In a series of episodes, Ragnar conquers three of England's four kingdoms. Cornwell liberally feeds readers history and nuggets of battle data and customs, with Uhtred's first-person wonderment spinning all into a colorful journey of (self-)discovery. (Most of the other principal characters Ubba, Guthrum, Ivar the Boneless and the like are real historical figures.) Young Uhtred, who's English, falls under the control of Viking ber-warrior Ragnar the Fearless when the Dane wipes out Uhtred's Northumberland family. 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.īestseller Cornwell leaps back a millennium from his Richard Sharpe series to tell of the consolidation of England in the late ninth century and the role played by a young (fictional) warrior-in-training who's at the center of the war between Christian Englishmen and the pagan Danes. Above all, though, he wishes to recover his father’s land, the enchanting fort of Bebbanburg by the wild northern sea. By now he is a young man, in love, trained to fight and ready to take his place in the dreaded shield wall.

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.

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. 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 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.

The last kingdom novel