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