The Last Kingdom

This section centers on three key tensions: Uhtred’s growing immersion in the Norse culture juxtaposed against his upbringing as a Saxon Christian; the increasingly brutal military engagements between the Danes and the Saxons as both sides target Wessex; and the emerging blood feud between Uhtred and his usurper-uncle that will come to define Uhtred as both a warrior and a man.

Christianity continues to pale in comparison to the religion and culture of the Norse that Uhtred learns. In real life, Edmund of Anglia is an established heroic figure within Catholic Christian hagiography, renowned as a warrior king who defied the invading godless barbarians and endured martyrdom rather than submit to the pagan gods. The retelling of his story here is far less heroic. Edmund essentially loses his life as a kind of entertainment for the Norse. In the gruesome scene in which Edmund is executed, Uhtred watches as the king confidently calls upon the Christian God to save him from the Norse arrows. In Catholic legends, after all, that was what God did to preserve His followers and convert heathens. Uhtred looking back decides, “I do not know if King Edmund was a saint. He was a fool, that was for sure” (113). For Uhtred, the execution exposes the weakness of Christianity: its message that a man was to rely on faith, not action, and that courage was somehow to be found in passivity and humility.

In this section, Uhtred’s education continues as he moves between the two camps. Ragnar’s trust and his Saxon pedigree allow Uhtred to move freely between the camps. As such, he compares himself to the sceadugengan from Saxon folklore, a shadowy half-man, half-creature. That freedom of movement makes him invaluable for the Norse, but that sense of non-identity defines Uhtred existentially at this point in his narrative. Although he swings a mean sword for the Danish and professes his loyalty to them, he feels the pang of homesickness when he visits Bebbanburg. Uhtred is at once both Saxon and Danish and neither, a child without a home, a man without an identity.

More importantly, this section offers the first of what will become bigger and more enthralling battle scenes. Given the vast cultural influence of image technology in films and even television, few events pose more of a challenge for a writer than conveying the chaos, confusion, agony, and terror of a massive battlefield engagement. As Cornwell explains in the Historical Note at the end of the book, he meticulously researched the military campaigns of both the Danes and the Saxons. These assaults—the going back and forth during intense hours of brutal fighting—are captured with a cinematic grandness.

Because of the narrative frame of Uhtred recounting these skirmishes, the battle scenes are both graphic and realistic. In fact, Uhtred deliberately distances his account from the prettied-up versions of poets and balladeers in the time since the battles were actually fought; he reassures the reader that this is truly what he remembers. He shares that the chaos is far from gore and slaughter and carnivorous bloodletting; it is actually driven by decisions made after weighing advantages and odds. Given his unique positioning as a boy welcome in the camps of both the Danes and the Saxons, Uhtred is able to share both sides’ strategies. These battlefield confrontations underscore the narrative question: who is Uhtred?

Finally, this section is the narrative’s tipping point because it sets up the plot arc that will define Uhtred and his destiny. If Uhtred fancies himself a shadow-walker—able to slip in and out of both camps and easily profess insincere loyalty to both—the news of his uncle’s nefarious scheme to rob him of his throne should not bother him. However, it sets in motion the blood feud that will, over the series, define his emerging identity as Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg. The treachery of his own uncle, which echoes the tragedy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, carries profound consequences for the boy. When, during his brief visit to Bebbanburg, Uhtred sees his uncle on the parapet walls of the fortifications, the response is immediate:

I gave my uncle the evil sign, the devil’s horns made with the two outer fingers, and I spat at him, turned and trotted away. He knew I was alive now, knew I was his enemy, and knew I would kill him like a dog if I ever had the chance (133).

These brave and defiant words, from a teenage boy of 13, jumpstarts Uhtred’s life journey.

The threat of the Danish invasion and the fate of the last Saxon kingdom suddenly dwarf in comparison to this sense of this titanic wrong. His uncle has desecrated his father’s memory, moved into the grand chambers of the palace, schemed his way into power by marrying Uhtred’s stepmother, and secured an heir to his illegitimate claim by siring a son. As the narrating Uhtred looks back decades later, he defines this return to his home and the realization that he has been exiled as the beginning of his journey. The moment of clarity makes him determined, whatever his obligations to fight for Alfred, to reclaim that title. As he identifies himself in the novel’s opening pages, he is not Uhtred the Dane, he is not Uhtred the Saxon—he is Uhtred, the Lord of Bebbanburg.