Category: The Eagle of the Ninth

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of The Ninth is an inspiration!

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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.

Animal furs for freezing weather | Rosemary Sutcliff Discovery of the Day

domcoyoteLeave a comment

Here is another cover of Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic children’s novel, The Eagle of the Ninth.

It’s the 1986 English edition. The cover shows the ninth legion marching with animal furs to keep them warm in the freezing British weather. I could do with one of those now! Some things haven’t changed in 2,000 years.

The Eagle of the Ninth in Swedish | Rosemary Sutcliff Discovery of the Day

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Here is another of cover of Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It is the Swedish version from 1993.

Inside, there is a map of Britain, showing the Latin names of the largest settlements of Roman Britain. This is slightly different to the map shown in English versions of the book. One thing I find intriguing is the Latin name for Scotland. In the English version, it is written as Caledonia. However, in the Swedish version it is written as Caledonien. I wonder why? If Caledonia is from the Latin language, is Caledonien Swedish/Latin? The word Britannia also differs here. It is written as Britannien. However, other names of settlements remain in conventional Latin.
I wonder why the translations differ. Any ideas?

Twitter on Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth hashtag | The Eagle film hashtag | #teotn

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

We link these posts with twitter.com/rsutcliff; sporadically at the moment because, while my posts do automatically , my son’s do not yet – for reasons we are fathoming out. But Twitter users amongst you do please  use your Twitter profiles to say something about The Eagle of the Ninth, or this blog, or to retweet a recent tweet at rsutcliff, using the ‘hashtag‘  #teotn .

In anticipation of The Eagle film release I am trying to get this established as a hashtag which people will use for the book and the film too – thus restoring in a small subversive way the link with the book! So far, as a search in Twitter will show, only I have used it! And it is certainly not trending; that is for you non-Twitter users, being used so widely at a particular moment that it figures in the top ten trending topics!

An entry on rsutcliff at Twitter

The film name was changed, I understand, because market research showed that some potential film-watchers were confused by the full title (What about the eagle of the first, was that an earlier film? What ninth? Is it a golf film?). It is unwise to confuse a would-be purchaser in any business … and distributors know their business … so I resigned myself long ago to the name change. But at least #teotn for Twitter?

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff is one of most stirring historical novels ever | The New Yorker

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Anthony Lane wrote of the film Centurion in September, and looking forward to Kevin Macdonald‘s film The Eagle from The Eagle of the Ninth that

… a number of debts are being discharged (in Centurion). The mysterious vanishing of the Ninth (now disputed by some scholars) has fed many fancies, notably Rosemary Sutcliff’s in The Eagle of the Ninth—one of the most stirring historical novels ever written for children …

Source:  “Centurion” review in The The New Yorker (Thanks to Mary Beth Dunhouse for pointing this out)