Tag: children’s literature

Fantasy writer Victoria Strauss writes about Rosemary Sutcliff historical novel for children and young adults, The Lantern Bearers The Lantern Bearers

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Rosemary Sutcliff ‘s The Lantern Bearers won the Carnegie Medal for children’s literature. It is a  historical novel for children and young people. One American reviewer, Victoria Strauss, a writer of fantasy fiction, thought Sutcliff’s The Lantern Bearers a ‘wonderful book’, having discovered Rosemary ‘s books in her early teens.

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.

Published in 1959 and reprinted several times since, The Lantern Bearers is set in the seventh century A.D., at the close of the Roman period in Britain. When the last Roman troops are recalled to Italy, Aquila, the young commander of a troop of cavalry, discovers that his love of his native Britain is stronger than his loyalty to a distant empire he has never seen. He deserts, and returns home. But the Saxon threat is looming, and soon after his return, Aquila’s home is overrun by Saxon raiders. His father is killed and his sister Flavia kidnapped, and he himself is captured and made a thrall in a Saxon household. Three years later, he and Flavia meet again in a Saxon camp, and Aquila discovers that she has married a Saxon and has had a child. Though she helps Aquila to escape, he cannot forgive her for what he sees as a profoundly dishonorable surrender to the enemy.

Bitter at Flavia’s betrayal and consumed with hatred for the Saxons, Aquila travels north to offer his service to Ambrosius, a Celtic prince who is the last inheritor of Roman authority in Britain. Over the fifteen years that follow, Aquila takes part in the long battle to throw the Saxon invaders back into the sea–years of suffering and sacrifice but also of love and friendship, in the course of which Aquila learns to relinquish his bitterness, and to better understand his sister’s choice. In the end, the decisive victory is won, and Ambrosius is crowned High King of Britain–a final defiant lifting of the light of Romano-Celtic civilization against the encroaching barbarian dark.

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 Lantern Bearers isn’t truly a fantasy novel, but it does touch upon one of the great fantasy themes: Arthur, future High King of Britain, whom Aquila first encounters as a child in Ambrosius’s camp. 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.

In the course of her career, Sutcliff wrote nearly forty books (Poster’s note: Actually  over 60.) Many of them are still in print, testifying to her enduring popularity. It is richly merited: she is, quite simply, one of the best.

Used with permission of Victoria Strauss

Knight’s Fee | Rosemary Sutcliff Story of the Week

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Rosemary Sutcliff’s Knights Fee – a historical novel for children and young adults – is set against the violent and turbulent backdrop of Norman England. It tells the story of a young ill-treated dog-boy Randall who is wagered and won in a game of chess between a lord and

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Guardian obituary of historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992) | ‘Chronicler of Occupied Brittania’

Anthony Lawton

Rosemary Sutcliff was called ‘impish’, even ‘irreverent’, and ‘without doubt an historical writer of genius’ by distinguished critic Elaine Moss in her knowledgeable 1992 obituary in The Guardian newspaper.

Let us not be solemn about the death of Rosemary Sutcliff CBE, who has died suddenly, aged 72, despite the progressively wasting Still’s disease that had been with her since the age of two. She was impish, almost irreverent sometimes, in her approach to life. Her favourite author was Kipling and she once told me she had a great affection for The Elephant’s Child – because his first action with his newly acquired trunk was to spank his insufferably interfering relations.

But it was Kipling’s deep communion with the Sussex countryside and its history that was her true inspiration. Settled as an adult in Arundel, Rosemary shared with him his love for his county as well as his vision of successive generations living in and leaving their mark upon the landscape.

Rosemary Sutcliff, at the peak of her form in her “Roman” novels, was without doubt an historical writer of genius, and recognised internationally as such. Though most of her books were published for children, many – particularly The Mark Of The Horse Lord (1965), have about them the full stature and uncompromising treatment that make them valued additions to the bookshelves of historians.

Though she wrote more than 50 novels, set in times as far apart as the Bronze Age and the 18th century, her favoured period was the Roman occupation of Britain and the survival through it (survival is her theme song) of the native tribes. She writes hauntingly of the life of the Legions, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the carrying of the lantern of civilisation by the descendants of the early legionaries into the Dark Ages. And it was in the Dark Ages that the Arthurian legends, her second love (surely not unrelated to the first?), were born. To the Arthurian legends which she retells in The Sword And The Circle (among other titles) for children and The Sword At Sunset (1963), an adult novel, she brings her own extraordinary narrative gifts and a touch of personal magic.

To the best-loved Roman stories – Eagle Of The Ninth, The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers (winner of the Carnegie Medal) – she brings life, glowing and immediate, the result of painstaking research that fired an imagination of extraordinary richness. Song For A Dark Queen (1978) celebrated one of her rare heroines – Boudicca – and she was at once pleased and amused by its outcome, “The Other Award”, which is normally conferred upon more self-consciously anti-sexist authors.

Many of Sutcliff‘s admirers are struck by the luminous details in her work that conjure up a palpable vision of a Northumbrian wood, a sleeping wolfhound, a young Roman soldier in the noise and mud and confusion of battle. They may not know that at the age of 14 Rosemary Sutcliff left school (“I was hopeless at everything – English, History, Nature Study, Latin – all the things that interest me now”) to study art. But few of those admirers will be surprised to discover that afterwards she became a miniaturist of distinction.

In Blue Remembered Hills (1982), a painful and moving account of her early life, she describes her six-year-old self sitting with her legs stuck straight out in front of her, investigating and experiencing “to my heart’s content the foot or two of world going on around me . . . The turf was not just grass, but a densely interwoven forest of thyme and scarlet pimpernel, creamy honey-scented clover and cinquefoil and the infinitely small and perfect eyebright with the spot of celestial yellow at its heart.” Here is the eye of the young artist feeding the pen of the future writer.

Rosemary Sutcliff‘s own pen had to be “fattened” and cushioned so that her arthritic hand could guide it – yet in her heyday she wrote 1,800 words a day in her elfin script on a single folio sheet and she made no fewer than three hand-written drafts of every novel before she was satisfied. She had just finished the second one in the evening before she died and there are two novels awaiting publication.

She was a professional and a perfectionist in her every endeavour and like so many of her heroes, she rose above apparently insuperable drawbacks.

Source: The Guardian (London) July 27, 1992 Pg. 39 ‘Chronicler of Occupied Brittania’ by Elaine Moss

Rosemary Sutcliff wins ChLA 2010 Phoenix Award in USA for high literary merit

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Research Centres on Children and Young People’s Literature and Writing in UK

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I have been tracking down the main research centres in England where scholars, students and teachers might have a particular interest in Rosemary Sutcliff’s writing, and issues related to her writing, as well as to historical fiction and story-telling. Thus I had an idea who to ask Read More »