sutcliff_swap | Promote your favorite Sutcliff book(s)!

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Promote your favorite Sutcliff book(s)!

We're going to post the Sutcliff Swap rules and schedule, and open for sign-ups, Real Soon Now! But while you're waiting, why not squee about your favorite Sutcliff book in the comments here? This is your chance to remind others of that book they'd almost forgotten they'd loved, and inspire them to request or offer fanfiction or fanart for it. And if a book you haven't read sounds good to you, you can read it this summer and enjoy the fanworks created for it - and maybe you'll want to request it for Yuletide or Yuletart, or for next year's Sutcliff Swap. (Because this is going to be so much fun we will want to do it again!)

We're doing this on Dreamwidth only, so that we can use comment subject lines to identify the books we're talking about. If you don't have a Dreamwidth login, you can use OpenID or comment anonymously. ETA: anonymous commenting is now enabled! OpenID works too, which will email you comment replies. Please join in and promote your favorite Sutcliff books (this post has a list of all the books), and start thinking about what you might want to request and offer for the Sutcliff Swap!

Also, if you are intrigued by the descriptions of books you haven't read yet, you should be sure to join, not just watch, the community (at either site) so you can see locked posts. *cough*

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Well, the White Horse is still around (and has been actively maintained all this time); theoretically you could have *any* Sutcliff character (except Warrior Scarlet I suppose) encounter it, as long as you found an excuse to get them to the Berkshire Downs...

I'm not sure the BBC miniseries is obtainable anymore, but I gather they set the whole thing in England (!), which...seems to be defeating the point, IMO. But maybe someone has better obscure-TV-show-finding-fu than I do (I have none).

Anyway, I love Alexia a lot, personally! Blood Feud I feel like leaves an awful lot of the emotions unspoken, even moreso than usual, such that not all the characters' relationships entirely make sense to me--which makes it excellently fertile ground for fic.

This is tied for my favorite Sutcliff, and hardly anyone seems to have read it. It's set in Wales around AD 600, and based on Y Gododdin, so I do not think it is a spoiler to say that the body count is very, very high.

It follows Prosper, son of a minor chieftain, as he becomes a shieldbearer to one of the Gododdin princes, Cynan Mac Clydno. The first part of the book is, I feel, echoing aspects of Eagle of the Ninth, only here the potential OT3 is less lopsided--Prosper and Luned have their kinship bond (they're cousins), Luned and Conn are in love but separated by station, and Conn and Prosper are BFFs. And Prosper is a bit more aware than Marcus that Conn being his bondman is something that impairs their friendship. Lots of gorgeous evocative descriptions of their lives, with echoes of the Roman past here.

And then the rest is adventure and tragedy! TSC is written in the first person, almost as if an older Prosper is looking back on his life and telling it to the reader, like a bard--and there are intriguing hints of what he may have done post-book. There are the usual cast of amazing secondary characters, besides Prosper, Conn, Luned, and Cynan, the most interesting is probably the bard Aneirin, who supposedly wrote Y Gododdin.

I don't want to say too much about the ending, which would be spoilery, but there's wonderful fic potential here, and not just for the slash and OT3-inclined. And it is, I feel, one of Sutcliff's most beautifully written books.

Edited 2012-06-07 16:51 (UTC)

Sword Song was Sutcliff's last published book, published posthumously (she was about halfway through editing it). It is a little rougher, but it's also fairly strongly influenced by Norse sagas and rather different in tone, IMO, from her other books.

The protagonist, Bjarni, is a young Norseman outcast from his settlement for a crime...so of course he has to go a-Viking. Along the way he acquires a dog and learns to respect women (there is a segment which struck me as...really problematic re: women, but I may be the only one) and has crushes on his ship-carls and all the usual for Sutcliff heroes.

I'm actually not the biggest fan of the book itself, but I desperately want fic for it. Bjarni's eventual love interest intrigues me (especially because of how they met, which I don't want to spoil), and Bjarni's lack of affect does as well. Fic about Bjarni learning to have ~feeeeeelings~? And yes, there's slash potential, too.

Geez, it is hard to try to convince people that books are awesome and ficcable without spoilers.

Also--oh, the blood feud itself between Thormod and the brothers. Really interesting, and some good fic potential there, I think.

(I also want Erland Silkbeard's backstory, but I suspect I am alone in this.)

I tend to think Flavius died before Alexios was born, but if he was his grandfather and not his father...hmmm...maybe not. Oooh. I shall have to think about this.

(I like Flavius being his father, but then there is the sticky issue of the British grandmother, who I'm still pretty sure is a paternal grandmother.)

Psst, OpenID should work now, Isis. And then people can get emailed comment replies.

OpenID worked for me from the start! I dunno what the earlier problem was... But I have updated the post to reflect anon and openID commenting working now.

Edited 2012-06-07 17:06 (UTC)

Hey. :)

In England?
- okay.

Thank you, very much, for the information. Think I can afford to give that one a miss...

