… The chiffchaff busy in the garden all morning … (Diary, 11/4/88)

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April 11th, Monday. Ray gave the lawn its first cut this afternoon, without the box on. So now, the fumes of petrol having gone, there’s a nice smell of cut grass. The chiffchaff busy in the garden all morning.

© Anthony Lawton 2012 

Rosemary knew the colouring, shape, flight and song of numerous birds, part of her deep knowledge of the natural world. I, on the other hand am most ignorant. So it is the RSPB site that helps me explain (complete with recording of its song) that a chiffchaff is small olive-brown warbler which actively flits through trees and shrubs, with a distinctive tail-wagging movement. It is readily recognised by its song, from where it gets its name. It picks insects from trees, and flies out to snap them up in flight. All this evoked for her diary  and herself, perhaps, by Rosemary’s reference to the bird being ‘busy’. (An intriguing curiosity is that in her diary she writes chiffchaff, but the copy-editor in the OUP version of Dawn Wind has chiff-chaff!)

Rosemary Sutcliff’s notebook | 1992

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Dates mattered to Rosemary Sutcliff; they matter in history; and in excellent historical fiction like hers. (See post yesterday, building on an article in The Guardian). From year to year she carried foreword notes about addresses, key contacts and the dates of her books, usually in a blue Challenge notebook. This page records the little story books for children that  she published with Hamish Hamilton. The notebook is here propped on her writing chair – a Captain’s chair.

Rosemary Sutcliff dates of Hamish Hamilton books

Rosemary Sutcliff's note and adress book

Mrs Prosser has a virus … which complicates things rather badly (Diary, 10/4/88)

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April 10th Sunday. The most beautiful day, tho’ still with a chilly wind. Geraldine in for tea. Mrs Prosser has a virus of some kind and won’t be able to come on Tuesday, which complicates everything rather badly as Sheila wants to go into Chichester on Tuesday morning.

© Anthony Lawton 2012

Rosemary Sutcliff’s recreation of the past is effortless | Returning to The Lantern Bearers

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The Lantern Bearers by historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff, first published in 1959, won the prestigious  Carnegie Medal that year. An American reviewer wrote some twenty years later …

I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in my early teens, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. I can still vividly recapture the magic of reading her books. It was a real pleasure to return to The Lantern Bearers, which I first read when I was about thirteen, and find the magic still intact. … The Lantern Bearers is a wonderful book. Sutcliff possesses a unique gift for character and description, evoking a sense of place and person so intense that the reader can almost see her characters and the world in which they move. She has a matchless ability to establish historical context without a surfeit of the “let’s learn a history lesson now” exposition that mars many historical novels for young people. Her books are never less than meticulously researched, but her recreation of the past is so effortless that one has no sense of academic exercise, but rather of a world as close and immediate as everyday.

…  The Arthurian theme was one of Sutcliff’s favorites: she produced several young adult books on the subject, as well as a beautiful adult novel, Sword at Sunset, to my mind one of the best ever written in this genre. But the Sutcliff’s Arthur is rooted as much in history as in myth–not just the tragic king of Le Morte d’Arthur or the heroic/magical figure of traditional Arthurian fantasy, but a man who might actually have existed, heir both to the memory of Rome and to the last great flowering of Celtic power in Britain.
…  her enduring popularity … is richly merited: she is, quite simply, one of the best.

Copyright © 1997 Victoria Strauss

(First posted, April 29th, 2009)

Teaching history without the facts? That’s just sociology!

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

“Teaching history without the facts? That’s just sociology” argues Brian Viner today.  The great historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff certainly thought that dates and facts mattered, although she wrote fiction. Thus for example the dates and periods of her Roman Novels:

The Eagle of the Ninth – 129 AD
The Silver Branch – 284 AD
Frontier Wolf – 343 AD
The Lantern Bearers – 410+ AD
Sword At Sunset – 5th century
Dawn Wind – mid-late 6th century
Sword Song – early 10th century
The Shield Ring – 11th century

And the dates of publication matter, for those who would explore Rosemary Sutcliff’s writing more critically, thus: The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), The Shield Ring (1956), The Silver Branch (1957), The Lantern Bearers (1959), Dawn Wind (1961), Sword At Sunset (1963), Frontier Wolf (1980).

Frustrated to learn that his 16-year-old son, a student of  History A-Level, “… knew neither the year, nor even the century, in which the Spanish Armada set sail”, Brian Viner is provoking and amusing at The Guardian comment-is-free pages about “chronological teaching of history”. He is for some dates, despite recalling that 1066 And All That, was subtitled  A Memorable History of England comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings, and 2 Genuine Dates. Read More »