The Last Kingdom

“Our men began beating weapons on their shields and that was a fearsome sound; the first time I ever heard an army making that war music; the clashing of ash spear shafts and iron sword blades on shield wood.”

Here, Uhtred reveals his profound response to the chaos, confusion, and violence of the battlefield. Long before he understands the concepts of cultural identity and nationalism, he responds to the raw, carnivore energy of war. Its confusion, for the boy, is coaxing music. 

“A poet, a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making. And my job now is to tell this day’s tale in such a way that men will never forget our great deeds.” 

Uhtred is talking with Ravn, a blind working poet who is part of the Norse invasion force. He addresses how he will, in time, recreate the mess and blood of the Norse invasion in the sweeping glory of poetry. The novel explores how the terrible reality of war becomes history and then myth.

“‘We’ll make a Dane of you yet.’” 

Ragnar reassures Uhtred of his welcome into the Norse force. Across the course of the novel, however, this assertion defines Uhtred’s narrative as a coming of age story. He wrestles with whether he is a Viking, his adopted culture, or a Saxon, his culture by birth. 

“That was the story Ragnar heard when he returned from hunting, and as it made me a hero I did not argue against its essential untruth, which was that Sven would not have raped Thyra for he would not have dared.”

The novel interrogates how war becomes epic poetry and how events are remembered or misremembered; the frame is Uhtred himself decades after the events, recounting his experience. Here, he knowingly allows a distorted version of his intervention and rescue of Ragnar’s daughter to elevate him to hero status. 

“[B]ut it was the Danes who had come to take my land, though I did not say that to Ragnar. I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane. Which was I? What did I want to be?” 

The novel is as much about the battle for Uhtred’s soul as it is about the battle for Britain’s future. As Uhtred prepares to wage war against the Saxons, he reflects on his conflicted sense of identity and the problematic nature of his loyalty to the Danes. After all, it was Ragnar, his apparent mentor, who set in motion the events that led to the fall of Bebbanburg and cost Uhtred his birthright. 

“God sees your remorse…and he will lift you up. Welcome the temptation, lord…welcome it, resist it, and give thanks to God when you succeed. And God will reward you, lord, he will reward you.” 

As Uhtred overhears, a priest counsels a troubled Alfred over his sexual sinning with a servant woman. This insight defines the Christian philosophy that Uhtred juxtaposes against the Nordic world view. The more a man falls, the more he must grovel in that failure for only then will the Christian God elevate him. The logic of piety escapes Uhtred, so he sees Alfred as weak and puny. 

“‘I want to serve you, lord,’ I lied, thinking that he was a pale, boring, priest-ridden weakling.”

Christianity is an acquired taste for Uhtred. Here, kidnapped by the English and returned to Alfred, he pledges a dubious allegiance to a king he sees as not worthy of his respect, much less his fealty. 

“‘Good,’ I said, and God help me, it did.”

Uhtred is asked how it felt to kill his first enemy. The encounter was messy. Uhtred’s clumsy execution betrays his lack of experience, and his fellow Danes actually laugh at his ineffective kill. But Uhtred cannot deny the thrill of the kill.

“So let’s try…We shall shoot arrows at you. And if you survive then we’ll all be washed.” 

This scene, which recounts the martyrdom of St. Edmund, even now held in highest esteem by the Catholic Church, reveals a less-than-heroic reality. Edmund is taunted, backed into a corner by the Danes who mock his belief that his God would protect him from a shower of their arrows. His death is brutal and hardly the stuff of heroic hagiography. It reassures Uhtred, however, of the inadequacy of the Christian God. 

“There was no law now except what the Danes said it was, and that was what they wanted it to be, and I knew that I reveled in that chaos.” 

Uhtred learns the tenuous reality of order. The impact of the 10th-century Viking invasion on Britain is today considered a case of anarchy upending structure. Here, Uhtred is excited by that new sense of ordered disorder.

“She was heavy, Serpent-Breath, too heavy for a thirteen-year-old, but I would grow into her.” 

Within the genre of epic narratives, Uhtred as the hero, gifted with a weapon that commands special respect and promises extraordinary destruction. Serpent-Breath is Uhtred’s wonder weapon, and he vows to grow into its magnificence.

“The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. The army that eats wins.” 

Uhtred makes clear that he will not be like Ravn, simply and blindly singing the praises of grand warriors. His chronicle will be more realistic—wars are fought by men who need land, who are literally hungry, and the winners of great battles are rewarded not by laurels or epic poetry but by food and a place to live.  

