Murray’s Reviews > The Last Kingdom > Status Update

We took our plunder back to the ships and that night, as I drank my ale, I thought of myself as a Dane. Not English, not any more ⚔️

I was a Dane and I had been given a perfect childhood, perfect, at least, to the ideas of a boy. I was raised among men, I was free, I ran wild, I was encumbered by no laws, was troubled by no priests, was encouraged to violence, and I was rarely alone ⚔️

We came to a village and we burned it to the ground. We burned farmsteads, a church, and marched on. We saw a larger village and we hid in a wood, lit no fires, and attacked at dawn.

We came shrieking from the half-light. We were a nightmare in the dawn; men in leather with iron helmets, men with round painted shields, men with axes, swords and spears. The folk in that place were not ready for us. They died ⚔️

He chanted a great epic in praise of Odin. On and on it went, the words as hard and rhythmic as a drum beat - how the great god had made the world from the corpse of the giant Ymir, how he had hurled the sun and moon into the sky, how his spear, Gungnir, was the mightiest weapon in creation, forged by dwarves in the world's deeps, and on the poem went and the men gathered around seemed to sway to the poem’s pulse.

I thought I’d do a reread of an epic 13 volume series set in the Viking/Anglo Saxon era so I can give readers a taste of the storyline and characters. I’ll just do the first book for now.

“My name is Uhtred.”

And so we begin ⚔️ 🛡️