[Rosemary Sutcliff's] first four books are for younger children: The Chronicles of Robin Hood (1950), The Queen Elizabeth Story (1950), The Armourer's House (1951), and Brother Dusty-Feet (1952). They are stories of imaginative fancy set in an historical period which provides the framework, but the fairies and the magic are more important than the kings and queens. Into each story the author reweaves some of the legends which are links with her own childhood delight. (p. 16) Rosemary Sutcliff&...

Day to day, minute to minute, second to second the surface of our lives is in a perpetual ripple of change. Below the immediate surface are slower, deeper currents, and below these again are profound mysterious movements beyond the scale of the individual life-span. And far down on the sea-bed are the oldest, most lasting things, whose changes our imagination can hardly grasp at all. The strength of Rosemary Sutcliff's main work—and it is a body of work rather than a shelf of novels—is ...

It can hardly have been by chance that in 1960 it was Rosemary Sutcliff who wrote the Bodley Head monograph on the children's books of Rudyard Kipling, nor is it surprising that in it she remarked " … of all the writers of my childhood, he made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgotten,"… for no reader of her own books—except one totally ignorant of Kipling—can fail to be aware of her debt to him. Quite apart from certain identities o...

Miss Sutcliff's first book, a retelling of the Robin Hood legends, and the three which followed, are written for younger children and, while they give pleasure, they do not suggest the range and power of the later books. Signs of this developing potential came with the publication of Simon in 1953, a story with a Civil War setting, whose hero fights for the Parliamentary cause. Teachers welcome this book as a counterweight to the over-romantic view of the war seen from the Royalist camp which is comm...

Most critics would say that at the present time the greatest writer of historical fiction for children and youth is unquestionably Rosemary Sutcliff. Her books are superior not only because they are authentic records of England's earliest history with its bloody raids and its continuous wars for occupation by Norsemen, Romans, Normans, and Saxons, but also because every one of her memorable books is built around a great theme. Her characters live and die for principles they value and that men today s...

Autobiography, however much one may try to modify the fact, is essentially the raising of a monument to oneself: an impulse which society may long have acknowledged as legitimate and healthy, but which still runs counter to inherited traditions of modesty and reticence. Rosemary Sutcliff, an honourable retailer and reteller of romance and epic, is the daughter of a naval officer, and a mother who taught her never to cry, always to conceal the fox beneath her cloak. Moreover, she was their only child, and ph...

A virtually perfect mesh of history and fiction can be found in the writing of Rosemary Sutcliff. She seems to work from no recipe for mixing fact and imagination and thus, like fantasy, which it also resembles in its magic qualities, her writing defies neat categorization. Still, what cannot be defined can be observed. Thus what one perceives is that Sutcliff begins with a very well stored mind and an affinity for a given period in the distant past that she sets forth as if it were something she herself ha...

Miss Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers ends, it is true, with a victory, but a victory in a war which, the reader is aware throughout the story, is inevitably lost. For this is a story of the decline of Roman Britain. Miss Sutcliff has written most sensitively in two previous books about other aspects of this theme. In each the ultimate disaster has lain like a shadow across the action. In the Place of Life, deep in the mists of Caledonia, Marcus the Centurion had felt it (in The Eagle of the Ninth), an...

Very occasionally, the opening sentence of a book works a small miracle on the reader. It is as if a shutter sprang open momentarily, to reveal the essence and truth of the entire book within a single visionary second. There is nothing obviously spectacular about the first sentence of The Sword and the Circle but the magic is there and with it the certainty that riches lie ahead. Many followers of Rosemary Sutcliff must have waited and hoped for her to bring her own particular distinction to a retelling of ...

[It] is now a long time since there was a new major piece of writing from Rosemary Sutcliff. Blood Feud will be eagerly welcomed by admirers of her long and distinguished body of work. Is Blood Feud then more of the same? In some ways, yes. We find ourselves once more with a hero suspended between worlds in transition—half Celtic, half English, Viking slave and Byzantine soldier, he is swept up on that epic movement of the Viking expansion eastwards, so fascinatingly unfamiliar to most of us. We find...

