A lot of them.
I agree with you on Aelswith (a horrible, horrible human being) and the sniveling rat-faced puke Odder the Younger. But I'm a gonna add a couple names here:
I found myself disliking Brida every time she tried to interact with anybody excepting Uthred. She was haughty and angry and self-interested.
For similar reasons, I'm not really a big fan of Uthred himself, a man who is repeatedly told (often begged) to let logic guide him and he repeatedly refuses by yelling at people and demanding things like a larger version of a petulant child. He has no tact, subtlety, or wisdom. He just plows forward trying to self-aggrandize himself without patience or any sensible action. Brida actually was a nice foil to Uthred at the beginning, often advising him well (he would immediately ignore her sensible advise, but hey). I don't want to freak out too much about Uthred, but (SPOILERS COMING UP) right at the beginning Brida tells him to ride immediately to Ubba and plead his case. He ignores her and winds up hunted by the Danes due to the faster-traveling lies against him. Later in the series, he is told the EXACT SAME THING after Ubba is killed in battle: go to Alfred and tell the truth so people know what happened. Instead he takes a languorous detour and winds up getting screwed AGAIN because not only is he too dumb to take a good course of action, not only is he too dumb to follow good advise, but he's too dumb to do so TWICE. He's not even learning! Grah. I'll stop there. Suffice it to say, I found his frequent, self-indulgent, bullheaded idiocy to be frustrating.
Don't mind Alfred so much. He's manipulative, sure, but he actually seems good at what he does (being a king), and only rarely displays the kind of blind thinking that Uthred does.
reply
share
Leo_ofRedKeep
9 years ago
Don't mind Alfred so much. He's manipulative, sure, but he actually seems good at what he does (being a king), and only rarely displays the kind of blind thinking that Uthred does.
I like Alfred a lot.
He is manipulative with Uthred, yes, and he has to, given the sort of dickhead he is facing. He also has to balance the church and the military, beliefs which guide into some sort of civilising order and realism which gets things done and keeps people alive, which he does in the most interesting way.
reply
share
Leo_ofRedKeep
9 years ago
I found myself disliking Brida every time she tried to interact with anybody excepting Uthred. She was haughty and angry and self-interested.
Brida wants to be a Dane. That's how she grew up and she doesn't have Uthred's position as heir of a Saxon land to recover, nor does she suffer of his dilemma of not being fully recognised as a Dane. As a result, she easily rejects the Saxon solution at the first hurdle, she won't pay the price and acts accordingly.
reply
share
Ace_Spade
9 years ago
I know why she acts the way she does. I just found her anger and arrogance to be off-putting. It's obvious she considers herself Danish and that all Saxons are, by virtue of being not-Danish, inferior. That's what irked me about her was her haughtiness.
reply
share
Scifi71
9 years ago
I know why she acts the way she does. I just found her anger and arrogance to be off-putting. It's obvious she considers herself Danish and that all Saxons are, by virtue of being not-Danish, inferior. That's what irked me about her was her haughtiness.
Totally agree.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality. ~T.S. Eliot
reply
share