Thank you to The Guardian newspaper for referring Christmas present buyers and Xmas readers to The Eagle of the Ninth in their recent children’s books podcast! (It’s well worth a listen here!).
Month: December 2010
The Eagle new UK film poster | Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell | Rosemary Sutcliff Discovery of the Day
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of The Ninth is an inspiration!
Rosemary Sutcliff fan Robert Vermaat wrote this great comment in response to the Dutch version of The Eagle of the Ninth book cover I posted yesterday.
Well, that’s THE BOOK. The book that got me hooked on Rosemary Sutcliff, but also the book that got me hooked on Roman history. I must have been about 9 years old or something, but it shaped my life. I’m not kidding! How could a mere novel do that? Well, my fascination with the Roman world was fed by a holiday in Germany right along the Roman Limes and its reconstructed wooden watchtowers. The die was cast. I began reading more books by Rosemary Sutcliff, and after school I studied history, where I met my current wife. Sutcliff’s Arthurian novels had by then set me in the direction of the post-Roman period, which brought me to research Vortigern and, later, the Later Roman Army. Need I say more?
A detail: I later managed to buy the very book that began all this when the library cast it aside.
The Eagle of the Ninth in Dutch
Here is the 1965 Dutch version of Rosemary Sutcliff’s acclaimed children’s novel ‘The Eagle of the Ninth‘.
Inside are the same beautiful illustrations by C. Walter Hodges, evident in all the early editions of the novel. This particular illustration depicts Marcus and his Legion, ‘The Fourth Gaulish Auxiliaries of the Second Legion’ breaking formation in their battle with a British tribe.
Historical novel The Hound of Ulster by Rosemary Sutcliff reviewed
Althea M. wrote an insightful review of Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic children’s historical retelling, The Hound of Ulster, the story of a legendary Irish hero, Cuchulain.
….in Sutcliff’s introduction, she mentions how one can tell a lot about a people and culture from the tales that they tell… and, reading these, I couldn’t help but be reminded (again) of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Gifts,” and how she showed in that book how small and petty conflicts and rivalries could be magnified to an importance all out of proportion in an isolated, primitive culture. Here, a good deal of Cuchulain’s “heroic” exploits have to do with no more than stealing a neighbor’s cattle! It’s interesting to read these stories in contrast to so much of the extremely ‘elevated’ fantasy inspired by Celtic myth.
The book also shows, however, some of the interesting aspects of the culture – how a Queen could sometimes be more powerful than her husband, how bearing a child out of wedlock did not have shame attached, and acceptance of infidelity in marriage – things that are there in the original stories, but surprising, I thought, for a book published in 1963 and marketed to an audience including young people.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 