The Last Kingdom - film review Part II

For anybody who loves historical drama, Netflix's The Last Kingdom is pure delight.  I blogged about it the other day after finishing the first season. I've now watched Seasons 2, 3 and 4 and will watch 5 once they've completed it.  I just can't get enough trivia, and am still stopping at regular intervals to poke around with more and more background information. I now know, for example, that if you're an Anglo-Saxon and have a kid you're likely to want to name him or her some variation on Ethel. And if you write it Scandinavian, Aethel. Or Æthel, if you want to save space. Maybe even Æþel, if you went to school in Iceland. There is Æþelhard,  Æþelred, Æþelwulf, Æthelwold, Æþelflaed, Æþelthryth, the last of these evolving, I understand, into modern day Audrey.  I love the image of a mother standing on the porch trying to get her daughter to come in the house for dinner. Æþelthryth! Æþelthryth! Æþelthryth! You get in here right now! The thoup ith getting cold! Sorry. The mind goes to strange places when unhindered. Names in Ethel, Æþel, were common because it was the word for "noble." A north Germanic cognate of the modern-day "Edel" as in "edelweiss" the "noble white flower," the symbol of Austria. 

I feel a special connection to the geography of Wessex. Town names pop up all the time on the screen. Alfred, the King of Wessex, lives in Winceaster - which name appears each time the scene shifts back to his capital, as the letters are jumbled around to show the modern version of the name: Winchester. I grew up in the Town of Winchester. In the Northwestern corner of Connecticut, sometimes referred to as the "Foothills to the Berkshires." Look on an old map of England and you will see that Berkshire borders Winchester to the north. We not only transferred the place names from the mother country to New England; we also kept the relative locations.

Alfred goes down in history because of his victory over the Viking marauders at Edington, in 878 (or "Ethandun" if you prefer, acknowledging the Viking preference for the interdental fricative.)

The Saxons had been thoroughly Christianized by the Romans, and Alfred was convinced he and his folk were being punished by God for their immorality (he was more than a bit of a prude) and had sent in the Vikings to rape and pillage and steal all their silver and gold. Much as he inflicts hurricanes on the people of North Carolina for letting Texan lesbians practice their witchery, I suppose. Guthrum (or in Old English Guðrum), the Viking leader who later became the King of East Anglia went down in that battle at Edington/Ethandun and got baptized for his failures, whether willingly or not I can't be sure. Guthrum is known by other names, to wit Aethelstan/Athelstan/Ethelstan, take your pick. He figures large as one of the many bad guys who become good guys and good guys who become bad guys in The Last Kingdom, switching ideologies being one of the major ways plot lines are kept alive in these TV serials that go on for weeks at a time keeping you up till 3 a.m. and beyond.

Alfred/Ælfred remains the central character in The Last Kingdom, as well he should. Despite being burdened by the belief that God uses bad men to punish good men, he was a man of great foresight. He figured out how to build ships to counter the initial advantage the Vikings had because of their expertise in shipbuilding. He also knew how to organize and use an army, to build fortresses to withstand invasions, and to bring back the book learning that had gotten lost since the glory days of the earlier invaders, the literate Romans. So the story is primarily about Alfred the Great.

But entertainment will out, and The Last Kingdom brings the historical Uhtred character in and fictionalizes his service to Alfred/Ælfred, making him the military hero of the battle of Edington/Ethandun, for example, a remarkable accomplishment for a man born a century after the fact.

There's something irresistible about combing through history to find evidence of nobility of one's origins. Albert is credited with putting the dream of a united England front and center and for spawning children who were inspired to further that dream. The fourth season ends (hope the spoiler won't spoil the fun of watching) with Albert's son Edward running Wessex and his daughter, Æthelflaed, running Mercia, dreaming of freeing first East Anglia and eventually Northumbria from the Danelaw, as the Viking-dominated part of the island was called.  With Kent these form the five main Saxon kingdoms. Eventually, by the 16th Century this will expand into what's called the Heptarchy, with Essex and Sussex added, but the central issue of The Last Kingdom is the dream, not the eventual playing out of the dream. 

