Dear sir, It is with the greatest interest I have read your first book about King Alfred the Great, The Last kingdom, so I hurried to purchase the other four in the series. One thing puzzled me though, namely the fact that you wrote the Anglo Saxons and the Danes (Vikings) needed interpreters (like Uhtred) to understand each other. The two groups of invaders came from the same regions, so they should be able to understand each other. I know that a period of about 400 years passed between the Anglo Saxon and Viking invasions of Britain, but languages didn’t change that much in those days, did they? Actually, the three Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish have had some 1.500 years to separate, and yet I don’t find it that difficult to understand Swedish and hardly any problems with Norwegian. I may of course be wrong, I haven’t done research as you have, but still, the quotations from the internet below, do sort of support my point Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea from what is the present day Denmark and northern Germany. The Evolution of English George Boeree The language we now call English is actually a blend of many languages. Even the original Anglo-Saxon was already a blend of the dialects of west Germanic tribes living along the North Sea coast: The Saxons in Germany and eastern Holland, the Jutes, possibly from northern Denmark (the area now called Jutland), and the Angles, probably living along the coast and on islands between Denmark and Holland. It is also likely that the invaders included Frisians from northern Holland and northern Franks from southern Holland (whose relatives gave their name to France).The dialects were close enough for each to understand the other. Later, in the 800s, the Northmen (Vikings) came to England, mostly from Denmark, and settled in with the Anglo-Saxons from Yorkshire to Norfolk, an area that became known as the Danelaw. Others from Norway ruled over the people in the northwest, from Strathclyde to the north of Wales. The Norse language they spoke resembled Anglo-Saxon in many ways, but was different enough for two things to happen: One, there were many Old Norse words that entered into English, including even such basic ones as they and them; And two, the complex conjugations and declensions began to wither away as people disagreed about which to use! I’m really looking forward to reading the next four books. With my best regards, Knud Eriksen