Speak
to me not of thrones. Speak to me of Vikings.
It’s the stories that matter. Stories
teach us. They always have.
So forget about endless wars,
conspiracies and power rivalries by ruthless wannabes in Throne land — I bet
you thought I was talking about D.C. — and learn about the stories that
mattered.
I’m talking about “The Last Kingdom.”
Here’s the history behind what has
become my favorite series in the era of Binge TV. Way back in the 9th century
AD (habitually called ‘the Dark Ages’) the North men, or Norse — those traders,
pirates and raiders who hailed in the lands we now call Scandinavia and are
generally known today as Vikings — were well established in the northern part
of England. In the latter part of that century fresh waves of raiders and
invaders from the continental North, whom Saxon England simply called “the
Danes,” began attacking the Christianized Saxon kingdoms of the relatively
wealthy south of England. East Anglia, the southeast of England (where Danish
influence is still felt today), fell to a Danish warrior king who then quickly
moved against Mercia, the ‘heart of England.’ When Mercia, including London,
fell as well, Wessex knew itself to be “the last kingdom” of the island’s seven
kingdoms still under Saxon rule.
After some four centuries of “owning the
ground” (by Winston Churchill’s count)* the Saxons faced the prospect of losing
the upper-hand in their country and possibly even extermination.
Ninth century Saxons were well are that
their own ancestors gained control of England (along with the Angles, who gave
their name to the language and the country where it was spoken) in the same way
the Danes were now doing it: raids, then full-scale invasions, then settlement.
What happened next was the emergence of
England’s true national hero, Alfred the Great.
(St. George, for the record, is a
fiction borrowed from the Middle East. King Arthur is a wonderful mythic — as
opposed to historically founded — hero who supposedly rallied the Celtic
Britons to fight off the then-barbarian Saxons while representing all that was
noble in a lost age. The Britons’ struggle proved unsuccessful.)
Alfred, one of whose most attractive
qualities is his creation of the county’s first ‘library’ through his
collection of scrolls containing reports assembled from intelligence agents
throughout the country, managed to unify Saxons from all the kingdoms to stand
against the fearsome invaders and persevere their nation in a lengthy struggle.
At a low point in this struggle, after a
surprise attack scattered his forces and deprived him of his capital ‘city’
(wooden huts within a surrounding wall), Alfred hid from the Danes in the
marshes and was presumed dead. Recovering health, he put out a call for all men
of England to rally at a point known to them, less apparent to the Danes, and
his reputation proved sufficient to bring an army together on the spot. He then
maneuvered the Danish warrior kings into a single defining battle on the plain
of Ethandum and defeated them in the year 878 AD.
That’s a long time ago. We know of these
dates, and these events, because Alfred began the practice of instructing
scribes to write down what happened.
This victory did not permanently end the
Danish threat and the island remained divided for much of a century between
English rule and Danish rule (a region termed the Danelaw), but the England we
recognize today — and the English language, which I confess is the single
biggest point for me — was preserved from a worse fate by the actions of a
single, outstanding leader. I can’t think of many other such examples.
Rome fell. Ancient Greece faded. The
United States was the product of a generation of gifted leaders.
The story of how Alfred the Great saved
England from Norse rule in those ‘dark’ early days is the story I expected to
encounter in the BBC production and Netflix edition (which took over the second
season) called “The Last Kingdom.” For anyone attracted by the challenge of
depicting life in those hard to imagine “dark ages,” that seemed more than
enough of a story.
But then I didn’t know anything about a
warrior called Uhtred, son of Uhtred, of Bebbanburg, who proves to be central
figure in “The Last Kingdom.”
That’s probably because he’s fictional.
Perhaps he’s based on some actual figure
of whom only fragmentary reports remain, or perhaps he is wholly the invention
of the fertile pen of Bernard Cornwell, on whose historical novels this series
is based. Either way, as the action hero of an historical saga, he’s a lord of
attractions.
First off, he’s an orphan. Orphans are
unique, special cases, others. Lacking living parents and strong family
connections, their survival is not guaranteed. They are self-made people by
definition. Uhtred is the son of his town’s lord, a kind of minor king. When
his father is killed by the Danes, Uhtred becomes the lost heir of a royal
line: the click bait of a thousand romance tales. Shakespeare would have liked this
plot.
