The Last Kingdom recap

Osbert, second son of the ealdorman of Bebbanburg in Northumbria, is renamed Uhtred and made heir after his brother is killed by Danish raiders. When his father dies fighting the Danes at Eoferwic, the boy is captured by Earl Ragnar the Fearless, who raises him as his own; Uhtred grows to love the Danish life and takes an English captive, Brida, as his companion. After a banished shipmaster, Kjartan, burns Ragnar's hall and kills him, Uhtred drifts south into Wessex and the service of the pious King Alfred, marries the Saxon Mildrith, and is caught in the war between Danes and Saxons. Reunited with his foster brother Ragnar the Younger, he survives Guthrum's treachery and, at the Battle of Cynuit, fights his first shield wall and kills the renowned Danish warlord Ubba, though another man steals the credit. He ends the book a young warrior torn between the people who bore him and the people who raised him.

In the year 866 the boy Osbert is the second son of the ealdorman of Bebbanburg, a coastal fortress in the English kingdom of Northumbria. When Danish raiders kill his older brother, whose name was Uhtred, the ealdorman renames Osbert as Uhtred and makes him his heir. The following year a great Danish army takes the city of Eoferwic (York); Uhtred's father joins a doomed attack to retake it and is killed, and the ten-year-old Uhtred is captured. Rather than kill or enslave the boy, the Danish earl Ragnar the Fearless takes him into his own household. Uhtred, along with a captured English girl named Brida, begins to be raised as a Dane, learning their language, their gods, and their way of war, while his uncle Aelfric seizes Bebbanburg for himself in the north.

Uhtred comes to love the Danish life and thinks of Ragnar almost as a father, growing close to Brida and to Ragnar's blind old father, the skald Ravn. Trouble follows a shipmaster named Kjartan and his son Sven: after Sven assaults Ragnar's daughter, Ragnar has the boy maimed and banishes the family, earning a bitter enemy. In revenge, Kjartan returns by night and burns Ragnar's great hall, killing the earl and most of his people. Uhtred and Brida escape the fire, but Uhtred's Danish home is destroyed and the man who raised him is dead, murdered rather than fallen in honest battle. With Ragnar's household scattered, Uhtred is cut loose in a country at war, no longer a boy and not yet sure where he belongs.

Adrift after Ragnar's death, Uhtred and Brida make their way south and eventually into Wessex, the last English kingdom still holding against the Danes. There Uhtred first encounters Alfred, the pious, bookish, and sickly prince who becomes king, a man utterly unlike the warriors Uhtred admires but relentlessly clever in defence of his realm. Uhtred also meets again the red-haired priest Father Beocca, who knew him as a child at Bebbanburg. As the Danes and Saxons make and break truces, Uhtred is drawn into the shifting war, serving Wessex while his sympathies and upbringing still tie him to the Danes, and takes part in the uneasy exchanges of hostages that pass between the two sides.

Bound more tightly to Alfred's court, Uhtred is more or less required to marry a Saxon woman, the devout Mildrith, who brings land but also a debt owed to the Church, a match that suits neither his temper nor his half-pagan faith. When the Danish leader Guthrum breaks a sworn peace and murders the Saxon hostages held among the Danes, Uhtred is nearly killed, but is saved by Ragnar the Younger, the elder son of Ragnar the Fearless and his foster brother, whose loyalty to him holds firm despite everything dividing Danes from Saxons. The war turns toward open battle as the Danish host under Ubba Lothbrokson moves against the West Saxons, and Uhtred is drawn toward the fight that will test him as a warrior for the first time.

The book ends at the Battle of Cynuit. A West Saxon force is cornered against the Danish army of Ubba Lothbrokson, one of the most feared warriors of the age, and the two sides lock in a shield wall. Fighting in earnest for the first time, Uhtred stands in the wall and, in the thick of the battle, kills Ubba in single combat, a killing that should have made his reputation across the land. But Odda the Younger seizes the credit for the victory, and Uhtred is denied both the glory and the reward. He remains tied to Alfred's Wessex and to his unhappy marriage with Mildrith, an outsider among the Saxons who does not trust him and cut off from the Danes who raised him. His true inheritance, Bebbanburg, is still held by his uncle Aelfric, and Kjartan, the man who murdered Ragnar the Fearless, is still alive and unpunished in the north.

The book closes with the Battle of Cynuit. Trapped against a Danish host led by Ubba Lothbrokson, a West Saxon force fights a desperate shield wall, and Uhtred - in his first real battle in the wall - kills Ubba in single combat, a feat that should make his name. Instead Odda the Younger claims the victory for himself, and Uhtred is left with the glory stolen and little reward. He remains bound to Alfred's Wessex, uneasily married to the devout Mildrith and still an outsider among the Saxons, while his true home, Bebbanburg, stays in the hands of his usurping uncle Aelfric far to the north. His foster brother Ragnar the Younger lives, and the bond between them holds, but Ragnar's father is dead and unavenged and the man who burned him, Kjartan, still lives. Uhtred stands at the start of a longer struggle: a Saxon by birth serving a Christian king he does not much like, a Dane by upbringing grieving a Danish father, with a stolen inheritance and an unpaid blood debt waiting in the north.