Pagan Lord is the latest offering from the prolific writer, Bernard Cornwell, best known for his Sharpe series. It follows Lord Uthred a Saxon earl, dispossessed by his wicked uncle of his inheritance, the great fortification of Bebbanburg, better known nowadays as Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland.
Regular readers will have seen Uthred grow from a young Christian nobleman, kidnapped at the behest of his aforementioned uncle by raiding Vikings. However Uthred soon amasses a reputation as a formidable warrior, and is adopted by his captors, taking on their ways and throwing over the Christian God for the more capricious pantheon of the Danes.
And even when he eventually ends up in the Christian court of Alfred the Great, he still holds to the old gods, much to the disgust of the king and the multitude of priests with which he surrounds himself.
However, by the time of Pagan Lord, Alfred is dead, and Uthred angers his successor Edward by accidently killing an abbot with whom he was arguing. Forced by these circumstances to flee with few men, Uthred finally decides that it is time to assault Bebbanburg, and with his tiny crew that is exactly what he does.
The writing is raw, and Cornwell handles his hero with a panache garnered over decades of tuning his craft, and even though this series is now on its seventh outing, it still feels fresh and original. And I’ve always had a particular fondness for the Warrior Chronicles. Hayling Island is mentioned in the foreword to each book as an interesting example of Saxon attitudes to spelling – and its many alternatives. Also Havant was used as a location in one of the earlier books of the series, so he gets my vote for that!
The Pagan Lord is out in paperback now.