iron Age grave in western Norway contained 18 gaming pieces and an oblong die; the region’s strategic, political, and economic importance indicate the person buried with the pieces held a lot of power. Die and gaming pieces were also found in the Vimose bog. The author argues that offerings illustrate the exhilaration of life as a warrior, but games were essential to fill the time spent waiting for the next battle.
The proliferation of board games shows they slipped easily into daily life, and images on artifacts like the Golden Horns of Gallehus depict figures with gaming boards. These games began as an elite pastime, even played by the gods. The author revisits the Salme ship burial in Estonia, which contained hundreds of gaming pieces that were status symbols and possible diplomatic gifts, and emphasizes the societal significance indicated by the king piece placed in the leader’s mouth.
Birka, an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm, was a powerful international trading center with links to Greenland and South Asia. High-status Viking Age graves there contain delicately made gaming pieces of glass, amber, horn, and bone. Others made in varying styles and of different materials have been unearthed in Iceland, Kyiv, Norway, and Denmark. Some are finely carved with detailed faces and braided beards.
Everyday items like shells and bones were likely also used as game pieces, but don’t stand out in the archaeological record. Elsewhere, people scratched hnefatafl grids on the backs of serving platters in the Faroe Islands and sandstone slabs at Orkney. Researchers at Orkney almost threw the boards away before rainwater revealed the markings.
Child’s Play
Small carved figures from Hedeby and elsewhere appear to be children’s toys: Horses, swords, boats, and dolls. The author remarks that though play is a cornerstone of the human experience, children’s possessions and invented games are unlikely to survive the centuries. However, skates of animal bones survive across the Viking world, and while skiing was a way to travel distances, most skating was recreational. Researchers measured the lengths of the skates they found and discovered most were 20-22 centimeters long. The small size combined with accounts of skating as a “youthful” pastime suggest most Viking Age ice skaters were children and teens.
Later images and descriptions indicate skaters propelled themselves with long poles, tipped with a metal spike for digging into the ice. A written description by Olaus Magnnus (1555) describes skating as a competitive sport involving prizes, where participants used greased animal bones as skates, since these would slide along ice better than iron.
Sports
Old Norse-Icelandic sagas describe competitive sports that included ball games, wrestling, and swimming. The participants are always male, which Barraclough suggests was the social reality of sports participation. Contests could be casual occasions or organized events. In the sagas, many sports competitions are the inciting incident to a deadly feud.
Feats of strength were another common competition. One Icelandic saga tells a tale of a man named Finnbogi, who demonstrated his strength by pulling up large stones from the ground, walking a far distance with them, and then hurling them down so they sank deeply into the earth. The tale says Finnbogi’s name will be celebrated as long as Iceland is inhabited; Barraclough notes that rocks that appear to have been hurled into the earth, known as glacial erratics, are today known for a character from another saga, named Grettir. Feats of strength and bodybuilding are still popular in Iceland today, and its residents dominate international strongman and strongwoman competitions.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
These two chapters delve more deeply into artifacts that reveal The Economic and Societal Impacts of Cultural Diffusion. In the long chapter “Home,” Barraclough focuses almost exclusively on the Farm Under the Sand and other settlements by Greenlanders to extrapolate and compare a wealth of archaeological evidence about Norse life there with other parts of the world. These indicate a broadly understood social structure with nuclear families at the center and shared work to ensure survival. In “Play,” she imagines what people did with the little leisure time they had; the conceit of the Greenlandic cat by the fire, listening to music and poems, connects archaeological evidence from both chapters to depict a familiar scene.
Barraclough describes Greenlandic settlements in “Home” with the narrative and metaphorical elements she applies throughout the book, building a sense of anticipation in the chapter’s opening lines about the voyage there and alluding to “a Viking Age Noah’s Ark” (187). She combines her imaginative recreations with a methodical approach that highlights the pure archaeological value of the location, using divided chapter sections to outline evidence with chronological as well as thematic organization. Her arc begins with the voyage to Greenland and ends with the abandonment of its settlements, and in between, she explores the elements that defined domestic life. By using the double-meaning of heimr, she threads together the broad implications of Greenlandic settlement with the narrower setting of the homestead.
Barraclough also examines The Nature of Social Structures and Daily Life in Viking Society. Juxtaposing the voyage outward and physical challenges of the marginal environment with the work of women as weavers, and the small innovations that helped make life comfortable, illustrates the interconnections between different aspects of daily life. The typically male work of exploration and expedition were impossible without the sails and warm cloth made by women weaving; the animals brought home from the distant Northern Hunting Grounds filled kitchens with food and with carved replicas of their figures; the wadmal woven by women and the walrus ivory hunted by men were primary sources of wealth and trade with the outside world.
While the artifacts and sagas Barraclough cites indicate that gender roles were ingrained, it also depicts them as possibly flexible due to the necessity of both kinds of work, as she notes “feud and murder might be more stereotypical Viking activities, but they were hardly going to put bread on the table” (206). While these Greenlanders may have represented a geographically isolated diaspora, they were still strongly connected socially and economically with the world to the east, ties that made it easier to return when the harsh environment became untenable.
In “Play,” artifacts and records from throughout the Norse world build on ideas and evidence in earlier chapters. Instruments with design origins outside medieval Europe and written impressions of Nordic singing ability highlight the impacts of cultural diffusion, while the ability to take part in leisure activities indicates social structures. As in “Home,” Barraclough uses artifacts to find common social threads: Gaming began with the gods, and only the elite had the time to learn to play instruments and become skalds, but anyone could sing or tell stories and riddles.
Hnefatafl is another example of how play adapted across social classes. Pieces and boards could be intricately carved from expensive walrus ivory, but anyone could scratch out a grid on a slab of stone with shells for pieces. The figures themselves provide small-scale illustrations of social structure, as it was the job of all players to protect the king. Sagas that depict game-play further illustrate how it reflected social values: Finnbogi’s wish for his feat of strength to “be remembered for as long as Iceland is inhabited” (250) shows the importance of attaining glory lasting beyond death. The fact that feats of strength are enshrined in modern Icelandic language and athletic competitions show that some values have stood the test of time.
By examining the sheer number of artifacts related to play, from high art etched on the Golden Horns of Gallehus to greased bone skates, Barraclough supports her claim that leisure time was an important part of life at all levels of society.
