Eleanor Barraclough | |
---|---|
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Churchill College, Cambridge (MA, MPhil, PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Environmental history |
Institutions | Bath Spa University Durham University |
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough FSA FRHistS is a British historian,broadcaster and writer. [1]
Much of her work explores the cultures,literatures and languages of the medieval north,particularly Viking Age history and Old Norse-Icelandic literature. She is the author of Embers of the Hands:Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile,2024) [2] and Beyond the Northlands:Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (Oxford University Press,2016). [3] She also co-edited Imagining the Supernatural North (University of Alberta Press,2016). [4]
Eleanor Barraclough studied at the University of Cambridge,in the Department of Anglo-Saxon,Norse and Celtic,where she earned an MA (Cantab),MPhil,PhD. [5] She then moved to the University of Oxford,where she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English, [6] and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College. [7] From there she moved to Durham University,where she was associate professor in Medieval History and Literature. [8] She is currently Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at Bath Spa University. [9] She held an AHRC Leadership Grant from 2020–2024, [10] for a multidisciplinary study of forests in early northern Germanic cultures.
In 2013,Barraclough was chosen as one of ten BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinkers, [11] in a competition to develop a new generation of academics who can bring the best of university research and scholarly ideas to a broad audience through the media and public engagement. Since then,she has presented many documentaries on BBC Radio 3 and 4,for series such as Costing the Earth, On Your Farm, Sunday Feature and Open Country. [12]
Barraclough was a regular presenter on Radio 3’s Free Thinking [13] and hosted three series of the Time Travellers podcast for Radio 3’s Essential Classics. [14] She also presented BBC Four’s Beyond the Walls:In Search of the Celts. [15] In 2020,Eleanor was a judge for the Costa Book Award for Biography. [16] In 2019 [17] and 2020, [18] she was a judge for the BBC Countryfile Magazine Awards. When she appeared as a guest on Radio 3’s Private Passions,her music choices included ‘Rotlaust tre fell’by Wardruna. [19] Thanks to her BBC documentaries,she has jammed with Viking musicians, [20] dunked herself in a frozen lake in search of immortality, [21] and been knighted with a walrus penis bone in the Arctic. [22]
Barraclough lives in London.[ citation needed ]
Vinland, Vineland, or Winland was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Eriksson landed there around 1000 AD, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. The name appears in the Vinland Sagas, and describes Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as northeastern New Brunswick. Much of the geographical content of the sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America.
Erik Thorvaldsson, known as Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer, described in medieval and Icelandic saga sources as having founded the first European settlement in Greenland. Erik most likely earned the epithet "the Red" due to the color of his hair and beard. According to Icelandic sagas, Erik was born in the Jæren district of Rogaland, Norway, as the son of Thorvald Asvaldsson; to which Thorvald would later be banished from Norway, and would sail west to Iceland with Erik and his family. During Erik's life in Iceland, he married Þjódhild Jorundsdottir and would have four children, with one of Erik's sons being the well-known Icelandic explorer Leif Erikson. Around the year of 982, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years, during which time he explored Greenland, eventually culminating in his founding of the first successful European settlement on the island. Erik would later die there around 1003 CE during a winter epidemic.
Leif Erikson, also known as Leif the Lucky, was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at Vinland, which is usually interpreted as being coastal North America. There is ongoing speculation that the settlement made by Leif and his crew corresponds to the remains of a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland, Canada, called L'Anse aux Meadows, which was occupied approximately 1,000 years ago.
Noggin the Nog is a fictional character appearing in a BBC Television animated series and a series of illustrated books, created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. The television series is considered a cult classic from the golden age of British children's television. Noggin himself is the simple, kind and unassuming "King of the Northmen" in a roughly Viking Age setting, with various fantastic elements such as dragons, flying machines and talking birds.
Viking ships were marine vessels of unique structure, used in Scandinavia from the Viking Age throughout the Middle Ages. The boat-types were quite varied, depending on what the ship was intended for, but they were generally characterized as being slender and flexible boats, with symmetrical ends with true keel. They were clinker built, which is the overlapping of planks riveted together. Some might have had a dragon's head or other circular object protruding from the bow and stern for design, although this is only inferred from historical sources. Viking ships were used both for military purposes and for long-distance trade, exploration and colonization.
The Norse exploration of North America began in the late 10th century, when Norsemen explored areas of the North Atlantic colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland. This is known now as L'Anse aux Meadows where the remains of buildings were found in 1960 dating to approximately 1,000 years ago. This discovery helped reignite archaeological exploration for the Norse in the North Atlantic. This single settlement, located on the island of Newfoundland and not on the North American mainland, was abruptly abandoned.