The author of the series, Bernard Cornwell, has been described by The Guardian as "the most successful British author you've never heard of," a "rock star in Scandinavia and Germany," and the most-kissed Anglo-Saxon male by Latina women of all time, etc. etc.  Cornwell is the son of an English mother and a Canadian airman, born during the Second World War who apparently can trace his father's origins to someplace in Saxon Northumbria.  

Apparently there's never a shortage of folk around the world who enjoy reading about (and now watching) swords clashing against linden-wood shields, eyeballs being gouged out, faces being smashed in by battle axes and heads rolling on the ground or being delivered in cloth sacks to intimidate one's enemies. Don't ask me how a fascination with history can be sufficient to offset such a depiction of barbarism. It obviously does. The series is garnering a huge number of fans. And if the answer to that question is that people are actually more interested in the blood and guts than the facts of history, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

The spin-off projects I've gotten distracted by are almost endless.  One of them is playing with the many linguistic questions that naturally arise and reflecting on the cosmopolitan nature of the cast. It's almost as if language is a separate character in the story. I wonder how all these folks - the Danes, the Welsh and all the variety of Saxons communicated with each other in historical time. Bilingualism/multilingualism obviously reigned supreme. 

I loved watching an interview given in native-speaker English by Alexander Dreymon, who plays Uhtred, and Emily Cox, who plays the quintessentially angry-woman, the Dane Brita, sometime lover of many men she later wants to kill (some of whom she does). Emily was born in Vienna to a British father and an Irish mother and is today a German-language actress. So both she and Alexander are native German-speakers talking about their major roles, in native-speaker English, of a story set in Anglo-Saxon England.  But why, oh why, oh why, did Dreymon assume a dumb-ass faux-German accent for the second, third and fourth series when he speaks without one in the first series. Somebody wasn't thinking right.

Bingeable series such as these are perfect escapist material for this time of lockdown.

Great fun.

Bloody and brutal as hell, but great fun.

A tough day for the "intrinsically disordered"

News item: Thursday, June 17, 2021: 

Supreme Court sides with Catholic adoption agency that refuses to work with LGBT couples

The Supreme Court was once the most dignified of American Institutions, a carefully vetted, carefully chosen group of wise old men (and eventually women) who could sit back and render cool-headed opinions on justice and equality. The people we could most count on to keep the dream of democracy alive. We are not a democracy by a long shot. Never have been. But in our better moments we've been a democracy-seeking collection of individuals, and our three branches of government have worked to extend to an ever greater number of us the freedoms the rest of us enjoy. Child labor is no more; slavery is no more, women now vote, gays now marry.

We find ourselves at a low moment in American history. Our legislature is in thrall to a political party dedicated not to truth and the rule of law but to backing up a twice impeached Divider in the Executive Branch. And now the Supremes climb on the injustice bandwagon. We're looking more and more like Hungary every day.

Most people care far more about their own personal welfare than the welfare of their neighbors and the folks in other places across the nation. That's why we have a bunch of old folks in robes we call justices, to keep us from forgetting that liberty for all is not the same thing as liberty for those with white skin or those who can afford it. Sometimes, as with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court decided that separate schools for black folk were inherently unequal, it brought freedom to Americans where it had been previously denied. At other times, as with the Dred Scott case a century earlier, in 1857, they went the other way. They decided slavery wasn't such a bad thing after all. The Supremes are not infallible, and just, democracy-extending decisions are by no means a given.

The Roman Catholic Church, like the Supreme Court, a fallible institution despite its arrogant claims to the contrary, has decided that gay and lesbian people are not as worthy as other people, deserving of second-class status. Not real citizens. Not nice people. Not somebody you'd want to have raising kids. And the Supreme Court has decided that's just fine with them.

