Tag: Romans

Review of The Lantern Bearers with ‘wilfull missing’ Aquila

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff‘s book, the award winning The Lantern Bearers set blogger and reviewer Sam Hawken writing about her again:

I’ve written about the Roman Britain Trilogy before, reviewing both The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch. If you go back and read those reviews, you’ll see that I have nothing but praise for the writing of Rosemary Sutcliff even when her plotting let me down. I can’t think of any other writer whose work I’ve read recently who has similar power to evoke sense of place. I’ve never been to the regions Sutcliff writes about, but I can feel like I’ve been there because of her ability to engage with colors and smells and sounds to create a living tapestry of the senses.

Writing in the ’50s, she had the insight of someone from the Roman Britain period and that’s why, whatever my issues with The Silver Branch, the second in the trilogy, I think Sutcliff was a truly great author.You’ll be pleased to know that The Lantern Bearers is a much more assured piece of work than The Silver Branch. I tend to think that Sutcliff wasn’t totally in love with her story the second time around and that showed. This time, however, she’s clearly attached to the period and the characters.

I loved The Eagle of the Ninth because it was a rip-roaring adventure tale with all the trappings of fine literature. The Lantern Bearers is a much more sophisticated offering and Sutcliff’s gifts are in full flower.The action picks up some 150 years after the conclusion of The Silver Branch and the time of the Roman occupation of Britain has come to an end. Young cavalryman Aquila is ordered, along with the rest of the Eagles, to return to Italy to bolster the Roman defenses against another barbarian incursion. Aquila, born and bred in the Down Country of Britain, is less than thrilled with this turn of events and, in an act of defiance, goes “wilfull missing” when it’s time to ship off. He is of Britain, he says, and will not go.

via Sam Hawken » The Lantern Bearers.

Hadrians Wall dig unearths Roman refugee camp

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff would no doubt have been fascinated that a research team has found hundreds of unusual buildings which may have housed natives seen as traitors by tribes from north of Hadrian’s wall, in what is now Scotland.

A major dig close to Hadrians Wall has revealed traces of a suspected refugee camp which would have housed tribes-people fleeing south from a breakdown of society north of the imperial border in the third century AD. Archaeologists were initially puzzled to unearth the foundations of temporary but well-built structures on the site of an earlier fort within the sprawling perimeter of the Roman fortress of Vindolanda.

Source: Hadrians Wall dig unearths Roman refugee camp | The Guardian.

The Eagle conveys a real sense of the Roman past

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

As a child Dr Miles Russell, now senior lecturer in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at Bournemouth University, “endlessly read (and re-read)” Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth . In fact he recalls that it was “to the point of being able to quote whole chunks of text verbatim. Not healthy, perhaps, but it meant that I approached the film The Eagle with both excitement and apprehension. That a film of Sutcliff’s book had finally been made was thrilling; but there is always the fear of cinematic disaster”. He has reviewed  The Eagle for the BBC History magazine.

The film is beautifully constructed and lovingly shot. Hadrian’s Wall has never looked so real (dirty and windswept, its garrison is cold and miserable), whilst the land beyond the reach of Rome has never seemed so alien and otherworldly (with its thick forests and landscapes of jagged stone).  Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff children’s book classic The Eagle of the Ninth reviewed by Brian Alderson

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff, was provided by the time when the Roman Empire was crumbling at the edges  with (says critic and children’s book expert Brian Alderson):

a complex of subjects of great dramatic potential: civilising discipline set against tribal barbarities, the servants of Empire with an allegiance also to a homeland within its borders, the selfless devotion, on either side of the equation, to causes and to overarching human relationships (and even those between man and beast) … Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth and Warrior Scarlet recommended by bestselling author Philip Reeve

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth and Warrior Scarlet have been listed by writer Philip Reeve as two of his favourite books, defined as ‘the books which mattered most to me while I was growing up … (which are) well worth tracking down’!.

…or I could have chosen Knight’s Fee, or The Lantern Bearers, or Sun-horse, Moon-horse, or Frontier Wolf… Rosemary Sutcliff is one of my favourite children’s authors, and I doubt she ever wrote a bad book, but these were the two I liked best when I was growing up. Read More »