By Allen Boyer

Of all the histories of the Viking Age, “Embers of the Hands” may be the funniest, sexually frankest, closest-focused, and fascinating.

Its author, Eleanor Barraclough, is an environmental historian at England’s Bath Spa University – which means, a specialist in archaeology and human life as it was shaped by a bleak, beautiful world of mountains, moorland, forests, and rough surf.

The title is a kenning, a word-puzzle metaphor used by Norse and Anglo-Saxon poets. (Among simple kennings, “whale-road” meant ocean and “reindeer-sea” meant land.) “Embers of the hands” once meant gold, precious metal shimmering like fire in a king’s fingers. Barraclough reworks the metaphor. For her, it means the small finds that make the past human: “clothes, toys and gaming pieces, love notes and obscenities carved into slivers of wood . . . the glowing remnants that survive when the flame of a life has vanished.”

These embers include whalebone spades, and weavers’ whorls on which women carved their names, Sigrid and Sigvor and Thorhild. A schoolboy’s drawings scratched on birch bark. Hoards of silver coins (found near trading towns). Frozen horse-dung in mountain passes. Troves of rune-sticks, splinters and tablets on which runes were whittled, messages fired off like a screed of text messages.

NOW THERE’S GOING TO BE A FIGHT. IF ONLY I MIGHT COME NEARER TO THE MEAD-HOUSE MUCH MORE OFTEN. GYRDA SAYS THAT YOU SHOULD GO HOME.

Barraclough handles this learning lightly. One Norse farm in Greenland, she points out cheerfully, preserved the remains of a cat and the bridge of a fiddle.

Viking raids echoed, ironically, in Norse home life. The bronze fittings on looted Bibles were fashioned into brooches for Norse ladies’ cloaks. Many monasteries preserved saints’ relics in reliquaries. Reliquaries were resplendent in precious metal, fine woodwork, bright glass and enamel – but fatefully, they were roughly the size and shape of modern handbags. They caught the eyes of Viking raiders. “A looted reliquary,” Barraclough writes, “was a tangible sign of adventures over the seas, deeds accomplished, treasures won. It also made an extremely fine gift for someone back at home.” A dozen English and Irish reliquaries survive from the Viking centuries. “Three of them ended up in Scandinavia, and all three of them are associated with Viking Age women. This is not a coincidence.”

Norse women get their due in this book (as they often do in the sagas). To clothe a family of five for a year might require the wool of 30 sheep – animals to be shepherded and shorn, wool to be carded and spun and woven. To make the sail for a Norse longship would have taken nine weavers a full year. Barraclough tartly observes: “Take away the textiles and the women, and you have some naked men in a rowing boat. Take away the food they cooked, preserved and stored for the voyage, and you have some naked hungry men in a rowing boat.”

Only rarely does Barraclough mention kings or follow chroniclers. She does quote the first bishop of Iceland, who prescribed flogging, perhaps lasting a period of years, for miscreants who had sex with the wrong sex, “or with a quadruped.”

Perhaps the bishop remembered the scapegrace Norse god Loki, who changed himself into a mare to distract a frost giant’s stallion and became the dam of Odin’s eight-legged steed.

Biomedical advances have revolutionized archaeology. Isotope traces in tooth enamel show where a Norseman lived before he left his skull in a burial mound. DNA can show family connections, even after a thousand years. Incredibly, a skeleton from England turned out to be the close relation – nephew, half-brother, grandson – of a middle-aged man buried in Denmark.

Both had died violently, the young man hacked down and buried in a mass grave outside Oxford, the other man felled by a stab wound to his hip.

“Perhaps the younger one grew up listening to the older one’s tales of travel and derring-do, and in time set off to emulate him,”

Barraclough comments. “But together, their bodies tell a story of family ties, far-off travel, brutal lives and brutal deaths.” The familiar narrative of Viking raids remains, but the more we know its details, the more the story deepens.

“Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.” By Eleanor Barraclough. W. W. Norton. 393 pages. $32.99.

Allen Boyer, writer and reviewer, grew up in Oxford.