I’ve just re-read the first few volumes of the Uhtred series. (Actually, this time I listened to them as audiobooks.) It seems to me there’s a sometimes a curious threefold perspective that the reader has to engage in. I wonder if you’d agree.
I’m thinking of the religious/philosophical conceptions. So the death of King Edmund jumps to mind. It’s re-imagined as a dare, and this is a bold and imaginative idea, and what the reality—which is inaccessible to us—was doesn’t matter. The point is: what can be created out of what we have? I think that’s an interesting approach, and already familiar from, for example, Robert Graves’s I Claudius. (In truth, Claudius was likely as much of a thug as anyone at the time, but imagine that he wasn’t, and you get an interesting tale out of it.)
So the triple perspective—there’s the view of the nature of life and reality that Christian Anglo-Saxons might have taken; there’s the view that Pagan Northmen might have taken—and actually those are closer than might at first seem—but then there’s a third view. This isn’t directly expressed in what anyone says but is situational: it’s the authorial view and it’s there in what happens within the action. For both Saxons and Northmen the world is an “enchanted” place in which the marvellous can and does happen. And they’re not necessarily hostile to each other’s conceptions (although some characters in the books can be). The Danes are people who might be converted in the Saxon view. To the Vikings, Christianity is perhaps, as the Swedish historian Anders Winroth has suggested, as much as anything, like silver, another exotic and prestigious possession richer cultures further south have that might be worth acquiring. But the Dark Age Scandinavian warband, with that very practical, laconic attitude that one sees in the poem Havamal, thinks to put things to the test and see what happens. King Edmund, when he sees how things are unfolding, would rather back out but can’t because (a) he’d lose face and (b) his captors wouldn’t let him. Is Edmund’s faith wavering when push comes to shove and he has to _really_ think about it? Or is it that he reflects that he’s been told God “moves in mysterious ways” and can’t be ordered to do this or that, and that God arranges what’s best from the Divine point of view, but that that may not be what he, King Edmund, would wish for? High drama. What a situation!
But there’s also the situational viewpoint, the view the author has, I take it—correct me if I’m wrong—this is that miracles don’t happen and Edmund must and will get it in the neck everything being as it is. And so I think we see the situation simultaneously from three viewpoints at once.
Michael