Sometimes, very occasionally, a new book comes out about what we have come to call the Viking Age that really adds something new, does not contain yet another personal opinion of an author, is very pleasant to read and provides (many) images that you have not seen before. Hidden Lives – What the Latest Finds Tell Us About the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough is exactly what you hope for, if you have already read hundreds of books about this period.
Eleanor Barraclough “shakes the Viking boat” by starting off with the observation that such a thing as the Viking Age does not exist. Since time immemorial, the credo has been that the Viking Age “began” in 793 A.D. with the Viking raid on Lindisfarne and “ended” with the Norman conquest of England in 1066 A.D. First of all, as I argue in my own book, this is far too centralistic a thought from an English perspective. However, as Eleanor Barraclough convincingly argues, this is not the only factor to abandon the well-known “Viking Age” as lasting from 793 to 1066 A.D.
The common people, the common man, who this book is all about, had no notion of “a beginning” or “an end.” What – looking back – “begins” is a marker in retrospect. An end is a concept defined almost 900 years later, which the people at the time could not do anything with, and certainly not the common citizens who experienced this time from their here and now. What “begins” in 793 A.D. when a group of warriors, buried near their ships, are found in Estonia and this battle appears to have been fought 40 years earlier, around 750 A.D. Should we then redefine the beginning or even let go? The Orkney Islands remained under Scandinavian rule until 1468 A.D. The last Scandinavian Greenlanders left their settlements in the 15th century. As I have stated before: when does a Viking start being a Viking and when does he stop being one. The same applies to the concept of Norseman. Were the Normans no longer Norsemen, or were they in their behavior and desire to conquer territory, since they were descendants of them? And if they felt this way, did it stop in the autumn of 1066 A.D.?
Be that as it may, the objects in the book steal the real show. With a few exceptions, they are truly new discoveries, in a few cases they have been published before, but many times more they are conjured up from museum depots and provided with many intriguing insights and perspectives. Whether it is a wooden ski, horse dung that has emerged from under the – melting – ice of a glacier in Norway, the largest fossilized turd from York, a wooden cutting board decorated with walrus heads or a polar bear carved from walrus ivory, found in Greenland; Hidden Lives is the gift that keeps on giving.
Thematically divided into chapters such as Love, Travel, Home, Play and Unfreedom – slavery, it takes us on a journey through the imaginative remains of this culture originating from Scandinavia that gradually, over the centuries, spread, took place and either merged with a sequel, or disappeared – until other cultures – without beginning or end – took their place. Wood was collected, the fire lit up, reached its highest point and then gradually became smaller. Indeed: as Eleanor writes: the embers continued to glow for a long time.
They glow to this day, with our wonder and unwavering interest in these objects. Closer – far away from the familiar main characters of the Viking Age – the ordinary people, we rarely came. Hidden Lives is an ode to those about whom far too little has been recorded – and is becoming; the everyday person. Seemingly invisible in historiography – until one realizes that without “the Viking woman” alone, the Viking Age would never have existed. Hidden Lives is therefore also a statement against the familiar books about the Viking Age.
Extremely refreshing.
Thomas Kamphuis 
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