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.