Further, he’s both Saxon and Dane. Born
Saxon in Bebbanburg, in the nation’s unsettled north, he’s baptized as
Christian, but determined from early boyhood to be a warrior. As the curtain
opens on “The Last Kingdom,” a raiding party of Danes lands on the shore near
his town and in a matter of a few minutes our hero loses his older brother
(Bebbanburg’s heir apparent) and then sees his father and most of town’s
fighting men mowed down in an open battle that shows the Saxons are no match
for either the advanced tactics or fighting skill of the ferocious Danes.
After this battle, Uhtred is taken as a
slave by a prominent Danish warrior who raises him within his own family and
comes to consider him a son. In this capacity, a Saxon who knows Danish ways,
Uhtred arrives at Alfred’s court at just the right moment to advise him on how
to meet the potentially fatal Danish threat.
As Uhtred himself declares at the
beginning of each episode: “Everything is destiny.”
Uhtred is at liberty to play this role
because at the dawn of his own brawny manhood, his adopted Danish family is
slaughtered in a sneak attack by a rival warrior with a grudge. Yes, there are
good Danes and bad ones. To its credit, this series takes a more nuanced view
of its times and setting and characters of both nations than, I suspect, a
straightforwarded hagiography of Alfred the Great — the story I initially
expected — could have managed.
And while “The Last Kingdom” is a story
of kingship, it’s also a warrior’s story.
Violence, revenge, sword fighting, long
hair and beards, both cold and hot-blooded killing loom as the show’s themes
and memes, and find play in in the story arcs that flow from its opening cries.
Despite the often excessive, and sometimes distressingly casual bloodletting by
barbarians (and Christians) wielding steel weapons against unarmored flesh, the
show’s atmosphere seldom remains grim. In addition to being the archetypal
gifted warrior (near-death escapes in every episode), our hero Uhtred has a
sense of both humor and justice, an appreciation for women, and a bedrock
loyalty to those to whom he is pledged likely to win emotional attachment from
any viewer with a heart.
And if we don’t wish our hearts
attached, then why do we watch these things?
Then, to add to its surface attractions,
the show is landscaped in a beautiful unsullied England — green valleys and
wooded hills (though the obsessive English gardening, I notice, hasn’t quite
taken hold yet). The mood, among both Christians and pagans, is more often
rough and ready rather than crude or nasty. Warrior-guys on both sides laugh a
lot, tease each other, drink themselves silly, eye the women and are put in
their place by them; while the leaders contemplate, plan, chronicle, and (in
Alfred’s case) invent the use of the ‘letter’ as an effective means of
communication. The main female characters are smart and capable, particularly
the fighting nun who attaches herself to Uhtred’s most dangerous missions.
And all this shouting, bonhomie, and
bloody hand-to-hand combat serves the appealingly subversive notion of a
ferociously embraced love of life, particularly evident in the Danes (who seem
to accept their own will be short) and in our Saxon-born adopted Dane.
The production even comes up with a
weird, savagely sung and yodeled soundtrack that sounds to me absolutely like
the world of our saga feels.
All this works as entertainment and
‘story,’ but I make a case for the value of the history portrayed here as well.
Though the Alfred depicted here is not always ‘good’ — his kingly virtues
include a ruthless use of the few for the benefit of the many; and his
Christian piety often comes across as ethical blindness, especially regarding
the pagan Uhtred — his ‘greatness’ lay in saving a world of which we and many
others are cultural inheritors.
If Saxon England had disappeared into
obscurity during the time of the Vikings, along with its laws, values, nascent
civil society, infant institutions (such the ‘witan’ council, the seed of
Parliament) and still forming language, I do not believe we would be better for
it today. Admittedly, I cannot imagine what we would be.
The United States of America, it is
worth remembering, did not invent the world in 1789, despite out ceaseless
clamor for ‘constitutional’ this and ‘founders’ that. This country, like all
countries and all societies, owes its debts to the past. During Alfred’s time,
at least in part because of his actions — and for that matter because of the
Danish invasion — England had to get organized in order to survive.
I believe that’s something this country
is still trying to do.
(*From “The
Birth of Britain” by WinstonChurchill, 1956, Barnes and Noble edition.)
My fascination with Bartolomeo Vanzetti's years in Plymouth, Mass. is going international.
