The last kingdom A novel

Review by Booklist Review

An acknowledged master of rousing battlefield fiction as evidenced by his crackling Richard Sharpe series, Cornwell also deserves praise for his mesmerizing narrative finesse and his authentic historical detailing. Here he introduces a new multivolume saga set in medieval England prior to the unification of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex. Weakened by civil war, Northumbria is invaded by the fearless Danes, and Uhtred, the rightful heir to the earldom of Bebbanburg, is captured by the enemy. Raised as a Viking warrior by Ragnar the Terrible, his beloved surrogate father, Uhtred is still torn by an innate desire to reclaim his birthright. Fighting as a Dane but realizing that his ultimate destiny lies along another path, he seizes the opportunity to serve Alfred, king of Wessex, after Ragnar is horribly betrayed and murdered by Kjartan, a fellow Dane. Ever watchful and ever practical, Uhtred awaits his chance to settle the blood feud with Kjartan and to seize Bebbanburg from his treacherous uncle. Leaving his hero suspended on the threshold of realizing his desires, Cornwell masterfully sets up his audience for the second volume in this irresistible epic adventure. --Margaret Flanagan Copyright 2004 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestseller Cornwell leaps back a millennium from his Richard Sharpe series to tell of the consolidation of England in the late ninth century and the role played by a young (fictional) warrior-in-training who's at the center of the war between Christian Englishmen and the pagan Danes. (Most of the other principal characters-Ubba, Guthrum, Ivar the Boneless and the like-are real historical figures.) Young Uhtred, who's English, falls under the control of Viking uber-warrior Ragnar the Fearless when the Dane wipes out Uhtred's Northumberland family. Cornwell liberally feeds readers history and nuggets of battle data and customs, with Uhtred's first-person wonderment spinning all into a colorful journey of (self-)discovery. In a series of episodes, Ragnar conquers three of England's four kingdoms. The juiciest segment has King Edmund of East Anglia rebuking the Viking pagans and demanding that they convert to Christianity if they intend to remain in England. After Edmund cites the example of St. Sebastian, the Danes oblige him by turning him into a latter-day Sebastian and sending him off to heaven. Uhtred's affection for Ragnar as a surrogate father grows, and he surpasses the conqueror's blood sons in valor. When father and adopted son arrive at the fourth and last kingdom, however, the Danes meet unexpected resistance and Uhtred faces personal and familial challenges, as well as a crisis of national allegiance. This is a solid adventure by a crackling good storyteller. Agent, Toby Eady. (Feb.) Forecast: Cornwell's own life served as inspiration for this novel: he, too, was orphaned (and adopted by members of a strict fundamentalist sect). Readers who followed the story of his reunion with his birth father in 2003 (while he was on tour with Sharpe's Havoc) will take special interest in the personal angle here. Four-city author tour. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

The ninth century witnessed the beginning of deadly raids and incursions along England's coastlines and waterways as Danes went a-Viking in search of riches of gold and silver and, most important, land. Opposing the invaders was the king of Wessex, Alfred the Great. Best-selling author Cornwell (Sharpe's Escape) explores this tumultuous period through the eyes of a Saxon nobleman's son. Ten-year-old Uhtred joins his father in battle to save their land of Northumbria from invasion. During the conflict, in which his father is killed, Uhtred is captured by the Danes and spends the next several years as the adopted son of war-leader Ragnar. Even after returning to his own people, Uhtred finds his loyalty torn. He despises the priest-ridden, sickly King Alfred and admires the Viking warriors who raised him. As a third-generation Dane, this reviewer can't help but root for the Danes right along with Uhtred. It doesn't hurt that Cornwell has clearly made them the more sympathetic and interesting characters. Another great historical series in the making, this is highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/04.]-Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Municipal Libs., AK (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A dispossessed Northumbrian gets a military education from the Danes before reluctantly signing on to serve the humorless Wessexian king, he who will eventually become Alfred the Great (849-99). Opening yet another series, Cornwell, who turns out about two high-quality historicals a year (Sharpe's Escape, 2004, etc.) without breaking a sweat, examines, through the eyes of a reluctant vassal, the career of the only English king to rate a Great. Born Osbert, younger son of Uhtred, ealdorman of Bebbanburg, on the coast of Northumbria, robust, war-loving Uhtred got renamed on the death of his older brother, killed by the Danes who, on a later raid, seized the lad and, admiring his spunk, kept him as a sort of pet. And Uhtred loves the Danish life. Back in Bebbanburg, his father and grumpy stepmother had been trying to have him educated by Beocca, a too-serious, too-Christian monk, but Uhtred wasn't interested. (And Uhtred's greedy uncle wanted him dead.) Ragnar, the warrior Dane who spared Uhtred's life, seeing real soldier potential in the boy, taught him the fine points of disemboweling, decapitating, etc., in a blissfully wild childhood on the land the invaders had seized from the very disorganized English. Besides loving the warrior life, Uhtred finds rowdy fatalistic paganism infinitely more sensible and appealing than the morose and, well, wimpy Christianity his countrymen cling to. The one glitch in his new life is the lifelong enemy he makes when he interrupts the prepubescent sexual assault on Ragnar's daughter by Sven, son of Kjartan, one of Ragnar's lieutenants. Sven and Kjartan will eventually be the death of Ragnar, forcing Uhtred and his wild English girlfriend, Brida, to move south, reluctantly resuming their British identities and drifting into the camp of Alfred, the only king on the island who hasn't capitulated to the invaders. Cornwell's no-fail mix of historic tidbits and good-humored action makes the usually gloomy ninth century sound like a hell of a lot of fun. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

