The poetry fragments in Chapter Ten are my own, but try to imitate the form of Old English verse, while those in Chapters Eleven and Twelve are very free translations of existing poems. The first in Chapter Eleven (“War cries were loud”) and second (“There was the clashing of shields”) are from “The Battle of Maldon,” a poem describing a Saxon defeat at the hands of the Vikings in AD 991, some seventy years after the fictional battle in the novel. The third (“Now they go forth”) is probably earlier and is a conflation of two brief passages from the Finnsburh Fragment, which, as the name suggests, is all that remains of a much longer poem. The surviving fragment is only known now by copies of a seventeenth-century copy, also now lost, which describes a fight at a besieged hall. The first in Chapter Twelve (“Many a carcass they left to be carrion”) is from a very short poem about the Battle of Brunanburh, which is quoted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year AD 937. Rather than attempt a translation, I adapted Alfred Lord Tennyson’s version, which he published in 1880 in Ballads and Other Poems. The second (“Then carry your willow shields”) and third (“Almighty God, Lord and Ruler”) are from a poem called “Judith” that tells the ancient story found in the extracanonical Book of Judith, which describes how the eponymous heroine beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes. The poem is probably from the ninth century, and, though the setting might be Israel, the battle descriptions (and much else) are thoroughly Anglo-Saxon.

Snorri’s prophecy about the Dane and the Saxon joining forces will eventually come true, though not till AD 1016, long past Uhtred’s lifetime. The story of how the family lost Bebbanburg is wonderfully told in Richard Fletcher’s book Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2004). In Chapter Six I mention Father Oda, a Danish priest, and say he became a bishop. That is not a novelist’s fancy. Oda’s parents were Danes who, it is thought, came to Britain in the service of Ubba and then settled in East Anglia. Oda was converted to Christianity, became a priest, and was appointed Bishop of Ramsbury in the 920s. His story did not end there, he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in AD 941, the first Dane to head the church in England.

The young Oda was probably a priest in Æthelhelm the Elder’s household, but in time became a supporter of Æthelstan, whose chief rival for Edward’s throne was indeed Ælfweard, whose mother was a daughter of Æthelhelm the Elder. The rivalry between Ælfweard and Æthelstan must wait for another novel. King Edward of Wessex, who claimed the title Anglorum Saxonum Rex and who is usually known as Edward the Elder, is overshadowed by his father and by his successor, but it is worth noting that Edward did much to unite the territories that would become England. He inherited Wessex from his father, conquered Danish-ruled East Anglia, and then annexed Mercia on the death of his sister Æthelflaed. That left only Northumbria. It is also worth noting that the unification of England was a West Saxon project, that it moved from the south to the north, and that whoever inherited the throne of Wessex would inevitably inherit the ambition for unification that had burned so fiercely in King Alfred.