The 25 Best Characters on The Last Kingdom
23) ISEULT
Uhtred’s whole world changes in the latter half of season 1 when he meets Iseult (Charlie Murphy), the dark-eyed shadow queen of the Britons. She’s a gurach, a sorceress-seer who must maintain her virginity or lose her supernatural gifts. The fist time she meets Uhtred, she inspects him with hypnotic eyes and states, “He is the one.”
In the sixth episode, Iseult shows Uhtred where the dead king Peredur’s real treasure is buried, allowing him to pay off his land debt and escape punishment for killing Oswald. Uhtred takes Iseult home with him, fully aware her presence will spell disaster for his marriage to the devout Saxon Mildrith.
Uhtred and Iseult join Alfred and his loyalists after they are driven into the Athelney marshes by the Viking attack on Winchester. A healer, Iseult soothes Alfred’s chronic digestive issues with natural tonics and later saves the life of his dying son, Edward, by immersing the infant in a muddy riverbank ritual. Iseult weeps, because the ceremony requires that somewhere else, a stranger’s child must die in return.
When Uhtred and Iseult later learn that Uhtred’s son has died, Iseult fears that the little boy was the “stranger’s son” who had to die so Edward could live. Wishing to be rid of her gift, she makes love to Uhtred. As her gift fades, she tells Uhtred that Thyra is still alive in the northlands; she has seen her.
Iseult is killed when the Viking warlord Skorpa and his riders raid the Saxon camp during the Battle of Ethandun. Skorpa returns to the battlefield and tosses Iseult’s head to Uhtred, who goes berserk, vaults the Dane shield wall and kills him. It’s a tragic ending for Iseult, and one that she seems to have expected.
From the very beginning, the mysterious and intelligent Iseult dominates Uhtred’s attentions. She feeds his starving pagan side, long submerged by his allegiance to a Christian king, and he is utterly taken by her. As a pagan sorceress, she could have been a dark character, but she’s a force for good.