Sutcliff reviewed: The Shining Company (June 1990)

Violent land of our fathers -
Books

Times, The (London, England)
June 9, 1990
Author: Brian Alderson

Estimated printed pages: 2

THE SHINING COMPANY, By Rosemary Sutcliff, The Bodley Head, Pounds 7.95

Y GODODDIN is not a species of baby-talk, but a tale of bloody strife, said to have been written around the end of the 7th century by the Welsh bard Aneirin. It tells how the High Chief of the Gododdin, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, called a hosting of the Celtic tribes at Edinburgh. There, for the space of a year, he trained a war-band of 300 princes and then unleashed them on the invading Saxons at the Battle of Catterick. Everything went wrong, and only one hero returned from the fray. But his exploits and those of his companions were celebrated by Aneirin in ``the Great Song that others will sing for a thousand years".

This Great Song is at the heart of Rosemary Sutcliff's Shining Company, thus bringing Aneirin longer life than he expected. For as he gave elegiac voice to the deeds of hero after hero, so she has taken the names from his telling and has sought to imagine them back int historical reality. Speaking through the persona of Prosper, the son of a Welsh chieftain, and eventually shieldbearer to the knight who returned, she begins by establishing a sense of the closed tribal world of the time after the Romans, and then introduces unbardic perceptions of form and motive. Personal relationships and the countryside of the Dark Ages become vital ingredients in the renewed story, and as the episodes pile up the ride to Edinburgh, the welding of disparate forces into a single fighting group so the reader is made ready for the great setpiece of the battle and the long dying fall of its tragic aftermath.

Such a theme is natural to Sutcliff's art. She is moved by simple concepts of loyalty and integrity that may be as foreign to today's children's literature as they were to the no-baby-talk Gododdin. But by admitting their possibility, while not shirking the real facts of ferocious woundings and pragmatic betrayals, she still persuades us that a bardic reading of the past is sustainable alongside an awareness of its squalor and its indifferent, but unpolluted, landscapes.

Section: Features

(c) Times Newspapers Limited 1990, 2003

Record Number: 1007894754

OpenURL Article Bookmark (right click, and copy the link location):

Violent land of our fathers

http://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.new

sbank.com:UKNB:&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F925AD4B76

8C85B&svc_dat=InfoWeb:aggregated4&req_dat=25636B4CC9A542FB9EC6D4B96A7A8F92

Anthony Lawton's blog has moved ...

Dom's contribution is hidden away in the comments, but he points out that Anthony Lawton has started a new blog at: rosemarysutcliff.wordpress.com

Sutcliff on film? Eagle of the Ninth (November 2000)

The Roman Eagle has landed: Saturday Premiere

Daily Telegraph, The (London, England)/Financial Times
November 25, 2000

Estimated printed pages: 1

BRITAIN has never had its own Ben Hur. However, hot on the heels of the success of Gladiator, this may change.

Duncan Kenworthy (the co-producer of comedy films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill) has just bought an option on Rosemary Sutcliff's classic children's book The Eagle of the Ninth. Based on the true story of the lost Ninth Hispana Legion, which disappeared somewhere north of Hadrian's Wall in the second century AD, it is a romping tale about a young legionary, Marcus, who ventures into Scotland to look for the missing soldiers, including his father, and their standard.

It is an odd project for Kenworthy but it will be good to see the Romans in Britain for once. Let's just pray that the producer does not want to cast Hugh Grant as Marcus . . .

http://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.new

sbank.com:UKNB:DSTC&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F288E6

BC1E90901&svc_dat=InfoWeb:aggregated4&req_dat=25636B4CC9A542FB9EC6D4B96A7A8

F92

Sutcliff reviewed: The Shining Company (July 1990)

Reliving a glorious past -
Children's Books

Sunday Times, The (London, England)
July 15, 1990
Author: Susan Hill

Estimated printed pages: 5

Rosemary Sutcliff has never tried to ingratiate herself with young readers by making her prose bland and easily digestible. The complexities ofher style are not gratuitous, but reflect the depth and complexity of her subject-matter. Those without an innate historical sense or taste need to be encouraged to read her, because they discover that she not only makes bare facts ``come alive" but attempts to make sense of them, and to illuminate legend, in human terms. She is also an extraordinarily rich, exciting and poetic writer. To those of my generation who thrilled to The Eagle of the Ninth, it is a pleasure to read her latest book, The Shining Company (Bodley Head Pounds 7.99), and find her still at the height of her powers.

