“BBC Two announces new drama series, The Last Kingdom
A
Carnival Films and BBC America co-production for BBC Two, The Last Kingdom is
an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s best-selling series of books by BAFTA
nominated and RTS award-winning writer Stephen Butchard.
BBC Two,
BBC America and Carnival Films, the Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning
producers, today announced that production would begin in the autumn on The
Last Kingdom, a new historical 8x60' drama series.”
It seems that the Saxons are at last to get a chance at
popular culture. Without doubt the Vikings have been the dominant
representation of early medieval peoples, giving us all kinds of stereotypical
behaviours such as rape and pillage, clothing like helmets with wings or horns
attached, and the image of a burly hair-suit barbarian.
Although the Saxon peoples were related in many ways to the
Norse peoples, not least in culture, they have always been somewhat in the
shadows of their more famous cousins. I have no doubt that in part this is a
ramification of the successful invasion of Britain by the Danes, the period
that Bernard Cornwell’s books cover, because to people who know very little
about the early medieval age that is what the Vikings did; they conquered the
Saxons.
It is true, they did destroy Saxon kingdoms like
Northumbria, but it is also true that the Saxons ultimately went on to destroy completely
the Viking kingdoms set up by the Danes. In fact the Saxons went to unite the
whole of England and weld it into one of the great states of the times. They
developed a robust culture governed by written law and in which the fledgling
Christian Church enjoyed a rapid growth evinced by the number of churches being
built throughout the island. At one point the Saxons were far ahead of the
continent in building churches in stone.
Recent discoveries like the Staffordshire Horde have
revealed a beauty to Saxon art and craftsmanship that has captured the imagination
of the world. The popular view of the Saxons as a beaten people who were
illiterate, mud-stained peasants, is being challenged and new representations
of their social and cultural developments revealed. The Saxons are worthy of
our respect.
The new drama series announced by the BBC represents an
excellent opportunity for the Saxons to be recast in an image closer to what
they are known to be for those who have taken the time to study them. Yes, it
will show the destruction of Saxon kingdoms before the Viking onslaught, but
hopefully viewers will come away with a more positive impression of the Saxons
as a whole. Their civilisation lasted for over 500 years until the time of the
Normans and even then it was not entirely eclipsed, it simple adapted to a new
form, absorbed the foreign culture and became something new and even more
robust in the process, giving rise to the modern British society of today.
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