A Reader’s Review of Rosemary Sutcliff’s final historical novel Sword Song | ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF

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A Reader’s Review of Rosemary Sutcliff’s final historical novel Sword Song

17/02/20102010 by Anthony Lawton

The Crawdad Hole has a long post on Sword Song – I have not found this to be written about as much by readers. I love the book because I transcribed it from Rosemary Sutcliff‘s hand-written draft manuscript left on her desk when she died suddenly in 1992. Her long-time editor Jill Black finalised it for publication.

Posted in Criticism, Reviews, Research, Awards, Sword Song | Tagged historical fiction, Vikings | 2 Comments

2 Responses

on 14/04/20102010 at 2:13 pm | Reply Anthony

thank you for your kind remarks Crawdad! Her research was indeed thorough and painstaking, I am fortunate to have many of her notebooks and papers. Anthony

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on 12/04/20102010 at 3:42 am | Reply crawdad

Thank you for your comment on my blog back in February. I have always been fond of Vikings, and as I started reading about Rosemary Sutcliff to flesh out my review of Sword Song I discovered what a fascinating person she was. I admire her thorough research, which of course brought her writing vividly to life. The Shining Company is still my favorite book of hers.
You are doing an amazing job with this blog. Ms. Sutcliff’s fine work deserves this kind of recognition.

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"An impish ... irreverent writer of genius" (The Guardian)
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the guardian newspaper in praise of rosemary sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – "a place where two worlds met without mingling" as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel's central character, is posted.

Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of "other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling". This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.

The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff's unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff's finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.
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