Twitter users read and enjoy Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Happily Twitter users sometimes (and increasingly) mention reading and enjoying Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. Most recently, for example, shanaqui (‘I read a lot’) and  salariyabookco (an award winning independent book publisher). We are trying to encourage the use of the hashtag #teotn for both the book and the film. Maybe one day – when the film comes out? – it will even ‘trend‘! Meanwhile please  spread the word to encourage reading of The Eagle of the Ninth, wherever, and hashtag or not!

The Mystery of the Ninth Legion | 44 Bread Ovens | Rosemary Sutcliff Discovery of the Day

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

In Digging Up  the Past (‘a news and resource centre for Biblical archaeology’) Kendall K. Down posted something written in 2009 about the disappearance of the Ninth Legion, possibly in Scotland, referring to Rosemary Sutcliff’s book The Eagle of the Ninth and the coming film (now called The Eagle and out in 2011). He reviewed  the ‘evidence’ to date as he interpreted it. He concluded:

Good reasons can be found for rejecting the tale of a Scottish defeat, but no good reasons can be found for accepting any alternative proposal, so I suppose the best conclusion is the one that earlier historians proposed: the disappearance of the Ninth Legion is a mystery.

That is unless  Rosemary Sutcliff’s informed but creative leaps of the imagination in The Eagle of the Ninth satisfy you …

Intriguingly he writes of latter-day research in Scotland:

A new survey of Scotland has found evidence that the story of the Romans north of Hadrian’s Wall is far more complicated than historians have hitherto thought. Ground surveys have previously found 225 Roman military camps from the Borders to Aberdeenshire. (This compares with 150 in England and Wales.) Now a new study using remote sensing technology is set to increase that number, while the Deers Den excavations at Kintore in Aberdeenshire show the extent of the Roman commitment to conquering Scotland: 44 bread ovens have been uncovered!

Source – Diggings: The Mystery of the Ninth Legion

Channing Tatum interviewed on filming The Eagle (of the Ninth)

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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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The gift of a good story from Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth | The Boston Globe

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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.”

via The gift of good stories – The Boston Globe.

Illustrator C. Walter Hodges illustrated Rosemary Sutcliff books

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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)