Month: April 2012

The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff | Based on Y Gododdin poem | Reviewed in The Times

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The Shining Company, the historical novel by Rosemary Sutcliff, was published to excellent reviews over twenty years ago, although it was awarded a major US award for children’s literature last year. This was the review in The Times newspaper, by Brian Alderson who was a  pioneer of the study of children’s literature in Britain.

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’sThe 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.

Source: The Times, June 9, 1990, Saturday by Brian Alderson

More on this blog about Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shining Company

Perceptions of King Arthur and other legendary figures

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This article about how historians’ perceptions of the ‘legendary figure’ have changed over recent times is behind a pay wall: I am trying to access it. Meanwhile…

Forty years ago both scholarly histories and historical novels had a common view of Arthur: as a historical warrior, whose leadership enabled his people, the native inhabitants of post-Roman Britain, to halt the advancing tide of Anglo-Saxon conquest for about half a century. Nobody was exactly sure when this was, because it had been in the obscure period between 410 and 550, which has left almost no contemporary documents. Nonetheless, there was general agreement that Arthur had flourished somewhere in that time and had been the greatest British personality in it, establishing a fame which laid the basis for the later, more romantic and fantastic, medieval Arthurian legend.

This happy consensus had mostly been produced by the new discipline of archaeology, which had excavated some of the main sites associated with Arthur in that later and fully-developed legend, such as his birthplace at Tintagel and Cadbury Castle in Somerset, which local tradition held had been his court of Camelot. In each case, amid great publicity, spectacular remains had been found of occupation by wealthy people at just the right period. For many, this was enough to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the legend was rooted in historical truth and books such as Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain  and Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain carried this message to a wide readership. It was taken up by historians, who now felt encouraged to reconstruct a story for the years around 500 by combining the meagre early medieval sources with a wealth of much more dubious data from later periods; this approach was epitomised by John Morris’s fat, exciting book, The Age of Arthur . The interest stirred up by scholars resulted in a flood of historical fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. Most was produced by Englishmen, though Englishwomen such as Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Stewart were among the most prominent authors. All treated Arthur as a historical character in a post-Roman setting, with realistic British landscapes and careful use of historical and archaeological data.

Source: Signposts: King Arthur | History Today.

… a very cheerful and gossipy couple of hours … (Diary, 14/4/88)

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April 14th Thursday. The Wickses in to tea, a very cheerful and gossipy couple of hours.


A Crown of Wild Olive | Rosemary Sutcliff story of the Greek Olympics

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Omnibus book of Rosemary SutcliffRosemary Sutcliff children’s book and story A Crown of Wild Olive (The Truce of the Games) tells the story of the Olympics.In fact, it is the newer title of a book originally published as The Truce of the Games. The tale is of two athletes from different ways of life who discover the meaning of friendship as they compete against each other in the ancient Olympic games. A Crown of Wild Olive was published in the collection Heather, Oak, and Olive  (1972).