Sword Song is the 33rd Bernard Cornwell book on my heaving shelves. Cornwell has been a mainstay of my reading for years, but this is the first of his works that I have reviewed since starting Bookgeeks. Sword Song is the fourth volume of the King Alfred saga, focusing on the reign of Alfred, the wars against the marauding Vikings and the birth of the English state as we now recognise it

Our narrator is Uhtred – born a Saxon noble and a Christian, but raised by Danes as a pagan. His divided loyalties are the central theme of this saga. While he has no love for the Christian King Alfred, Uhtred’s fate is to fight for the kingdom of Wessex against the Danes and Norsemen who occupy half the country. When Alfred is surrounded by priests and monks, the bluff and pragmatic Uhtred, skilled in the application of violence, is a necessary member of his entourage. His directness often brings a smile:

‘If I told you every time Aethelwold talked treason,’ I said, ‘you would never cease to hear from me. What I can tell you now is that you should slice his head off.’

‘He is my nephew,’ said Alfred stiffly, ‘and has royal blood.’

‘He still has a removable head,’ I insisted.

In this volume, as Cornwell admits in his traditional historical afterword, the plot deviates rather more from the known historical record than previous volumes: Uhtred is first charged with reclaiming Lundene (London) from the occupying Danes, then gets drawn in to the rescue of Alfred’s daughter from a huge band of Vikings holed up in Essex, following a disastrous campaign against the Vikings by his cousin. Along the way, he is almost convinced that it’s his place to betray his oath to Alfred, seize the throne of Mercia and set in motion a chain of events that might have led to the demise of Wessex and the end of Alfred’s dream of England.

This series of books has been Cornwell’s best first-person work so far (better than the Arthur and Merlin trilogy, perhaps because he is on firmer historical ground), and his best work for a while given that Sharpe has been reduced to episodes filling in the gaps in the series. On the plus side, I particularly enjoy the cultural tension between the earthy paganism of the Vikings and the heavenly concerns of the Christians, with their faith in the scared relics of their religion. On the minus side, the combat scenes are rather repetitive hack and slash fare and there’s nothing we haven’t had before.

With Sword Song, Cornwell underlines his dependability, but doesn’t break any new ground – mind you, I don’t suppose that should surprise anyone too much, nor should it diminish the enjoyment. Corrnwell is very good at what he does, and I am looking forward to reading the new, standalone Agincourt novel that’s just come out, as well as following the next instalment of of Uhtred’s adventures.

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