I don't give a hoot what the Catholic Church thinks. I thank the great spaghetti monster in the sky that, as an American citizen, I am not required to live by the bigoted guidelines of the church of Rome.  People are leaving it in droves, for very good reasons. If they want to bang on about how the Jews killed Christ, they are free to do so. This is America, after all. We value the freedom to be stupid or unkind if you want, provided, as they say, your freedom to swing your fist stops short of my nose. It's all on you what things you advocate, and not for government to dictate. If you want to tell women they can't practice birth control, that's fine with me. They are free to tell you to take a hike. If you want to stop research on stem-cells, that's OK too. The majority of people who want to keep their loved ones alive through research on stem cells, they too are free to tell you to take a hike. The church is a broad collection of all types of folks, kindly folk who care for people in the shadows of life, and hypocrites and abusers of children, people who want their fellow Catholic president to be denied communion - all kinds.

The Supreme Court, however, is an institution I count on to further my civil rights and those of my fellow-Americans. Today, however, they have fallen on their faces and come down on the side of bigotry, and that's a crying shame. This cruel decision will be corrected eventually, as the Dred Scott approval of slavery was corrected. In the meantime, we can only hope America's children needing a home find their way to a non-Catholic organization to provide them with one.

Anybody who has picked up a newspaper in the past is familiar with the fact that thousands of lesbians and gays have made loving homes for children they adopt - as well as children they themselves give birth to. People have tried their damnedest to demonstrate that kids raised by LGBT people are harmed by the sexuality of their parents - to no avail. According to a report published in 2012 by the American Psychological Association,

(o)n the basis of a remarkably consistent body of research on lesbian and gay parents and their children, the American Psychological Association (APA) and other health professional and scientific organizations have concluded that there is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation. That is, lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children.  

The City of Philadelphia, working to place kids in need of fostering in good homes, took a dim view of the homophobia of the church and decided it wouldn't work with them. The church sued, and lost. The 3rd U.S. District Court of Appeals sided with the city and agreed that they had a right to not do business with an institution that discriminates against its lesbian and gay citizens. So the church took it all the way to the top, and today they won the day. It is now officially OK in the United States of America for homophobes to discriminate when it comes to taking care of needy children.

Chief Justice Roberts slipped up, however, and his decision is going to bite him in the ass eventually. The true conservatives on the court, Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas, wanted to go all the way. They should have taken down, as well, the 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith which allowed the city to forbid discrimination in a number of areas, according to Alito. He argued that the First Amendment's free exercise of religion should be interpreted to mean that citizens are free to discriminate against people they consider to be "intrinsically disordered," to use the language of the official Roman Catholic catechism. Roberts, however, obviously felt shy about letting that line of reasoning get out of hand. He was willing to say no to discrimination in most cases and decide this particular case quite narrowly. You can discriminate, he says, when it comes to gay parenting, but not otherwise.

Better watch out, Justice Roberts. You're about to go down in history as wishy-washy. And as the boss of an organization on a par with the bigoted Catholic Church. If you will just give it a little thought, Mr. Justice, you'll realize that not all of us are bigots. Or Roman Catholics. 

We'd like to be able to count on you too.

Sad day today in America.

Update: Sunday, June 20, 2021

If you read the opinion expressed in Slate a few days ago (on the 17th) you may conclude that the opinion I express here is naive because it underestimates the craftiness of Chief Justice Roberts, who recognized that he needed to find a way to prevent opening the floodgates to the wholesale discrimination against lesbians and gays that would result from a refusal to throw them under the bus in this particular instance. I lack the legal training and probably the legal mind and cannot follow the Smith argument well enough to engage with it, and I leave it to others to have at it if they can.

What I am left with is a sour feeling in my gut that this may well be just another case where the decision is decided pre-argument according to the biases of the judges and then the bureaucratic mind goes to work to find the legal means to put that bias into practice. The big picture, anti-discrimination, gets lost, decency plays second fiddle to cleverness, and one can do little at this stage but sigh that real democracy remains out of reach for now and hope for better days.

