The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.

They were called Vikings when they were raiders, but Danes or pagans when they were traders,

Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods.

“You can’t live somewhere,” he told me, “if the people don’t want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.”

Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, “Wyrd bi ful aræd.”

“A leader leads,” Ragnar said, “and you can’t ask men to risk death if you’re not willing to risk it yourself.”

Besides, I was learning to despise the English. They would not fight, they prayed instead of sharpening their swords, and it was no wonder the Danes were taking their land.

Ragnar had become convinced that the Christian monasteries and nunneries were sources of evil, places where sinister rites were performed to encourage folk to attack the Danes, and he saw no point in letting such places exist.

An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

I took my mail coat and helmet in the year 874, the same year that King Burghred fled to Rome, and Alfred expected Guthrum to come in the following spring, but he did not, nor in the summer, and so Wessex was spared an invasion in 875.

We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.