Nordic folklore is the folklore of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. It has common roots with, and has been under mutual influence with, folklore in England, Germany, the Low Countries, the Baltic countries, Finland and Sápmi. Folklore is a concept encompassing expressive traditions of a particular culture or group. The peoples of Scandinavia are heterogenous, as are the oral genres and material culture that has been common in their lands. However, there are some commonalities across Scandinavian folkloric traditions, among them a common ground in elements from Norse mythology as well as Christian conceptions of the world.
The Maine penny, also referred to as the Goddard coin, is a Norwegian silver coin dating to the reign of Olaf Kyrre King of Norway (1067–1093 AD). It was claimed to be discovered in Maine in 1957, and it has been suggested as evidence of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact.
Kvenland, known as Cwenland, Qwenland, Kænland, and similar terms in medieval sources, is an ancient name for an area in Fennoscandia and Scandinavia. Kvenland, in that or nearly that spelling, is known from an Old English account written in the 9th century, which used information provided by Norwegian adventurer and traveler Ohthere, and from Nordic sources, primarily Icelandic. A possible additional source was written in the modern-day area of Norway. All known Nordic sources date from the 12th and 13th centuries. Other possible references to Kvenland by other names and spellings are also discussed here.
A shield-maiden was a female warrior from Scandinavian folklore and mythology.
Thorvald Eiriksson was the son of Erik the Red and brother of Leif Erikson. The only Medieval Period source material available regarding Thorvald Eiriksson are the two Vinland sagas; the Greenland Saga and the Saga of Erik the Red. Although differing in various detail, according to both sagas Thorvald was part of an expedition for the exploration of Vinland and became the first European to die in North America outside of Greenland.
Aud the Deep-Minded, also known as Unn, Aud Ketilsdatter or Unnur Ketilsdottir, was a 9th-century settler during the age of Settlement of Iceland. The main source of information about her life in Iceland is Sturla Þórðarson's Landnámabók; Laxdæla saga, which calls her Unn, gives a varying account but has more on her background, and she also figures in several other sagas, including Njáls saga, Eyrbyggja saga, Eiríks saga rauða and Grettis saga.
The Vinland Sagas are two Icelandic texts written independently of each other in the early 13th century—The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red. The sagas were written down between 1220 and 1280 and describe events occurring around 970–1030.
A knarr is a type of Norse merchant ship used by the Vikings for long sea voyages and during the Viking expansion. The knarr was a cargo ship; the hull was wider, deeper and shorter than a longship, and could take more cargo and be operated by smaller crews. It was primarily used to transport trading goods like walrus ivory, wool, timber, wheat, furs and pelts, armour, slaves, honey, and weapons. It was also used to supply food, drink, weapons and armour to warriors and traders along their journeys across the Baltic, the Mediterranean and other seas. Knarrs routinely crossed the North Atlantic carrying livestock such as sheep and horses, and stores to Norse settlements in Iceland, Greenland and Vinland as well as trading goods to trading posts in the British Isles, Continental Europe and possibly the Middle East. The knarr was constructed using the same clinker-built method as longships, karves, and faerings.
L'Anse aux Meadows is an archaeological site, first excavated in the 1960s, of a Norse settlement dating to approximately 1,000 years ago. The site is located on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador near St. Anthony.
The Rus', also known as Russes, were a people in early medieval Eastern Europe. The scholarly consensus holds that they were originally Norsemen, mainly originating from present-day Sweden, who settled and ruled along the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the 8th to 11th centuries AD.
Mirkwood is any of several great dark forests in novels by Sir Walter Scott and William Morris in the 19th century, and by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 20th century. The critic Tom Shippey explains that the name evoked the excitement of the wildness of Europe's ancient North.
Nábrók or nábuxur are a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead human, which are believed in Icelandic witchcraft to be capable of producing an endless supply of money. It is highly unlikely these pants ever existed outside of folklore.
Jesse L. Byock is Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian Studies in the Scandinavian Section at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Leiv Eirikson Discovering America is a painting by Christian Krohg. It depicts the explorer Leif Erikson at the moment he discovers American land, as described in the sagas of Icelanders. The painting was made for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and was exhibited along with the Viking ship replica Viking. It is in the collection of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo. A copy of the painting, created by Krohg's son, Per Krohg, has hung in the United States Capitol since 1936.