“Fate rules. The three spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads.”

Uhtred contemplates who he is and why he seems destined for great conquests as a warrior. Dismissive of the Christian vision of a benevolent Creator who somehow grants humanity the power to decide a fate He already knows, Uhtred embraces the Norse vision of the Fates weaving each man’s destiny. 

“Yule was supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land….but the West Saxons handed the feast over to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral.” 

The novel’s juxtaposition of Christian Saxon culture and pagan Norse culture is highlighted by each culture’s celebration of winter. If the Christian commemoration of the Nativity seems quiet, subdued, and brooding, the Viking celebration of the Yule is marked by great feasting, war games, and music and dancing.

“I had said I knew what I would do, but that is not wholly true. The truth is that I was in a well of misery, tempted to despair, and with tears ever close to my eyes, I wanted life to go on as before, to have Ragnar as my father, to feast and to laugh. But destiny grips us.” 

The narrative works to ensure that Uhtred remains more relatable than heroic. His adopted father burned alive in a massive fire, Uhtred struggles with the all-too-human need to mourn, to question why, and to sort through dark and complex emotions. Only through that cathartic experience of contemplation, which brings out the philosopher in his nature, does Uhtred emerge ready to embrace his destiny as warrior. 

“The joy of it. The sword joy. I was dancing with joy, joy seething in me, the battle joy that Ragnar had often spoken of, the warrior joy.” 

It is difficult to find any irony or authorial undercutting of Uhtred’s evolving embrace of the sheer joy of killing. Swinging his powerful sword into the heat of battle gives Uhtred the sort of joy that a contemporary reader, wary of any celebration of violence, might struggle to entirely understand. 

“Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey.” 

Destiny is the thread, woven by the Fates, that connects the events of Uhtred’s life. As he prepares, now as a Saxon, for the showdown with the Norse, he looks back and sees how everything was part of his evolution into Alfred’s warrior. 

“What I should do…is go back to Northumbria. There is a man I have to kill.” 

Amid the vicious battles on land and at sea, Uhtred never forgets his blood feud with his uncle, who displaced him as rightful earl of Northumbria, married his step-mother, and produced an heir to the throne. This contest to rule, which echoes the plotline of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, defines Uhtred’s life purpose. 

“He was trying to make me into a West Saxon, and he was half succeeding. I was sworn now to fight for Wessex and it seemed I must marry into it, but I still clung to that ancient dream of retaking Bebbanburg.” 

Uhtred is taken by Alfred’s vision to unite the four British kingdoms, which seems grander than the Norse’s scrounging for land and food. Uncertain over his identity, Uhtred feels the power of Alfred’s vision. However, he cannot entirely abandon his private duty to right the wrong of his uncle. 

“I had never endured the long bloodletting, the terrible fights when thirst and weariness weaken a man and the enemy, no matter how many you kill, keeps on coming. Only when I had done that, I thought, could I call myself a proper man.” 

As a coming-of-age narrative, The Last Kingdom suggests a number of tipping points that would define a boy as a man: the death of a father, the initiation into sexuality, the definition of national identity, the loss of a mentor. However, Uhtred keeps coming back to a far more visceral event: the experience of total slaughter on the battlefield.

“What do we look for in a lord? Strength, generosity, hardness, and success, and why should such a man not be proud of those things? Show me a humble warrior and I will see a corpse. Alfred preached humility.” 

Accomplishment defines manhood for the Norse. Martial skill, exploits in battle, and embracing destiny measure a man’s achievements and demand celebration and reward. Because this is what Uhtred came to believe, he struggles to understand the Christian concept of the strength of humility. 

“I had come to Cynuit. I had no need to be on that hilltop. But I was there. Because destiny is everything.” 

At Cynuit, the night before battle, Uhtred quietly embraces his destiny. His year of pledged service to Alfred is over, and he is free to return to Northumbria. But he intuits that he belongs in Cynuit and that the Fates wanted him to fight for Alfred. 

“I was soaking wet. I was cold, yet suddenly I felt invincible. It was a wondrous thing, that battle calm. The nerves go, the fear wings off into the void, and all is clear as precious crystal and the enemy has no chance.” 

At last, amid the chaos and carnage of Cynuit, Uhtred fully transitions into manhood. He taps into an unnervingly steely calm during battle, a certainty that provides the surest sign he has left his childhood behind.