Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough cut her teeth in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge, where she completed her MA, MPhil and PhD (on landscape and identity in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas). She then defected from the misty fens of Cambridge to the dreaming spires of Oxford, where she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at The Queen's College.

In 2013 she was selected as one of ten BBC New Generation Thinkers, in a national competition run by BBC Radio 3 designed to find young academics with the ability to turn their research into programmes for broadcast. She is now a regular presenter for Radio 3's arts and culture programme, Free Thinking. Nordic-flavoured documentaries for Radio 3 include True Norse, Supernatural North and Immortal North. Programmes for Radio 4 include Costing the Earth (on climate change in Svalbard) and Open Country (on the Isle of Lewis during the Viking Age). Eleanor is the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (Oxford University Press, 2016), on Viking Age far-travellers and Iceland's storytelling saga culture. While researching this book she had many far-flung adventures of her own, bumping along on the back of an Icelandic horse while exploring Norse ruins in Greenland, sailing ice fjords under the midnight sun with a caribou hunter, and search for Norse runestones in Sweden. She also made it further south to warm up, following in the footsteps of Norse pilgrims in Rome and imperial bodyguards in Constantinople. Her proudest moment came when travelling across Arctic Norway, when he was knighted with a walrus penis bone in Hammerfest and became a member of the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society.