Benedetta sits with me, her head on my shoulder, and sometimes she looks towards the hall I built at the fortress’s northern end and she smiles. My wife lives there. Æthelstan insisted on the marriage, sometimes I think to mock me, and so Eldrida the piglet became my wife. I had thought Benedetta would be enraged, but she was amused. ‘Poor child,’ she said, and has ignored her ever since. Eldrida is scared of me and even more scared of Benedetta, but she delivered me her lands in Cumbria, and that was her purpose. I try to be kind to her, but all she wants is to pray. I built her a private chapel and she brought two priests to Bebbanburg and I hear their prayers whenever I go near the Sea Gate. She tells me she prays for me, and perhaps that is why I still live.
Finan also lives, but he is slower now. So am I. We must both die soon. Finan asks that his body be taken to Ireland to sleep with his ancestors, and Egil, who has a Norseman’s endless desire to be at sea, has promised he will fulfil that wish. My only request is to die with a sword in my hand, and so Benedetta and I share our bed with Serpent-Breath. Bury her with me, I tell my son, and he has promised that my sword will go to Valhalla with me. And in that great hall of the gods I will meet so many men that I once fought, who I killed, and we shall feast together and watch the middle-earth beneath us and see men fight as we once fought, and so the world will go on till Ragnarok’s chaos engulfs it.
And until the day when I shall go to the hall of the gods I shall stay in Bebbanburg. I fought for Bebbanburg. It was stolen from me, I recaptured it, and I have held it against all my enemies, and whenever I sit on the terrace I wonder if, a thousand years from now, the fortress will still stand, still unconquered, still brooding over the sea and the land. I think it will remain until Ragnarok comes, when the seas will boil, the land shatter and the skies turn to fire, and there the story will end.
Wyrd bið ful ãræd.
Never before in this island was there such slaughter.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, AD 938, on the Battle of Brunanburh
Historical Note
The Battle of Brunanburh was fought in the autumn of AD 937. Æthelstan, monarch of the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia, defeated an army led by Anlaf Guthfrithson, King of Dyflin in Ireland, and by Constantine of Scotland. They were joined by the men of Strath Clota, by the Norse warriors of what are now the Orkneys and the Hebrides, and by sympathetic Northmen from Northumbria. They were defeated. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle broke into verse to celebrate the victory, noting ‘never was there such slaughter in our islands’. For years afterwards it was simply known as ‘the great battle’.
It was undoubtedly a great battle and a terrible slaughter, and it was also one of the most important battles ever to have been fought on British soil. Michael Livingston, who is surely the greatest expert on Brunanburh, notes in his book, The Battle of Brunanburh: A Casebook, that ‘the men who fought and died on that field forged a political map of the future that remains with us today, arguably making the Battle of Brunanburh one of the most significant battles in the long history not just of England, but of the whole of the British Isles … in one day, on one field, the fate of a nation was determined’.
That nation was England, and Brunanburh is its founding moment. When Uhtred’s story began, there were four Saxon kingdoms, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria, and King Alfred had a dream to unite them into one. To do that he needed to repel the invading Danes who had conquered Northumbria, East Anglia, and northern Mercia. Alfred’s son Edward and his daughter Æthelflaed reconquered East Anglia and Mercia, but Northumbria remained stubbornly independent and ruled by Norsemen. Scotland lay to its north, Æthelstan’s Saxon kingdom to the south, and both had an interest in its fate. Æthelstan wanted to fulfil his grandfather’s dream of a united England, Constantine feared and resented the growing power of the Saxons, which could only grow more powerful if Northumbria became a part of England.
That growing power was demonstrated in AD 927 at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria when Æthelstan demanded the presence of Constantine and the rulers of Northumbria to swear loyalty to him. He had already demanded the same oath from Hywel of Dyfed. Æthelstan was now calling himself the Monarchus Totius Brittaniae, yet he was content to leave Guthfrith on Northumbria’s throne. Guthfrith’s death meant that his cousin, Anlaf of Dyflin, now had a claim to Northumbria’s throne and it also led to unrest as Constantine increased his influence in Northumbria, especially in the western part, Cumbria. That unrest led to Æthelstan’s invasion of Scotland in AD 934. His army and