The inspiration for it comes from an early northern British epic poem such sources are often the triggers for her fiction about 300 young, keen warriors belonging to the tribe of King Mynyddog in 600 AD who were brought together and trained for a year, as a fighting brotherhood, before being sent out against the invading Saxons. The hero is Prosper, son of Gerontius, a shieldbearer to one of them, and the story concerns him, his close friends and confederates, and his bond-slave. It is a remote time, and values and customs are completely alien to those of our own, particularly the concept of fealty and loyalty to a king, an individual lord, a blood brother. Rosemary Sutcliff gets under the skin of adventurous young men in trying to reveal what made them follow a leader and give their lives gladly in his service. It is as inspiring, and tragic, as any similar war story involving a ``shining company" of golden boys, and this intricate, compellingly imagined and beautifully told story makes period and people sympathetic and comprehensibl in our own time.

http://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.new

sbank.com:UKNB:LSTB&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F9297D

98010A2E3&svc_dat=InfoWeb:aggregated4&req_dat=25636B4CC9A542FB9EC6D4B96A7A8

F92

BBC's Eagle of the Ninth, 1977

Finally, I found a good photo of BBC's 1977 series of Eagle of the Ninth, showing Aqulia leading his troops. Details of the production can be found here. Marcus Aquila was played by Anthony Higgins. This scene, was, I think also briefly shown in Togas on TV recently, along with a couple of other scenes. Any chance of a DVD release please of the whole series, Auntie Beeb?

From a pedant's point of view, the armour looks dodgy. As it's AD 117 they'd be OK with lorica segmentata, but it looks like scale armour. And the helmets are odd too. Perhaps they are auxiliaries? Nethertheless, I'd rather have a well acted drama with naff costumes than nothing at all ...

27/7/2017 Edit: See this blog post for links to the whole series on YouTube!

Sutcliff and Simon Schama (October 2000)

Television Review

Independent, The (London, England)/Financial Times
October 5, 2000

Estimated printed pages: 3

THE PROBLEM with the past is that it just won't stay put: it's always shifting to accommodate our needs, our assumptions about the sorts of people we are. Not long ago, I re-read Rosemary Sutcliff's children's story, The Silver Branch, which is set in Britain towards the end of Roman rule. When I first read it, 25 years ago, I took it as a fairly faithful recreation of the period; second time around, what was striking was how obviously it was the product of the time it was written, the 1950s. The story has two young Romano- British patriots on a spying mission in Saxon-occupied Britain - sleeping in haylofts, evading the brutal Germanic invaders with the help of friendly locals: it's basically a Second World War resistance yarn transposed to the fourth century.

By contrast, Sunday's opening episode of A History of Britain by Simon Schama (BBC2) presented a much gentler picture of the same period. Schama disdained talk of "apocalypse" in favour of gentle change - Roman Britannia "morphed" into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; the process was "an adaptation, not an annihilation".

Partly, no doubt, the differences between Sutcliff's picture and Schama's reflect advances in understanding. But Schama's version also said something about the way we live now: this was history for a multicultural society, one that embraces difference and defines its relationships with the outside world in terms of trade and economics, not wars and empires. Schama depicted the Roman occupation of Britain in similarly benign terms - the odd violent episode aside, it was a matter of seduction rather than conquest. Hadrian's Wall was depicted as a conduit for trade, not a military frontier.

