The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

“There are different kinds of men,” he said, “and some are to be more feared than others. I feared Ivar the Boneless, for he was cold and thought carefully.

“He thinks with his heart, Uhtred,” Alfred said, “not his head. You can change a man’s heart, but not his head.”

That is what a lord is, a giver of rings, and a lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men, yet even so I had not earned the gifts, though I was grateful for them.

the three spinners

He did not like me, but I liked him.

he made sure he opposed me and he beat me to the ground as if I was a yapping dog, opening a cut on my skull and leaving me dazed. “I’m not a Welshman, earsling,” he said. I liked Leofric a lot.

There are days when the sword and shield seem clumsy, when the enemy seems

quicker, and this had been one such day. I was angry with myself.

But fate rules us.

I had fought alongside Leofric

for all these months, and fighting next to a man in the shield wall makes a...

Ragnar pushed it back without a thought, making me rich again. “My father loved you, too,” he said, “and I am wealthy enough.”

“The bastard thinks, earsling, which is more than you or I ever do. He knows what has to be done, and don’t underestimate him. He can be ruthless.”

What worried me was that I found myself agreeing with whatever the last person suggested I did;

He was tall, well built, strong, and as wild as an unbroken colt.

What is the point of protesting when the executioner’s sword is in midswing?

At the top is the king,

then come the ealdormen

beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves,

The reeves are drawn from the ranks of thegns, who are wealthy men who can lead followers to war, but who lack the wide holdings of noblemen like Odda or my father.

ceorls,

Slaves can be, and often are, freed, though unless a slave’s lord gives him land or money he will soon be a slave again.

Women. Men fight for them, and that was another lesson to learn. As a child I thought men struggled for land or for mastery, but they fight for women just as much.

“Uhtred is my brother,” Ragnar said, “and you are welcome to kill him, lord, but you must first kill me.”

“You and I,” he said, “are tied as brothers. Don’t forget that. Now go.”

War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.

The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation and the Danes understood that. Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

Utred The Last Kingdom

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

Utred on Pride

men should fear a lord. They should fear his displeasure and fear that his generosity will cease. Reputation makes fear, and pride protects reputation,

Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear.

I alone on Cynuit was confident of victory, or seemed to be, and that, despite my age, made me the leader on this hill.

Yet I was tall, I was a lord, I had grown up among warriors, and I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.

except some men believed that those who did not die in battle went instead to Niflheim,

“Kill one,” I sang softly, “and two then three, kill four and five, and then some more.”

Suddenly there was no more sourness in my bowels, no dry mouth, no shaking muscles, but only the magical battle calm. I was happy.

Beware the man who loves battle. Ravn had told me that only one man in three or perhaps one man in four is a real warrior and the rest are reluctant fighters, but I was to learn that only one man in twenty is a lover of battle. Such men were the most dangerous, the most skillful, the ones who reaped the souls, and the ones to fear.

I am really Uhtred the Lonely.

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.

Crohn’s disease,

To go viking meant to go raiding,

Ivar the Boneless, Ubba, Halfdan, Guthrum, the various kings, Alfred’s nephew Æthelwold, Ealdorman Odda, and the ealdormen whose names begin with Æ (a vanished letter, called the ash) all existed.

Ragnar and Uhtred are fictional, though a family with Uhtred’s name did hold Bebbanburg (now Bamburgh Castle) later in the Anglo-Saxon period, and as that family are my ancestors, I decided to give them that magical place a little earlier than the records suggest. Most of the major events happened; the assault on York, the siege of Nottingham, the attacks on the four kingdoms, all are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or in Asser’s life of King Alfred, which together are the major sources for the period.

“Arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation.”

Guthrum’s occupation of Wareham, the exchange of hostages and his breaking of the truce, his murder of the hostages and occupation of Exeter all happened, as did the loss of most of his fleet in a great storm off Durlston Head near Swanage.

The one large change I have made was to bring Ubba’s death forward by a year,