Channing Tatum was interviewed earlier in the year by ITN about the filming of The Eagle, an adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth.
Channing Tatum: I’ll never film in Scotland again!
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Month: December 2010
The gift of a good story from Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth | The Boston Globe
Carlo Rotella writes in the Boston Globe about buying for her children for Christmas “generations-tested” books, including Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth:
… my daughters, being kids, are into Christmas, and I have some other gift-giving obligations, so every year on the Saturday morning before Christmas I come down off the mountain and make a trip downtown to buy presents. My main destination is a bookstore, and as soon as I get there I start feeling better about things. The place is always packed during the days before Christmas with a crowd that radiates excitement and contentment, and that itself is encouraging. People still read, and still regard the giving and receiving of books as something special.
And the old long-haul reliables I remember from childhood, generations-tested books you can read to your kids when they’re little and they can then read for themselves and go on rereading into adolescence and beyond, are still for sale, often in fine new editions: books like Scott O’Dell’s “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, John Dennis Fitzgerald’s Great Brain books, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman adventure “The Eagle of the Ninth,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Charles Portis’s great comic Western “True Grit.”
Illustrator C. Walter Hodges illustrated Rosemary Sutcliff books
A while back I noted that English illustrator Cyril Walter Hodges, known as C. Walter Hodges (1909-2004), worked on Rosemary Sutcliff’s early books. Born in Beckenham and educated at Dulwich College and Goldsmiths’ College, he spent most of his career as a freelance illustrator. He wrote:
Rosemary Sutcliff I also liked very much. Her work was very good, though rather sweet, but that was because she was very crippled. As soon as I met her I realised where this romantic sweetness came from. . . . When illustrating her books one realised that one was responsible to her for what one was doing in her name. After I’d illustrated some Sutcliff novels, other artists like Charles Keeping illustrated her work and to my mind, did a much better job. I was very envious of Keeping—I thought he did marvellous drawings. I knew I could never do it like that!
Source: Mathew Eve’s article ‘C. Walter Hodges: A Life Illustrating History Children’s Literature’ in the journal Education (Vol. 35, No. 2, June 2004)
A Rosemary Sutcliff Style Guide?
Rosemary Sutcliff was my personal ‘style guide’ when she was alive. (She would have been 90 years old last week). I remember her berating me frequently for a far too ready use of commas, let alone for contorted sentences like this …
For many years since her death in 1992 I have used The Guardian Style Guide. I started to read it today at ‘A’, thinking about entries that might have overlapped with a Rosemary Sutcliff Style Guide. Thus, extracted from many entries under the letter ‘A’ in the Guardian guide:
- abbeys are, like cathedrals, with capitals: Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, etc
- abscess
- achilles heel
- AD, BC: AD goes before the date (AD64), BC goes after (300BC); both go after the century, eg second century AD, fourth century BC
- adviser not advisor
- affect/effect: exhortations in the style guide had no effect (noun) on the number of mistakes; the level of mistakes was not affected (verb) by exhortations in the style guide; we hope to effect (verb) a change in this
- aide-de-camp , plural aides-de-camp (aide is a noun)
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Rosemary Sutcliff and the South Downs
Award winning children’s novelist Rosemary Sutcliff lived most of her life in Sussex. Some of her stories are set in the county and mention the South Downs, a large protected area of Sussex countryside. I discovered that she is in the ‘featured writers’ section of www.southdownsonline.org, along with H.G Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Virginia Woolf.
For much of her adult life she lived in Walberton. The remains of Iron Age forts, Roman villas and Norman castles in the county inspired her to set many of her stories in Sussex.
Warrior Scarlet is set in the Iron Age. Some of the action takes place near Cissbury Ring. At one point, the hero, Drem, fails his test to become a warrior and is sent off to be a shepherd. Sheep on the Downs were looked after in a very similar way until about 100 years or so ago. The South Downs Society paid for the restoration of a traditional wheeled shepherd’s hut in 1980 and for a shepherd’s room in 1989, both at the Weald and Downland Museum.
In The Witch’s Brat the hero is thrown out of his tribe and walks along the South Downs to Winchester. Here he finds shelter in the New Minster, better known as Winchester Cathedral. He ends up in London where he helps with the setting up of St. Bartholomew’s hospital.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 