 

The Last Kingdom - a film review

Alexander Dreymon, aka
Uhtred, before makeup

Some time ago, surfing through the Netflix possibilities, I tried getting into The Last Kingdom. I shut it down after watching the first episode. Too much violence for the mood I was in at the time. Besides, watching hunky men in desperate need of a shower and some dental floss is not high on my list.

But my friends Sandy and Norm were visiting the other day and she recommended it highly, so I gave it a second look. Didn't take long before I was hooked.

I don't know what hooked me. Maybe it was the notion that somebody can cut your father's head off and use it like a bowling ball, and then adopt you and make you his own son. Try getting your head around that.

The boy, Uhtred, grows up and becomes the hero of the story. Being bilingual in Anglo-Saxon and Viking and schooled in the notion that he is the rightful heir to land up in Northumbria (near the Scottish border) motivates him to keep both his identities alive. He is Uhtred, son of Uhtred. He is also son of Ragnar the Elder and forms an affectionate relationship with his brother, Ragnar the Younger. Schizophrenia here I come.

The bulk of the First Season (I've only completed one season so far) takes place around Winchester, the residence of King Alfred, later to be known as Alfred the Great. Most of Anglo-Saxon England is in thrall to the invading Danes. That includes Northumbria, where Uhtred is from, and Mercia - England's mid-section, and East Anglia. Wessex, where Alfred reigns, is the Saxons' last hope - hence the title, I believe. Uhtred throws in his lot with Alfred.

Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred

And for anybody like me who has to stop watching historical dramas at regular intervals to google the historical characters - as well as to get the timeline for the Celtic, Saxon and Viking invasions - this is kind of a bummer. Uhtred is a historical character, but in real life he lived a century after the time of this story. They've also taken liberties with Ragnar, the "Danish king of the Swedes" who shows up in Icelandic lore as Ragnar Lodbrok, and is known variously as Ragnar, "rex crudelissimus Normannorum" (king of the very nasty North-folk), and father to Ivar the Boneless (don't ask - I don't have the answer.)

Don't want to get too far afield here. Let's just say broad liberties were taken with historical facts.

The role of Uhtred is played by the German-born actor Alexander Dreymon, a handsome dude who grew up in France and now lives in Los Angeles. And digging around for information on him is only one of the many distractions I've encountered since I launched into this streaming adventure, which has kept me up till 5 a.m. on a couple occasions. I am equally distracted by questions at the dinner table from my husband such as "What's the difference between "Anglo-Saxon" and "Old English." What I learned in my History of the English Language class back in the 60s has long since leached out of my brain, so there was another google. Answer: They're the same thing. Beowulf, which, if you remember, is the main source of Old English is, not surprisingly, all about some Norse dragon-slaying hero. It was written about a century after the time the first season of The Last Kingdom takes place, but it was written in West Saxon, i.e., the language of Alfred's Kingdom of Wessex. All tied in, you see.

My husband sees no reason to begin his questions with "I wonder..." or "Do you have any idea..." and simply hits me with "When did the Romans leave Britain? When did the Saxons first arrive? Did the ordinary folk speak Latin? How much of the country was covered by the 'Danelaw?'" leaving me to leave the chicken Schnitzel on my plate and dash up to google for yet more answers. I figure, all told, I have spent as much time figuring out which of my English friends live in what was once Mercia (that's the Norwich folk), Northumbria (friend Garren from Middlesborough and friends in Yorkshire), and Wessex (the London set).

*     *     *

There is a wonderful neighborhood restaurant just down the street on the corner of Stuart and Shattuck called Sconehenge Bakery and Cafe. Their bakery makes wonderful scones. American ones, not English ones, more like muffins, with blueberries and apricots and cranberries. And they're pronounced "skones" - rhymes with "tones" and not the English way, where they are rhymed with "bronze"

The cafe section of Sconehenge is the best place in town to go for Huevos Rancheros. The owners, apparently, are Mexican.

