‘Brings us as close to an intimacy with a strange past as we are likely to get’
Financial Times
‘Barraclough’s book is a scholarly delight … Perhaps the greatest virtue of this wonderful book, though, is that it captures the sheer strangeness, the ultimate unknowability, of the distant past’
Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
‘Endlessly fascinating, authoritatively informative and, above all, great fun’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived, a history of the Vikings that deploys their material legacy – from combs to slave collars,
from skulls to sundials – to evoke the wonder of an entire civilisation’
Tom Holland
‘If each individual artifact reveals relatively little, the enormous array Barraclough assembles … adds depth to the traditional
portrait of Viking culture’
New Yorker
‘A fascinating tour … Barraclough looks beyond the soap-opera sagas to those lost in the cracks of history’
The New York Times
‘From glittering treasure to lost ephemera, racy runes to hidden tombs, Barraclough reveals people both endearingly familiar, yet
sometimes also bafflingly, even unnervingly, strange’
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
‘Barraclough keeps on expanding our horizons’
Literary Review
‘The great success of this book is that it finds the “little fragments of lives lived, the bits and pieces that fell between the
cracks in the floorboards,” and constructs a story that helps us comprehend the messiness of the period, in all its wonders as
well as its horrors’
Washington Post
‘A fascinating journey through all facets of the Viking world’
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
‘Extraordinarily intimate – a rich tapestry of lives and things interwoven in lively prose. This is history made material’
Madeleine Pelling
‘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
‘Great storytelling, told with extreme authority. This book brings us an exciting new talent’
Emma Gannon
