Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s book re-telling of the saga of Beowulf enthused and inspired children in this Caribbean school , on the other side of the Atlantic (from me!) – wonderful work. And then again last year – here. (When I first posted this, I placed the islands in the Pacific – ap0logies to everyone).
Rosemary Sutcliff book Beowulf inspires children in Turks and Caicos Islands School
April 6, 2010 by Anthony
Posted in Beowulf, Education, Influence and Inspiration, Sutcliff Discovery of the Day | Leave a Comment
rosemary sutcliff
"An impish … irreverent writer of genius" (The Guardian)
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- Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth No 27 in Times newpaper Top 50 reads for children
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- A reader tells me Rosemary Sutcliff discovered that Kipling never learned to read until he was 9 years old either wp.me/p42Yg-2zP | 8 hours ago
- … my mother decided the time had come for me to learn to read … that was where she made her mistake wp.me/p42Yg-2zP | 21 hours ago
- RT @CaroSanderson: @joannechocolat I still love this to dog-eared bits. Contains seasonal treats too #Shelfie http://t.co/XKu5pVkvXW | 1 day ago
- Post re The Eagle of the Ninth No 27 in Times Top 50 reads for children at wp.me/p42Yg-2zF is most visited this year. And on fb. | 1 day ago
- @markgamsu @andrewcoz @TheKingsFund Yes, good slides on NHS but intriguing Slide 8 looks like lonely killer +big gun as much as on a slide? | 1 day ago
- @DrEoinCl The graphic illustrates increased complexity (undesirable) created, not top-down methods used to re-organise (also undesirable)? | 1 day ago
- I, who had walked the boards with the Crummles, and had fought beside Beowulf in the darkened Hall of Heriot … decided not to learn to read. | 1 day ago
- I decided the best way of making sure I’d never meet the Rosy-Faced Family … in the future was not to learn to read at all. So I didn’t. | 1 day ago
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in praise of rosemary sutcliff
Guardian newspaper editorial ‘in praise of’ Rosemary Sutcliff, published in 2011,
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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