I don't know who named the place, but they no doubt must have had Stonehenge in mind, that stone-age monolith in Britain dating back more than 4000 years, before the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, before the Romans, before even the Celts. So far back, in fact, that the inhabitants get to carry the title, "original Britons," even though nobody knows for sure who those folks are and how they got there from Africa.

I have no idea if I'm going to be able to get through all four seasons of The Last Kingdom - and I understand they're working on a fifth. There is no such thing as a series which holds up all the way through, in my experience. Sooner or later the writers run out of plot lines or the characters you start out rooting for lose their charm and begin looking like dumbies who can't get their shit together.

Albert (the real, historical one) was born in 840 and died at the advanced age of 59 in 899. That means his "English" was probably more comprehensible to the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes (i.e., Danes) who arrived in Britain to stay in about the year 450. They had first come in the previous century, but were kicked out by the Romans who ruled the place from about 43, the time of their first of many invasions, until Rome withdrew from Britain to defend the Roman homeland, now being sacked by Vandals, in the middle of the 5th Century, leaving the local Britons helpless against invading Danes. (See what you can learn if you're willing to leave some Schnitzel on your plate for the sake of science and knowledge?)

So historically you have the Ur-folk of Britain, the pre-Celtic peoples who go back to a time when Britain was attached to the European continent. Then comes the Celtic invasion at the time of the Iron Age. Then the Romans, then the Angles (from Schleswig, i.e., the modern-day Danish-German border area, and the Saxons (i.e., from the original place the Celts came from, in modern-day Saxony in Germany) and the Jutes (from Jutland, in Denmark), then the Danes, and finally the Normans.

Interesting to me is the fact that any of us with British or North European roots are a real jumble of folk, genetically interwoven for centuries. As I kid I prided myself on the knowledge that my father was Scottish and my mother German and that meant I was both Celtic and Saxon genetically. Now I have to recognize that the Celts actually originated in Central Europe, i.e., the same place the Saxons did, and we speak of Jutes as different from Danes even though they originate in Denmark, so what's the wuss?

I have spent hours filling in a family tree on familyecho.com, and my tree contains about 500 entries, so far. Most of the people listed are so far from my everyday life that I really have to question where this this fascination with family history comes from. First of all, inordinate attention is paid to the male line - not because men count and women don't but because we're programmed to think paternalistically. Back in the day when gay people were routinely kicked to the curb by their natural families, I joined the gay practice of prioritizing "chosen" family over "biological" family, so digging around for genetic connections mattered little to me.

But things have changed. I was never rejected by my "biologicals" and I remember the time when I decided that I would include my (bio) sister among my chosen family. Only the cruelest folk kick their LGBT kids out these days - in my part of the world, anyway, and that's one of the reasons I have for believing maybe the world is not a lost cause after all.

I have English roots, and by that I mean not only genetically, but even more importantly linguistically. Digging around for information on The Last Kingdom has turned out to be a very rewarding past time in this age of Covid and streaming. I love it that my mother and the guy who plays Uhtred are both Saxons from the Saxon Saxony, but are tied nonetheless to Anglo-Saxony, my mother through marriage to my father and Alexander Dreymon through Hollywood, that Alexander speaks French because his German mother decided to raise him in France, that my chosen nephew of English and Polish Jewish origins just married a French woman from Normandy - the land of the Northmen and that anybody still hanging onto notions of racial purity has got to be a total moron.

We're all from all over the place. We can, all of us, go back to the Kingdom of Wessex and root for the francophone German playing the role of a half-Northumbrian half-Dane, and have the time of our lives.

Or, of course, you could ignore all this genetico-linguistic folderol and just enjoy watching heads roll.

I also recognize that if you're Mediterranean, or Chinese-Mexican or Pakistani-African, this particular focus on the British Isles may not resonate with you.

Different strokes, as they say.

photo credits: with glasses, with hair

P.S. For you language geeks (my kind of folk) to whom it would naturally occur to ask, "How is it these Anglo-Saxons like King Albert are able to deal linguistically with the invader Danes? What language do they speak?" you might find this discussion interesting:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTqI6P6iwbE