The Last Kingdom

The Last Kingdom offers insight into Norse culture, social structures, and pagan religion. Within a contemporary culture, given the eventual ascent of Christianity as the defining religion of Europe, the term pagan has come to denote largely negative stereotypes. Paganism is synonymous uncivilized heathens, godless heretics, violent barbarians, wild primitives, sensual hedonists, illiterate unschooled savages, and blasphemous conjurers who worship trees and believe in spirits. This first volume of the Saxon Chronicles interrogates that perception of pagans.

Because Uhtred serves as narrator, his depiction of the Norse is articulate and balanced, and perhaps the best defense of worth and value of the pagan culture. He is, after all, raised a Viking. Paganism offers a coherent code of honor, civility, and fairness that counters the cultural perceptions of the Vikings as fierce, uncouth warriors. The Norse desire not bloodletting and conquest but land and food for the swelling population.

Though Uhtred learns the ways of warfare and sees the Norse handle insurgency and challenges with a cruel if dispassionate thoroughness, he finds that paganism is more than bloodlust. Uhtred learns that, within the pagan culture, debts are honored, vows are kept, and men prove their integrity through their actions not through words and promises. Furthermore, real knowledge comes through the senses, not the mind; the heart trumps both the soul and the intellect; a man’s family is to be protected; and though the gods watch all, they do not interfere and certainly do not grant wishes or stage miracles like Alfred argues the Christian god does. 

As a child, Uhtred is enthralled by the story the blacksmith tells him about the sceadugengan (pronounced set-urt-nkan): fabulous creatures said to roam the forbidding and dark woods of northern England. Nicknamed the shadow-walkers, these magical, mysterious creatures are known for their ability to shift shape, never being entirely one thing or another for long. One moment it is a wolf, the next an eagle, the next maybe a child. As such, they are neither dead or alive but rather creatures “silent and half-seen” (60), whose superpower is to move without threat through any environment. Because Uhtred is a child, the story appeals to his fantasy, much like a contemporary boy who dreams of being a superhero; “When you are young and powerless you dream of possessing mystical strength” (60).

However, as Uhtred matures and becomes a free agent—or more precisely a variation on a double agent—moving freely between the Norse and Saxon camps, he continually returns to the idea of the mythological creature. Like the shadow-walkers, Uhtred passes through hostile environments without fear or threat. For the Danes, he is a Dane; for the Saxons, a Saxon. He is thus at the same time something and nothing, less a being and more a shadow.

Certainly, that ability to move between camps makes Uhtred the magnificent and confident warrior he becomes. But the sceadugengan also symbolizes Uhtred’s search for identity. Because moves between identities as needed, he is uncertain about who exactly he is. The figure of the shadow-walker becomes his truest identity: half this, half that.

The implication of such a status is ultimately disturbing for Uhtred as this volume closes. He understands that he is never to be entirely at home, entirely at rest: “I am really Uhtred the Lonely. We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness” (328). The novel ends with Uhtred determined at last to define himself and to shake the sad and lonely identity of a sceadugengan.