Rosemary Sutcliff has given us [in Song for a Dark Queen] a rounded, convincing and (very properly) rather frightening portrait of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, who led the tribes to the sack of Roman Colchester, St. Alban's and London. In the lyrical, loving, and doomladen tale of Cadwan the harper, she grows from a brave defiant infant to a proud unwilling bride, a happy mother and a vengeful widow, her private self always contrasted with her public, queenly role…. The Roman point of view, a...

Rosemary Sutcliff is an intuitive historian. This is not to say that she is not most careful and exact in research, but that her ability to think herself back into the past transcends scholarship. Her acknowledged master is Kipling who had the same gift for feeling history through his nerves and seeking it through the soil. Rosemary Sutcliff began her career with The Queen Elizabeth Story [1950], a gentle, charmingly written story with an element of fantasy and a pervading sweetness which bordered on sentim...

[Rosemary Sutcliff] cherishes cultural diversity even while she stresses continuity. And while she upholds such unfashionable virtues as duty, courage, integrity, she has in her treatment of the theme of male comradeship provided the most sensitive and sustained representation of male homosexual feeling in children's literature. The main body of her work, the sequence of major novels ranging from the Bronze Age Warrior Scarlet, through the great Roman trilogy (published in one volume as Three Legions...

If there is one story with which every child growing up in Britain should be familiar, it is the story of King Arthur. There is no shortage of retelling, but most of them are hack rewritings which debase their source material. Even the best attempts … seem to lack the vital spark which animates the early sources, and which received its classic expression in the prose writings of Sir Thomas Malory. Rosemary Sutcliff's version, told in three books, The Sword and the Circle, The Light Beyond the ...

Ever since Standish O'Grady published his bardic history of Ireland in the nineties, storytellers and poets have been exalting Cuchulain…. Cuchulain's story is the grand episode of the epic tale of pagan Ireland, and, like a good deal of Irish romance, has much of supernatural and irrational in it. Here is the hero who is to die young, the one who defends his uncle's kingdom against the forces of the whole of Ireland, who has to meet a well-loved friend in single combat, who unwi...

Rosemary Sutcliff is a master of the concrete detail which brings home to us that our ancestors, though men like ourselves, lived in very different conditions…. [Knight's Fee] which tells how a poor dog-boy rose by faithful service to knighthood under King Henry I…. The reader is told what people ate and at what times, as well as what they wore. The characters are not deeply explored, but the sketches of chivalrous knights and turbulent barons are adequate for the purpose of an exciting...

[The Road to Camlann] takes up the story [of King Arthur] with Mordred at Camelot, insidiously undermining the fellowship and the spiritual values on which the Round Table was based. There follows the love of Guenever and Lancelot, the wars and the final battle. The story ends with the death of Lancelot at Glastonbury. In this, the most familiar of all the Arthurian stories, there is not much room for individual interpretation, and Miss Sutcliff stays close to Malory, even to the use of actual speeches and ...

"We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind."—so, at the end of the latest and one of the finest of Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels ["The Lantern Bearers"], does Ambrosius, who had held off the Saxon hordes for a time, speak to his young aid Aquila, adding that "morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go...

[The] power of imagination Rosemary Sutcliff needed in order to cast herself back into the minds and feelings of the Bronze Age peoples in Warrior Scarlet is fully as vital and astounding as that required by any of the great fantasists. Sutcliff's quality of imagination is different from theirs, no doubt, for there are many different kinds, but it is just as truly a wizard power to exist so completely in the past that the reader never stops once to question any action, any name, any practice or state...

[In The Road to Camlann] Rosemary Sutcliff has assumed a bardic style, rhythmic and full of poetic archaism and reflecting in some ways the manner of medieval poetry. From this source, perhaps, come the delicate natural touches that refresh a tale of intrigue and cruelty—the flowers that herald spring, the dark forest reaches: but the author uses nature for something more than decoration. [For example, the] last battle at Dover in which Mordred and Arthur strike their last blows is full of the harshn...

Rosemary Sutcliff has always enjoyed the idea of the outsider, of the odd one who is isolated by fate to perform some special act. Though it has become almost a formula now, the magic lingers on—even in her new novel [Sun Horse, Sun Moon] which verges on self-parody…. All the Sutcliff hallmarks are here: the sonorous descriptions, the perfect evocation of an alien culture, the stilted quasiprimitive dialogue (with its unique use of the soothing phrase "na-na"). And, at about a th...

