The Saxon Tales 4 Book Collection

Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss.

The three spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads. Destiny is everything,

Nowadays, of course, that story is never told; instead children learn how brave Saint Edmund stood up to the Danes, demanded their conversion, and was murdered. So now he is a martyr and a saint, warbling happily in heaven, but the truth is that he was a fool and talked himself into martyrdom.

I have heard some women complain that they have no power and that men control the world, and so they do, but women still have the power to drive men to battle and to the grave beyond.

I found another uncle, this one called Ealdorman Æthelred, son of Æthelred, brother of Æthelwulf, father of Æthelred, and brother to another Æthelred who had been the father of Ælswith who was married to Alfred, and Ealdorman Æthelred, with his confusing family, grudgingly acknowledged me as a nephew, though the welcome became slightly warmer when I presented him with two gold coins and swore on a crucifix that it was all the money I possessed. He assumed Brida was my lover, in which he was right, and thereafter he ignored her.

I wanted the sword decorated with silver or gilt bronze, but Ealdwulf refused. “It’s a tool, lord,” he said, “just a tool. Something to make your work easier, and no better than my hammer.” He held the blade up so that it caught the sunlight. “And one day,” he went on, leaning toward me, “you will kill Danes with her.

My harpist is right to smile when he chants that I am Uhtred the Gift-Giver or Uhtred the Avenger or Uhtred the Widow-Maker, for he is old and he has learned what I have learned, that I am really Uhtred the Lonely. We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.

Wyrd bi ful aræd.

They wore thick robes, had curved swords,

It is only by obedience to God that we can hope to defeat the Danes.” “Only by obedience?” I asked. I thought swords might help.

He came to the monastery to pray,” she said, “and he farted when he knelt down.” “No doubt their god appreciated the tribute,

In this I follow the early English writers who suffered from the Danes, and who rarely used the word Viking, which, anyway, describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding, and the Danes who fought against England in the ninth century, though undoubtedly raiders, were preeminently invaders and occupiers

Love has power over power itself.

to.” “And only have one wife?” “Only one wife. They’re strict about that.” He thought about it. “I still think I should do it,” he said, “because Eadred’s god does have power. Look at that dead man! It’s a miracle that he hasn’t rotted away!” The Danes were fascinated by Eadred’s relics. Most did not understand why a group of monks would carry a corpse,

Alfred’s first act as king, other than to bury his brother and put his nephews away in a monastery and have himself crowned and go to church a hundred times and weary God’s ears with unceasing prayers, was to send messengers to Halfdan proposing a conference.

The wind is a message from the gods,” Ravn said, “as is the flight of a bird, the fall of a feather, the rise of a fish, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a vixen, all are messages, but in the end, Uhtred, the gods speak in only one place.” He tapped my head. “There.

At sea, sometimes, if you take a ship too far from land and the wind rises and the tide sucks with a venomous force and the waves splinter white above the shield-pegs, you have no choice but to go where the gods will. The sail must be furled before it rips and the long oars would pull to no effect and so you lash the blades and bail the ship and say your prayers and watch the darkening sky and listen to the wind howl and suffer the rain’s sting, and you hope that the tide and waves and wind will not drive you onto rocks.

Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

I have known other men like him, men who could work themselves into a welter of fury over the smallest insult to the one thing they hold most dear.

The same is true of the horned helmet for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence. Viking warriors were much too sensible to place a pair of protuberances on their helmets so ideally positioned as to enable an enemy to knock the helmet off. It is a pity to abandon the iconic horned helmets, but alas, they did not exist.