The Last Kingdom Chapter One The Danes were clever that day. They had made new walls inside the city, invited our men into the streets, trapped them between the new walls, surrounded them, and killed them. They did not kill all the Northumbrian army, for even the fiercest warriors tire of slaughter and, besides, the Danes made much money from slavery. Most of the slaves taken in England were sold to farmers in the wild northern isles, or to Ireland, or sent back across the sea to the Danish lands, but some, I learned, were taken to the big slave markets in Frankia and a few were shipped south to a place where there was no winter and where men with faces the color of scorched wood would pay good money for men and even better money for young women. But they killed enough of us. They killed Ælla and they killed Osbert and they killed my father. Ælla and my father were fortunate, for they died in battle, swords in their hands, but Osbert was captured and he was tortured that night as the Danes feasted in a city stinking of blood. Some of the victors guarded the walls, others celebrated in the captured houses, but most gathered in the hall of Northumbria's defeated king where Ragnar took me. I did not know why he took me there, I half expected to be killed or, at best, sold into slavery, but Ragnar made me sit with his men and put a roasted goose leg, half a loaf of bread, and a pot of ale in front of me, then cuffed me cheerfully round the head. The other Danes ignored me at first. They were too busy getting drunk and cheering the fights that broke out once they were drunk, but the loudest cheers came when the captured Osbert was forced to fight against a young warrior who had extraordinary skill with a sword. He danced around the king, then chopped off his left hand before slitting his belly with a sweeping cut and, because Osbert was a heavy man, his guts spilled out like eels slithering from a ruptured sack. Some of the Danes were weak with laughter after that. The king took a long time to die, and while he cried for relief, the Danes crucified a captured priest who had fought against them in the battle. They were intrigued and repelled by our religion, and they were angry when the priest's hands pulled free of the nails and some claimed it was impossible to kill a man that way, and they argued that point drunkenly, then tried to nail the priest to the hall's timber walls a second time until, bored with it, one of their warriors slammed a spear into the priest's chest, crushing his ribs and mangling his heart. A handful of them turned on me once the priest was dead and, because I had worn a helmet with a gilt-bronze circlet, they thought I must be a king's son and they put me in a robe and a man climbed onto the table to piss on me, and just then a huge voice bellowed at them to stop and Ragnar bullied his way through the crowd. He snatched the robe from me and harangued the men, telling them I knew not what, but whatever he said made them stop and Ragnar then put an arm around my shoulders and took me to a dais at the side of the hall and gestured I should climb up to it. An old man was eating alone there. He was blind, both eyes milky white, and had a deep-lined face framed by gray hair as long as Ragnar's. He heard me clamber up and asked a question, and Ragnar answered and then walked away. "You must be hungry, boy," the old man said in English. I did not answer. I was terrified of his blind eyes. "Have you vanished?" he asked. "Did the dwarves pluck you down to the underearth?" "I'm hungry," I admitted. "So you are there after all," he said, "and there's pork here, and bread, and cheese, and ale. Tell me your name." I almost said Osbert, then remembered I was Uhtred. "Uhtred," I said. "An ugly name," the old man said, "but my son said I was to look after you, so I will, but you must look after me too. You could cut me some pork?" "Your son?" I asked. "Earl Ragnar," he said, "sometimes called Ragnar the Fearless. Who were they killing in here?" "The king," I said, "and a priest." "Which king?" "Osbert." "Did he die well?" "No." "Then he shouldn't have been king." "Are you a king?" I asked. He laughed. "I am Ravn," he said, "and once I was an earl and a warrior, but now I am blind so I am no use to anyone. They should beat me over the head with a cudgel and send me on my way to the netherworld." I said nothing to that because I did not know what to say. "But I try to be useful," Ravn went on, his hands groping for bread. "I speak your language and the language of the Britons and the tongue of the Wends and the speech of the Frisians and that of the Franks. Language is now my trade, boy, because I have become a skald." "A skald?" "A scop, you would call me. 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." "But if you cannot see," I asked, "how can you tell what happened?" Ravn laughed at that. "Have you heard of Odin? Then you should know that Odin sacrificed one of his own eyes so that he could obtain the gift of poetry. So perhaps I am twice as good a skald as Odin, eh?" The Last Kingdom . Copyright © by Bernard Cornwell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---