Embers of the Hands — Barraclough

Drawing on the Old Norse poetic tradition, Barraclough reconstructs the mental and imaginative world of medieval Scandinavia — the cosmology, the ethics of honour and vengeance, the relationship between the living and the dead. The book is a work of cultural history as much as political narrative, using skaldic poetry as evidence for how Norse society understood itself rather than simply as literary decoration.