Rosemary Sutcliff has dwelt so long, imaginatively, in the Dark Ages that she seems not quite at ease in bringing Arthur into the age of chivalry. Future literary historians, assessing her contribution to the literature of our age, will find profitable exercise in comparing her approach to the figure of Arthur in The Lantern Bearers, in the adult novel Sword at Sunset, and in this rather more conventional exploration of Malory and other medieval sources [The Sword and the Circle]. Perhaps it is some evidenc...

A bronze-age boy had to kill a wolf single-handed before he could wear the warrior's scarlet, the mantle of manhood. For Drem, the test was doubly difficult because of a crippled right arm…. This tale of the testing of Drem [Warrior Scarlet] is a splendid excursion into the past, a fine reconstruction of prehistoric rituals. Set in southern England, the novel is evocative in mood and revealing in detail. The courage and determination of the handicapped hero are implied through actions that spe...

"Simon" is the longest and best written of Miss Sutcliff's books, appealing more to readers over twelve. It pictures England of the Civil War in 1640, focusing on the campaign in Devon and the west country, showing how a teen-age boy came to take his share in the fighting, and what happened to his friendship for his neighbor and friend who fought with the Royalists. The battles, the journeys, the narrow escapes, are done with vigorous realism. The setting, always vivid with this writer,...

Rosemary Sutcliff is never obvious in her interpretation of old causes lost and won…. Blood Feud is in fact what the book is about, the obligation for vengeance not for gain but so that the shades of the dead may rest in peace. (p. 3064) Relatively short, concentrated, enriched with pictorial detail, the book has an emotional force which relates it, for me, to Rosemary Sutcliff's best work and especially with Eagle of the Ninth. Everything in the book—battle scenes, the discovery of lov...

[So] great is the output of legends retold nowadays, amounting almost to a minor industry, that one is entitled to ask not only if the story is well told, but also if it was really worth the telling. Rosemary Sutcliff's Tristan and Iseult deserves the highest praise on both counts. The Arthurian cycle is a defining element in our culture, as the Trojan war was in the ancient Greek, and the Tristan story is one of its loveliest strands. Miss Sutcliff tells it with her admirable mastery of that difficu...

Rosemary Sutcliff has won a reputation as a writer of historical novels for children which always show care and sensitivity and sometimes distinction. Her recent work has been rather sombre in tone and over ornate in style. The Silver Branch, a story of Roman Britain, is a sequel to The Eagle of the Ninth, and shows Miss Sutcliff at her best. The time is the close of the third century: the theme the recovery of Britain by Rome after the reign of Carausius and the coup of Allectus…. It is a carefully ...

[In "The Shield Ring"] Rosemary Sutcliff tells the story of young Bjorn, unsure of his own courage but determined to prove himself worthy of the noble traditions of his people [the Vikings]. How he does this, and how his friendship for the Saxon girl, Frytha, gradually changes into love, makes an absorbing tale, peopled with three-dimensional characters and filled with stirring events. Admittedly, the author's precise care in recreating a period and place, her use of archaic words such ...

[What] is impressive about Frontier Wolf is not the story itself, nor the gradual winning through of Alexios from disgrace to honour. It is Rosemary Sutcliff's extraordinary capacity for recreating a visual and emotional picture, many-textured, of the life of a Roman garrison on the Antonine Wall as the Empire crumbled. She has the writer's equivalent of a musician's "absolute pitch"; her certainty enables her to use language that fore-echoes the future (the Votadini speak...

[Knight's Fee is] a splendid rendering of upper-middle-class values. It is set in that Kiplingesque region of English history where Saxon and Norman are being made one. The hero is a lowly Celtic hound boy, in touch with the surviving magic of earth and folk…. [His] loyal steadfastness (and the accidents of fate) finally win him victory over the class barrier and inheritance of the knight's fee. The feudal background is vivid; the political intrigue murky. Miss Sutcliff's strengt...

A deeply stirring historical tale, one like "The Shield Ring," is rare. The characters are forceful, sympathetic and interesting. There is a startlingly vivid picture of life in hut and Great Hall in a Viking settlement or steading among the northern hills and lakes of England in the eleventh century while the Normans harass its borders…. Splendid as was the "Eagle of the Ninth," this is finer. The intelligent reader over twelve will be caught by the sweep and power of it ...