Tag: writing

Chosen with a poet’s care | The names of Rosemary Sutcliff’s characters | Placidus, Allectus, Evicatos, Tradui

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Cover of Margaret Meek's monograph on historical and children’s novelist Rosemary SutcliffAround 1962 Margaret Meek wrote a monograph about Rosemary Sutcliff, only a decade or so into a writing career that was to last for another 30 years.  She spoke of Rosemary choosing names “with a poet’s care”:

Rosemary Sutcliff’s magic has certain recognizable elements; the names of the characters are chosen with a poet’s care, the dogs have a central place and are characterized with the loving attention children recognize and approve. The villains, such as Placidus in The Eagle of the Ninth and Allectus in The Silver Branch are acidly etched, although there is more reliance on traditional enmity and feud than on personal evil to provide the dark side. Episodic characters, singly or in groups, have a miniaturist’s clarity of outline. Pandarus, the gladiator with his rose in the battle, Galerius the surgeon, the garrulous household slaves, soldiers at a firelit cockfight or warriors at a feast, all are equally memorable.

Others more involved in the developing action, commanding officers, wise men of the tribes, outcasts, especially Guern the Hunter, Evicatos of the Spear and Brother Ninnias, have a legendary quality. Tradui the Chieftain at the making of New Spears, Bruni, dressed in the war gear of a Jutish hero dying as the wild geese fly south, blind Flavian, killed at the hands of marauding Saxons, all carry a dignity and heroism that link this series of tales with the legends Miss Sutcliff loves to tell. Indeed, part of the difficulty in evaluating the achievement of these books comes from the thickly woven texture which is as closely wrought as in many adult novels of quality.

  • Source: Margaret Meek (1962). Rosemary Sutcliff. New York: Henry Z. Walck
  • A list of most main characters in Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels. re-tellings and books

(First posted 30 March, 2010; revised,  24 March, 2014)

Rosemary Sutcliff on her schooling, painting and writing

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

My schooling began late, owing to a childhood illness, and ended when I was only fourteen, owing to my entire lack of interest in being educated. But I showed signs of being able to paint, and so from school I went to art school, trained hard, and eventually became a professional miniature painter.

I did not start to write until the end of the War, but now I have switched completely from one medium to the other, and it is several years since I last touched paint.

Source: Rosemary Sutcliff’s monograph on Rudyard Kipling.

A mystical communion with the past … and one of the rudest senses of humour in anyone I have met! |An editor on Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

I once found that an editor of Rosemary Sutcliff once wrote (I could not for a long time locate the source, a website on ancient history, but see Anne’s comment below):

 I knew Rosemary as a friend and, briefly, as her editor…most of her best writing was done in the 50s and 60s, beginning with The Eagle of the Ninth and ending with The Mark of the Horse Lord, which is my own favourite. What she really wanted to do, however, was to write romantic novels full of sex, but here her experience, and imagination, let her down. She was crippled by Still’s disease, contracted as a child – many of her protagonists have physical disabilities of one kind or another. She had no movement in her legs, and hands whose work (including writing and miniature painting) was done with just a forefinger and a tiny, rudimentary thumb.

She had, as did Henry Treece, a mystical communion with the past, which enabled her both to recreate tiny details, and to confound military historians with her understanding of the art of battle in any situation she cared to devise. Her sense of place was uncanny, in that she could get no nearer to a site than the seat of a car on an adjacent road. Friends often served as her eyes, and also as her researchers, but it was the conclusions she drew from the evidence, and her re-creations of them, that made her contribution to the literature about the ancient world so distinctive. Where she was simply embellishing recorded history, she was no better than anyone else.

She also had one of the rudest senses of humour in anyone I have met.”

Rosemary Sutcliff | Made the story-teller she was by the stories told to her as a child?

Aside Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Michael Rosen (writer, poet, performer, broadcaster and Professor of Children’s Literature) recently said about children’s literature: Most adult readers were made into the readers they are by the ‘repertoire’ of reading they did as children. The link, then, between children’s literature and adult literature is not so much via the writers as through the reading habits […]

12 orphan-heroes and heroines in Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

Many of historical novelist and children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s books (of children’s literature) feature orphans—a thought prompted by Katherine Rundell’s choice of ’10 of the best orphans’ in children’s books, which did not include any of Rosemary Sutcliff’s characters. Indeed Anne, a regular reader and commenter here, wonders if the issue might not be which of Sutcliff’s heroes are not orphans; she recalls that the hero as orphan who makes their way in the world is  both a traditional fairy tale and a mythic trope. Thirteen orphans in Rosemary Sutcliff’s writing are:

Artos in Sword at Sunset (first published in 1963)
Beric in Outcast (1955)
Frytha and Bjorn in The Shield Ring (1956)
Hugh Herriot in Bonnie Dundee (1983)
Hugh Copplestone in Brother Dusty-Feet (1952)
Jestyn in Blood Feud (1976)
Lovell in The Witch’s Brat (1970)
Owain in Dawn Wind (1961)
Randall, the dog-boy, in Knight’s Fee (1960)
Red Phaedrus in The Mark of the Horse Lord (1965)
Tamsyn in The Armourer’s House (1951)

Artos (King  Arthur) is  the bastard son of a long-dead Uther, raised by his uncle. Read More »