Ragnar had saved me and Ragnar spoiled me and he treated me like a son, and he called me a Dane, and I liked the Danes, yet even at that time I knew I was not a Dane. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg....

I did not know the Danes could lose, but at fourteen years old I learned that lesson, and for the first time I heard Saxon cheers and jeers, and something hidden in my soul stirred.
- Uhtred, son of Uhtred, The Last Kingdom

When Alfred could no longer hold off the enemy battle line, without either retreating back from the fight or prematurely charging against the enemy troops before his brother had come to the battle, he finally commanded the Christian troops to advance against the enemy army, acting manfully, like a wild boar.
-from Asser's Life of Alfred

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell is the first of a 13-book epic that takes us from the Viking conquest of Northumbria in 867 to the battle of Brunanburh in 937. Although it was Alfred's grandson Aethelstan who won that great battle and became the king of all England, it was King Alfred of Wessex who laid the foundation for his victory. The Last Kingdom is Alfred's story, closely following the battles, successions and treaties that were recorded in the Saxon Chronicle and in Bishop Asser's Life of Alfred.

This story is told from the point of view of a man who grudgingly swears his sword to the king of Wessex, a Northumbrian who straddles two worlds: that of the boisterous Danes and of the dour Saxons.

Like its TV show adaptation, this fast-paced book is packed with horses, swords, romance, castles, forests, war and intrigue. It's an almost fantastic story set in a real time and place: England's conception. In this novel, Cornwell blends fiction and history so effortlessly that this early Medieval world feels real. Each of his characters, no matter how minor, is unique and fleshed out, and his battles are realistic. Indeed, he may be the only writer I have come across who can so deftly depict a Medieval battle.

The best part, though, is Uhtred himself. The narrator. The flawed hero.

Born a Saxon and raised a Dane, Uhtred loved the Danes' zest for life, loved how casual they were about their gods and yet, for all that, he remained a Saxon. And when, at the Battle of Ashdown, he saw the unbeatable Danes routed, something stirred in him. He had been a boy learning to fight from men who had never been defeated. He learned what they had to teach and he saw them cut down. So, when Ragnar, the man who was like a father to him, was murdered, Uhtred went back to his people.

It was not a happy reunion. Torn between the Saxon and Danish worlds, Uhtred did not want to regain his lost Bebbanburg only to be a Danish puppet king. Amongst the Danes, if a man did not serve a powerful lord he was nothing. Saxons, at least, had laws and customs. Each man's life was worth a wergild -- money that the reeves collected. And though a peasant was not worth as much as a lord, nor a woman as much as a man, every Saxon life had some value.

And then there was the church. True, Uhtred had little time for priests, prayer or Christianity. They sucked the joy out of life, he thought, or, as he put it in one of the more memorable passages on the subject: "Yule is 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 lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly ... but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral."

Christians could read and, because Alfred would not have an illiterate commander, Uhtred learned his letters. Contrary to what the incredibly well-done TV series claims, the Saxons were every bit as hard as the Vikings. And books, reading and writing -- which Alfred insisted on -- were a necessary sheen, a bit of civilization amidst the mud and blood that was four generations of war. Not to mention the fact that that literate men could communicate with one another across the far-flung Saxon kingdoms. Without reading and writing there could be no England.

And so, Uhtred became a Saxon warlord who grudgingly learned his letters, which is why we see the events portrayed in the Saxon Chronicle and Life of Alfred through the eyes of a man who is both Saxon and Dane, who insists that destiny is everything even as he makes choice after fateful choice.

Uhtred, of course, is a fictional character. But this story about an Anglo-Saxon shilling from the 7th century discovered in 2025 in East Anglia depicts a man dancing with a cross above a valknut (three interlocking crosses symbolizing the Norse god Odin and the Norse afterlife). The coin was discovered long after Cornwell penned this novel, but he was so deeply entrenched in the lore of that era that he told us the tale of the coin 11 years before it was found. Saxon and Dane clash and reconcile in that shilling as, indeed, they do in Uhtred, son of Uhtred.