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.

More from The Last Kingdom

It's like porn for history nerds and Anglophiles.

The subject today is the town of Gyruum, now called Jarrow on the northeast coast of Britain. The first monastery was founded there in 674, per the Cornwell reader blog. The Venerable Bede wrote his history of the English Church there, finishing around 731.

The blog mentions the monastery was destroyed by the Vikings around 860 which doesn't totally jive with the books dates (It's off by around 8 or 10 years?) But why quibble? It would take some doing to dig into the minutiae of this event and Cornwell clearly has done a lot of research. At any rate, Ragnar and company return from conquering East Anglia (leaving Alfred's Wessex the only sovereign English kingdom left) to quell some civil unrest in York, their home turf. Take it away, Bernard:

It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monastery's treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks and fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the river Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement...

And there, people were tortured and killed in what the monks had decided was now a holy war. Women were raped by monks while nuns cheered them on. Ok, the Danes are doing the same shit themselves but I love this cheeky history for pointing out the Church proper was often (or never) any better than their opponents. As retribution, Ragnar finds out where the biggest monasteries and convents in the area are and his men burn them to the ground and rape and pillage, etc. Which all leads to this funny coda from Uhtred:

The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape...I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that where was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvelous tale how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.

None of that happened. We arrived, they screamed, the young ones were raped, and then they died...Still priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet, which was just as well.

(disclaimer: Needless to say, I do not endorse rape, murder and pillaging in general and certainly not against monks and nuns.)


One of the recurring themes in the book is the Danes' befuddlement at Christianity. There is another great scene where Edmund of East Anglia surrenders to the Danes but demands they be baptized and become Christian as a condition of his surrender which the translator conflated with "washing" which confused the Danish side. Ivar finally understands with Uhtred's help and having asked earlier about a picture of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian says he will agree to become Christian if Edmund, too, can live after being pierced by arrows. Ivar isn't even being cruel here, he genuinely wants to know. And it's logical, really. If the English god can protect you from arrows, it's worth switching sides or adding him to your pantheon at least. Edmund, the poor schmuck, agrees when he realizes he's talked himself into a corner and Ivar and his men shoot him with arrows. The results were predictable. As to the fate of the real Edmund, it's not clear. Also predictable, he's considered a martyr too.

It's a famous subject in Renaissance art, the Sebastian story. Like many a tale of Catholic miracles, it's rather anti-climactic since he after the arrows didn't work, the Romans allegedly clubbed him to death.

Here is Sebastian, in happier times:

As always, the loincloth is holding on just enough to spare us pubes.

Britisms from Exile

There have been several words and miscellany I didn't recognize from Exile so I've looked them up.

Maureen mentions an Aga warming her London friend Sarah's kitchen. Aga is a Scandinavian made stove that is sold throughout Britain-but curiously not in Ireland outside of Northern Ireland. They have a cute, distinctive multi-paneled front to them.

Sarah brings Maureen a plate of kedgeree to eat. It's a dish of boiled rice, fish, parsley, eggs and curry. I do love curry but, frankly, this sounds kinda like ass.

The London Met police tell Leslie they have to take Jimmy to Carlisle to be interviewed since they aren't Scottish. So it makes sense that Carlisle would be close to the Scottish border and it is: about 10 miles. It's in the county of Cumbria. According to WikiAnswers, Carlisle is about 110 miles from Glasgow though. Quite a drive.

(Incidentally, Cumbria just came up on a PRI Geo Quiz. It's where Stan Laurel was born, in the town of Ulverston. He was born Stan Patterson but changed his name, supposedly because he was superstitious and didn't like the 13 letters. There was a recent row in England when a tourism agency in Durham mistakenly printed 50,000 brochures saying Stan was born there.  Ulverston is much farther South than Carlisle though so even if Jimmy weren't being escorted by police who think he's killed his wife, he wouldn't be inclined to swing by there and visit the Laurel and Hardy Museum. Anyways..)

Sarah makes a face when Maureen tells her she has business in Brixton. Brixton is a neighborhood in the South of London. Apparently it's somewhat hip and gentrified now but there are still dangerous areas (Wikipedia helpfully informs me that you should never buy marijuana or cocaine from the dealers at the tube station. You'll either be buying overpriced oregano or get arrested. Helpful safety tip!) It seems like it's a mix of upscale housing, renovated Victorian buildings, music clubs and high crime areas which you should studiously avoid after dark. It's sometimes called the drug (and oregano?) capital of London. It's also a multi-ethnic neighborhood where you can get cuisines ranging from Jamaican to Eritrean. Some asshat set off a nail bomb near the market there in 1999 to ignite a race war. Luckily, it looks like no one was killed and he's now serving a bundle of consecutive life sentences.

Brixton is also the home of The Electric Avenue (the one Eddy Grant sang about.)

Maureen's mother Winnie mentions her estranged perv father Michael is living in a council flat. I gather from the context this is government housing and it appears to be. Evidently, there is a housing shortage in Glasgow. A Glasgow website says if you are low on money, you can apply for Council or Housing Association accomodations but there is a wait and if you are lucky enough to attain this low cost and assured tenancy housing (meaning your landlord has to get a court order to remove you if you don't want to leave), you may not find yourself in the most "salubrious" of areas. I love the Brits and their positive, tasteful spin on the mother tongue. It's not a crime-ridden shithole, it's just not salubrious.

Epistemophilia: BBC pepper pots

I am mourning the fact that BBC Radio 4's History of the World in 100 Objects has come to an end. But I'm still only on object 30-something so at least I'll be catching up for a while.

(also, I have a huge crush on its host and British Museum director Neil McGregor but that's incidental.)

The other night he talked about an object called the Hoxne Pepper Pot (or on the BBC's site, here) This is the most beautiful object so far and it's story is fascinating. Pepper was evidently highly prized and costly in Roman times. The Visigoths were paid off not to sack Rome in 410 with a ton of pepper. It wasn't grown anywhere in the Roman Empire and had to be shipped from India along a lengthy and dangerous trade route over the Indian Ocean and through Egypt. This pot was found by a farmer in Suffolk in 1992 with a metal detector. He was looking for a lost hammer. And instead he found a huge cache of Roman era objects. His hammer, btw, is also now part of the British Museum collection. I don't know why but this makes me laugh.

What I continue to love about this show is how Neil McGregor makes you think about the object as a contemporary from the period would. The family in question appears to have been Christian guessing from the engraving "VIVAS IN DEO" on one of the objects (engraved unicamerally of course as the Latin alphabet was at that time) and Christians in Britain-or at least rich ones-would have been in particular danger. As McGregor said, there were no Swiss banks so what else would you do with your valuables besides bury them? The fact that they obviously never came back for their valuables makes me sad. Did they flee back to Rome? And what did they find there if so? Did they miss their little silver pepper pot with golden lips that would sparkle in candlelight? Not to mention the pepper in it. I guess the return of bland food was another consequence of the fall of the empire.

BTW, the pot is so named because it came from the village of Hoxne (pronouned "Hoksen") in Suffolk. It is part of a group of artifacts called the Hoxne Hoard.