Eleanor Barraclough

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough FSA FRHistS is a British historian, broadcaster and writer.

Eleanor Barraclough
Academic background
Alma mater	Churchill College, Cambridge (MA, MPhil, PhD)
Academic work
Discipline	Environmental history
Institutions	Bath Spa University Durham University

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) and Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (Oxford University Press, 2016). She also co-edited Imagining the Supernatural North (University of Alberta Press, 2016).

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. She then moved to the University of Oxford, where she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English, and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College. From there she moved to Durham University, where she was Associate Professor in Medieval History and Literature. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at Bath Spa University. She held an AHRC Leadership Grant from 2020–2024, for a multidisciplinary study of forests in early northern Germanic cultures.

In 2013, Eleanor was chosen as one of ten BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinkers, 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.

Eleanor was a regular presenter on Radio 3’s Free Thinking and hosted three series of the Time Travellers podcast for Radio 3’s Essential Classics. She also presented BBC Four’s Beyond the Walls: In Search of the Celts. In 2020, Eleanor was a judge for the Costa Book Award for Biography. In 2019 and 2020, 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. Thanks to her BBC documentaries, she has jammed with Viking musicians, dunked herself in a frozen lake in search of immortality, and been knighted with a walrus penis bone in the Arctic.

Eleanor lives in London.

Works

• —; Cudmore, Danielle Marie; Donecker, Stefan, eds. (October 2016). Imagining the Supernatural North. University of Alberta Press. p. 328. ISBN 978-1-77212-267-1.
• — (December 2016). Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Oxford University Press. p. 320. ISBN 978-0198701248.
• Barraclough, Eleanor (September 2024). Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-78816-674-4.

External links

• Official website