The first installment of Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling series chronicling the epic saga of the making of England, “like Game of Thrones, but real” (The Observer, London)—the basis for The Last Kingdom, the hit BBC America television series.

This is the exciting—yet little known—story of the making of England in the 9th and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred the Great, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England’s four kingdoms.

The story is seen through the eyes of Uhtred, a dispossessed nobleman, who is captured as a child by the Danes and then raised by them so that, by the time the Northmen begin their assault on Wessex (Alfred’s kingdom and the last territory in English hands) Uhtred almost thinks of himself as a Dane. He certainly has no love for Alfred, whom he considers a pious weakling and no match for Viking savagery, yet when Alfred unexpectedly defeats the Danes and the Danes themselves turn on Uhtred, he is finally forced to choose sides. By now he is a young man, in love, trained to fight and ready to take his place in the dreaded shield wall. Above all, though, he wishes to recover his father’s land, the enchanting fort of Bebbanburg by the wild northern sea.

This thrilling adventure—based on existing records of Bernard Cornwell’s ancestors—depicts a time when law and order were ripped violently apart by a pagan assault on Christian England, an assault that came very close to destroying England.

Bernard Cornwell is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers 1356 and Agincourt; the bestselling Saxon Tales, which include The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North, Sword Song, The Burning Land, Death of Kings, The Pagan Lord, and, most recently, The Empty Throne; and the Richard Sharpe novels, among many others.

The Alfred of history and fable was learned and just, a pious man of delicate health who saved 9th-century England from being entirely colonized by pagan Danes and was elevated to sainthood after his death. Indeed, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman identified him as England's first "Good King" in 1066 and All That -- which peerless repository of mangled historical cliché went on, naturally enough, to confound him with Arthur. The Alfred whom Cornwell sets before us is also learned and just, and he's pious in spades, always "wearing out his knees" in prayer and cherishing such relics as "a feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark" and "a toe ring that had belonged to Mary Magdalene." But he is also a compulsive, if remorseful, fornicator, a martyr to hemorrhoids and intestinal distress and, at times, a hard-nosed conniver.

What we see of him in this, the first volume of a projected sequence, comes through the eyes of one Uhtred, whose tale, narrated from the vantage of old age, this really is. Born of noble stock in Northumbria, Uhtred is only 10 in 866, when he witnesses the battle that brings death to his father, "a morose man, expecting the worst and not fond of children." Captured and adopted by the far more congenial Ragnar, a fearless, high-spirited Danish lord, Uhtred embarks upon a perfect pagan boyhood, freed of the trammels of Christianity. He spends his hours burning "green muck" off the hulls of Danish ships, shield painting, cattle slaughtering, house thatching, tending charcoal burns and practicing with his sword, all admirably described -- and, eventually, in youthful sexual dalliance, not described, but which would have brought fire and brimstone down on his head in a Christian community.

The boy does not miss his father, or monkish censure or the noxious grind of learning to read, and becomes quite the pagan Dane in most ways. Uhtred's great object in life is to fight in a "shield wall" -- one of Cornwell's specialties (whereby warriors advance in a row, shields overlapping) -- and to reclaim his inheritance, the family domain and stronghold in Northumbria. His uncle has taken possession of both, cementing his hold by marrying Uhtred's father's widow. Vexed loyalties begin to proliferate in Uhtred's youthful bosom: toward England, toward the good-natured Danish lord, against a treacherous Danish villain, toward Danish paganism and against English Christian morality. Treacheries and prevarications abound, fortunes reverse, battles rage, and soon enough the youth ends up back with the English -- and his loyalties, well shuffled, begin to gravitate toward Alfred. This feeling turns to rueful wonder when he realizes that the great man has sent him on a mission meant to kill him, a breach of saintliness Alfred commits more than once.

This is a most enjoyable novel, and Cornwell has seasoned it with dashes of intoxicating pedantry. He shuns the word "Viking" (which "describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding") and eliminates horned helmets ("for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence"). His prose is not always the equal of his historical imagination and sense of character: He does not, for instance, achieve Patrick O'Brian's marriage of language and vision. Still, he does convey the disquiet of change and the melancholy of extinction as few historical novelists manage to.

The England of the 9th century conjured up here is a palimpsest, an ancient isle giving ghostly testimony to successive civilizations. Prehistoric forts, "old when the world was young," still exist, moldering and growing into the land. So, too, Roman roads continue to bear traffic and Roman structures still stand, left behind almost five centuries ago and inherited by peoples lacking the engineering and architectural capability or understanding to repair them. Here and there these marvels of imperial technology, materials and manpower provide the foundations for crude Saxon building, as in London, "where huge Roman buildings were buttressed by thatched wooden shacks." Meanwhile, the city's great bridge is falling down, and the old wharves and quays are "long rotted so that the waterfront east of the bridge was a treacherous place of rotted pilings and broken piers that stabbed the river like shattered teeth."

Place names are abundant in this peripatetic adventure, and in their Saxon forms we find the weird, almost ectoplasmic predecessors of today's tame locutions: Lundene, Eoferwic (York), Suth Seaxa (Sussex), Thornsaeta (Dorset), Defnascir (Devonshire) and Snotengaham. Cornwell wouldn't be his merry self if he didn't teach us that Nottingham was once bountiful Snotengaham, "the Home of Snot's people." Nor would he be his generous and indefatigable self if he did not promise us that this story "is far from over."

Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

The Last Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

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?"