Stimulated by an article in The Guardian which recalled Rahere in The Witch’s Brat, I am trying to track down all the nuns, monks and friars in the historical novels and children’s books by Rosemary Sutcliff. Commenters at the Facebook page on Rosemary Sutcliff associated with this blog are helping … can you (if you have not already!)?
The prestigious Carnegie Medal was once won by Rosemary Sutcliff, as well as multiple award-winning Geraldine McCaughrean (who has written more than 160 books, from picture books to adult novels). Interviewed at Red House, the web-based, self-styled ‘home of (buying) children’s books’, she spoke of the influence on her of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical fiction.
Did you have any favourite children’s authors when you were a child and have they influenced your writing at all?
I loved Elyne Mitchell’s Brumby books because I loved all things horsey. One day I shall write a horse book and then all those pony and horse books I read as a child will come into their own.
I also loved Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical fiction – The Eagle of the Ninth, Brother Dusty Feet … – They taught me how a book could take you time travelling to a different age. That must be why I have written so many books set in the past. Adventure is so much easier to come by there.
Rosemary Sutcliff won the Carnegie Medal in 1959, not for either of the books mentioned by McCaughrean, but for The Lantern Bearers. She was runner-up in 1972 with Tristan and Iseult. The Medal is perhaps the UK’s most prestigious prize for writing for children, awarded every year in the UK to the writer of an outstanding book for children. The Library Association started to award the prize in 1936, in memory of the Scottish-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), a great supporter of reading and libraries. The medal is now awarded by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
Rosemary Sutcliff also won the Boston-Globe Horn Book Award for Tristan and Iseult in 1972; was highly commended by the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1974; won The Other Award for Song for a Dark Queen in 1978; and won The Phoenix Children’s Book Award for The Mark of the Horse Lord in 1985, and The Shining Company in 2010
In a brief review in The Dallas Morning News in 1985 (12 May) Cherie Clodfelter commented that the historical novel for children and young adults, Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff (published in USA by Dutton) was:
… historical fiction at its very best, a blend of fact and fiction. The writing style is immensely informative and engrossing, although the American teenager may lack the knowledge of British history to appreciate the complicated plot and the Scottish idiom. John Graham of Claverhouse (called Bonnie Dundee by his followers) was a Scottish Royalist who died fighting to keep the House of Stuart on the throne. Both the legendary leader whom King James entitled the Viscount Dundee and the period of history where battle was both elegant and horrible is carefully developed to maintain the pace of a suspenseful adventure story.
Responding to an earlier post quoting Margaret Meek on in her eponymous monograph about historical novelist and doyen of children’s literature Rosemary Sutcliff, reader and regular commenter Anne (much more knowledgeable than me about the details of Rosemary’s work. and commentary upon it) posted:
It seems appropriate to add this piece from another critical essay, this one by May Hill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland:
The theme of all (Sutcliff’s) stories, as Margaret Meek points out, is “the light and the dark. The light is what is valued, what is to be saved beyond one’s own lifetime. The dark is the threatening destruction that works against it.” In The Lantern Bearers… the blackness of despair is concentrated in the heart of Aquila, a Roman officer….
No briefing of these stories can give any conception of their scope and power, and when young people read them they live with nobility… Nevertheless, these are difficult books, not because of vocabulary problems, but because of the complexities of the plots in which many peoples are fighting for dominance.
Fortunately, Dawn Wind …, one of the finest of the books, is also the least complex. Chronologically it follows The Lantern Bearers, but it is complete in itself and will undoubtedly send some readers to the trilogy. For the fourteen-year-old hero Owain, the light of the world seems to have been extinguished. He finds himself the sole survivor of a bloody battle between the Saxons and the Britons in which his people, the Britons, were completely destroyed. In the gutted remains of the city from which he had come, the only life the boy finds is a pitiable waif of a girl, lost and half-starved. At first Owain and Regina are bound together in mutual misery, but eventually they are united in respect and affection. So when Regina is sick and dying, Owain carries her to a Saxon settlement, even though he knows what will happen to him. The Saxons care for the girl but sell Owain into slavery…. After eleven years, he is freed and sets out at once to find his people and Regina, who has never doubted he would come for her.
So life is not snuffed out by the night. A dawn wind blows and two people start all over again with those basic qualities that have always made for survival…. Rosemary Sutcliff gives children and youth historical fiction that builds courage and faith that life will go on and is well worth the struggle.
Source: May Hill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland, “Historical Fiction: ‘The Lantern Bearers’ and ‘Dawn Wind’,” in their “Children and Books”, pub. Scott, Foresman and Company, 1972, pp. 508-9
Rosemary Sutcliff crafted her historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth from two starting points: a small bronze eagle found at Silchester, which is now in Reading Museum; and the unknown fate of the Roman Ninth Legion, which, based in York, had apparently vanished from the historical record in the early years of the 2nd century. Written, as always, “for children aged 8 to 88” The Eagle of the Ninth is about a young centurion, Marcus Aquila, who takes up his first command on the edges of the Roman empire in south-west Britain. Severely injured during a fight with local warriors who have been inflamed by a travelling druid, he has to give up his military career. However, he hears rumours of sightings of the standard of his father’s lost legion – the eagle of the ninth – north of Hadrian’s wall. He realises that if he can find it, he will restore the honour of his disgraced father and the legion he commanded.
Last year, at the time of the release of the film The Eagle, Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer of The Guardian newspaper, wrote a long, affectionate article about her children’s favourite.
… In an interview in 1992, the year she died, she said: “I don’t write for adults, I don’t write for children. I don’t write for the outside world at all. Basically, I write for some small, inquiring thing in myself.” I have read The Eagle of the Ninth dozens of times; and as the reading self changes, so does the book. When I last read the story, it was the quality of the prose that delighted, the rightness with which Sutcliff gives life to physical sensation. A battle fought through the grey drizzle of a west country dawn is illuminated by “firebrands that gilded the falling mizzle and flashed on the blade of sword and heron-tufted war spear”. Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 