Full article at:

http://docs.newsbank.com/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.new

sbank.com:UKNB:IISC&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_dat=0F2A785

864940A86&svc_dat=InfoWeb:aggregated4&req_dat=25636B4CC9A542FB9EC6D4B96A7A8

F92

Film rights

I've been contacted recently by someone from the US trying to find out if a particular book by Rosemary Sutcliff has had the film rights bought. I've passed her onto Anthony Lawton, needless to say. But she did ask if there were any 'fun' titles I'd like to see on film ... I told her the books that are most often mentioned by fans I've met (Eagle of the Ninth* and Mark of the Horse Lord), plus threw one in of my own (Sword at Sunset). Lets see if it comes to anything in the coming years ...

But which of Sutcliff's books would you like to see on the big screen?

*Yes, I know that Eagle of the Ninth was serialised by the BBC, but it's a fat lot of good if the Beeb neither shows it now, nor issues it on DVD

The Witch's Brat, Red Fox, 1990

Red Fox, Paperback, 1990

Flowering Dagger

On exploring Google Book Search, I found a Rosemary Sutcliff short story. It's called Flowering Dagger and is in a collection called Within the Hollow Hills: an anthology of new Celtic writing, edited by John Matthews, published 2000 by Steiner Books. A few sample pages can be found here. It was originally published in The Real Thing, edited by Peggy Woodford, Bodley Head, 1977. Other contributors include: Robin Williamson, R.J. Stewart, Caitlin Matthews, David Spangler, Peter Vansittart, Henry Treece and Margaret Elphinstone, plus others.

Other books by or mentioning Sutcliff extracted on Google Book Search include: The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of "The Odyssey", Essential Fiction Genres Student Book by Peter Ellison, 100 More Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies by Bernard A. Drew, Honey for a Child's Heart: The Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life by Gladys M. Hunt, Killing the Celt by Tomas Runmhar, Black Ships Before Troy: the story of the Iliad, etc.

Update on searching this blog

If you want to search this blog specifically (to see if we've covered something) there is now a way to do this properly. In the bar on the right of the screen there is a Technorati search box. Just type in what you're looking for, and it'll bring back the results.

UK Paperback Cover: The Silver Branch

The Silver Branch, Oxford University Press, 2000

Sending in cover shots

Ross kindly asked about sending in other cover shots of Sutcliff's books. People are always welcome to do this, but please note the following:

1. So you don't waste your time, check the blog's archives first to see if it's already been included. You can either trawl through the monthly archives (see right-hand side bar) or search the blog, using the search facility at the very top of the screen. However, I've just tried it now, searching on Sword at Sunset, and it's only brought up the msot recent blog! Perhaps it's not working properly at the moment? I have tried to give the posts clear headings, so you should be able to pick the titles out pretty easily.

2. Ensure your image is about 25kb. A bit higher or lower is OK, but I'm still on dial-up, so anything really large takes ages to download. I'm also then in the position of editing the image down anyway for uploading to the blog. So keep the images of a modest size.

Looking forward to seeing some new covers!

UK Hardback Cover: Sword at Sunset

Sword at Sunset, Bookclub, 1963
With thanks to David Mace who sent this to us.

Song for a Dark Queen: brief review

Tony Keen, in his blog comments briefly on Song for a Dark Queen.

Update on 23rd April: Tony Keen comments on Rosemary Sutcliff.

Teachers' Guide for Sutcliff's novels

Thank you to Sarah Johnson for mentioning this on her blog:

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux's (Sutcliff's US publisher) 12 page Teachers' Guide brochure

UK Paperback cover: Frontier Wolf

Frontier Wolf, Puffin, 1984

UK paperback cover: Song for a Dark Queen

Song for a Dark Queen, Red Fox, 1996

UK Paperback cover: Blood and Sand

Blood and Sand, Coronet, 1987

A Rosemary Sutcliff editor

I recently came across the Ancient Worlds website. They have a forum for Children's Literature and this post by one of Sutcliff's editors will doubtless be of interest. Here is the same poster acknowledging that Sutcliff is out of fashion. And here are some comments on Sutcliff's book in general.

UK Hardback cover: Sword Song

Sword Song, Bodley Head, 1997