Last week, frequent commentator and guest reviewer Bill Brockman alerted me to an article about BBC making Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom into a TV series. The Last Kingdom is one of my all-time favorite historical novels, so this is wonderful news! You can read the full article in The Independent, titled “BBC’s new Game of Thrones slayer ‘The Last Kingdom’ relies on Saxon appeal, creators say,” here. Excerpts are below.
Based on Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling series of “Saxon stories”, the drama is set in England during the reign of King Alfred, when “the separate kingdoms of what we now know as England have fallen to the invading Vikings and the great kingdom of Wessex has been left standing alone and defiant”.
Merging historical figures and fiction, The Last Kingdom’s hero is Uhtred, born the son of a Saxon nobleman, who is orphaned by the Vikings and then kidnapped and raised as one of their own.
Forced to choose between the country of his birth and the people of his upbringing, Uhtred treads a dangerous path between Saxon and Viking as he seeks to recapture his ancestral lands.
Coming to BBC Two next year, the series is a collaboration between BBC America and Carnival Films, the award winning producers who turned ITV’s Downton Abbey into a global blockbuster.
Bill
July 16, 2014 - 1:36 pm ·Joe, fans of Cornwell will be glad to see he's venturing into non-fiction with the UK release this September of "Waterloo, The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles."
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Waterloo-History-Three-Armies-Battles/dp/000753938X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405535754&sr=1-3
Joseph Finley
July 17, 2014 - 6:43 am ·Did not know that, Bill. Thanks for the tip! I imagine he's done so much research for his books over the years, he could write a whole series of non-fiction books.