Final thoughts on The Last Kingdom, a few more lines + first and last

There was a part where this book dragged after Uhtred joined Alfred the Great's side. He was ambivalent. He didn't like Alfred (here, a smart but manipulative and tediously pious leader who contrasted with the life-loving Ragnar. Ragnar and Ravn dying, especially of Danish double-crossing sucks.) Alfred forces a wife on Uhtred that owes a large debt to the Church which Uhtred has to pay. Uhtred thinks about Bebbanburg. Uhtred thinks about the Danes. More ambivalence but he still is determined to fight for England. And so on. But the story picks up steam again towards the end as it reaches the Battle of Cynuit in 878. Coincidentally, the site of that battle was recently identified.

Also, the feared Viking leader Ubba really did die at that battle. In the book, he of course dies in a climactic mano a mano with Uhtred who here shares some proper final Viking moments with him:

I knelt by Ubba and closed his nerveless right fist about the handle of his war ax. "Go to Valhalla, lord," I said. He was not dead yet, but he was dying for my last stroke had pierced deep into his neck, and then he gave a great shudder and there was a croaking noise in his throat and I kept on holding his hand tight to the ax as he died. 

One of the things I like about Cornwell is his ability to bring clarity and readability to battle scenes which typically are confusing and dreary (see: almost everyone since James Fenimore Cooper.) All of the confusion and gore and exhileration of combat are captured well here I think-such as when Ubba's downfall is slipping in someone's guts.

I recently heard someone on BBC 4's travel show Excess Baggage talking about the difficulty of traveling with a harp when she was hired as a harpist for a cruise line (she said it was the definition of "excess baggage.") I just mention this because this is the second time in a week harps have come up when I read these final thoughts of Uhtred's:

Every lord has a harp in the hall. As a child, before I went to Ragnar, I would sometimes sit by the harp in Bebbanburg's hall and I was intrigued by how the strings would play themselves. Pluck one strings and the others would shiver to give off a tiny music. "Wasting your time, boy?" my father had snarled as I crouched by the harp one day, and I supposed I had been wasting it, but on that spring day in 877 I remembered my childhood's harp and how its strings would quiver if just one was touched. It was not music of course...but after the battle in Pedredan's valley it seemed to me that my life was made of strings and if I touched one then the others, though separate, would still make sound. I thought of Ragnar the Younger and wondered if he lived, and whether his father's killer, Kjartan, still lived, and how he would die if he did, and thinking of Ragnar made me remember Brida......

Daft thoughts, I told myself. Life is just life. We live, we die, we go to the corpse hall. There is no music, just chance. Fate is relentless. 

"What are you thinking?" Leofric asked me.

"I'm thinking about a harp."

"A harp!" he laughed. "Your head's full of rubbish."

"Touch a harp," I said, "and it just makes noise but play it and it makes music." 

"Sweet Christ!" He looked at me with a worried expression. "You're as bad as Alfred. You think too much."

There is something kind of satisfying to me also that a key battle was won by drearily pious Alfred's army by a man who worships Odin and plans on meeting his fallen comrades again in Valhalla.

First and last--

First:

My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called Uhtred.

Last:

For I am Uhtred, Earl Uhtred, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and destiny is everything.