And, yes, I think you're absolutely right (although in all honesty, I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned) that the emotions are sketchy - looking through this afternoon, I was seriously considering Thormod/Anders. Also, agreed to Alexia - she's definitely one of the more rounded younger female characters Sutcliff writes, and it's lovely to see her threaded through the book. (And... there's a whole other consideration there that I suspect you've already gone through in some detail, about women in Sutcliff.)

Had to laugh. After you posted, I came round to in-canon-time Alexios/Cunorix...

Hah! Yes to the blood feud. Erland... without bothering to wiki, I *think* he's either real or based on someone who is. Could be wrong there.

- google tells me, there are Silkbeards of the Erland line in the right period. But nothing more. Backstory... I am not sure: I absolutely see where you're coming from, but almost... I don't know. I'm thinking, heading towards original fiction (nothing wrong in that) and then I thought, but with the right style... eh. Well worth considering!

Yeah, that was my reaction. I guess maybe it was a budget thing, I dunno.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around Thormod/Justyn. Like, sure, I can totally buy it, and Justyn is loyal to Thormod...I just don't really understand why, hence desire for fic.

And... there's a whole other consideration there that I suspect you've already gone through in some detail, about women in Sutcliff.

I don't know which one you mean? I'm...conflicted...about how Sutcliff writes women, shall we say. I love a lot of her female characters as individuals, but the overall patterns kind of sadden me, and I get the impression they do not bother most other Sutcliff fans as much (or at all). And certainly the way she writes (or doesn't write) women contributes heavily to the slashiness of her books.

Yeah, the reason Erland interests me is that he's one of those characters at a cultural interface, which is one of my favorites of Sutcliff's recurring themes. And it would likely be heading towards original fiction, as backstory for minor characters tends to do, but it's one of my favorite subgenres of fanfiction anyway.

I'm not requesting it this time around, though, unless I change my mind in the next couple weeks.

Wry smile. All of them?

I don't know. I've been thinking about this one. Because, yes, Rosemary's Sutcliff's female characters can be... there's the fierce, dark-haired girl, the formidable, older woman: only in her adult novels, I think, do we get fully fleshed out female characters.

And it bothers me and doesn't. When I was younger, reading these for the first time, it never occured to me. In fact... to be honest, I really liked her lack of women: I wasn't interested in boarding schools or girl guides, and it was a huge relief not to have to bother.

Later, I did start to look for women in her books, and not find the characters I did want to read about. But it must have been the same for her - worse - when writing. There are very few *known* adventurous women, particularly in the time periods she wrote, and the books she read when she was lying in that bed doing nothing but reading and making up stories would have very few references. So... I have an awful lot of sympathy (obviously, as a writer) with her use of a male character to experience the world she's writing. I did go through a period when I was really annoyed with her for the lack, and then came full circle to an acknowledgement that I wasn't going to hold her to some modern standard that didn't apply either in the periods she writes or the period in which she was writing herself. I was going to enjoy the books as they stand, and if I wanted women doing amazing things, I would read other books about them, because I was lucky enough to have other books to read.

... um, yes. I had thoughts. ;)

I'm not sure this is the venue for a discussion of Sutcliff and female characters, so I'll try to be brief. a) I have pretty different issues about Sutcliff and women (mainly revolving around how she treats mothers and overtly sexual women, even in later books which she wrote well overlapped with the feminist movement and the rise of genre fiction with female protaginists) and b) I think a lot of it's a generational thing. I've noticed that younger Sutcliff fans, who grew up on narratives where women were fully present and often protagonists, tend to pick up on the same stuff that bugs me, and older Sutcliff fans who grew up identifying with male adventurers, tend to not have those issues.

Also, I don't think presenting a diversity of female characters sympathetically is incompatible with historical accuracy. History was full of women with different personality types who were loved by their family and friends. Since recorded history tends to focus on men of rank, power, and wealth, I think that's all the more reason for historical fiction--especially fiction like Sutcliff's, which doesn't usually focus on famous figures--to portray the rest of society. To some extent Sutcliff does that, but there are certain female types that I get the impression she had Issues with, and I'm not very comfortable with that. I think that's more of a product of the time she was writing in (and by the end of her career, earlier formed habits) than of the settings she wrote about.

(Although I am not saying I think Sutcliff should have written about anachronistic female adventurers, mind!)

Edited 2012-06-07 18:52 (UTC)

I think it was some kind of temporary glitch.

I finished this a few days ago and still can't stop thinking about it - it's probably my favourite Sutcliff book so far. If I'd been told how it was going to end in advance I probably would have been really pissy about it, but when it got to it, somehow it worked perfectly (gah, Cynan. The poor thing broke my heart. :(), and yes, loads of post-book fanfic possibilities!

Y Gododdin is such a heartrending, heroic tale and she really does it justice in TSC. And the setting! Roman Britain all down at heel and patched up and half-forgotten fading into Wales. Almost beats 'Dawn Wind' for collapse and decay, with a brilliant fragile layer of the pride of shrinking Wales running over the top of it.

Yay, comment went through this time!

Sixth Century Britain. Rome is gone, Arthur is a fading memory, and Owain, who is little more than a boy is almost the last survivor of a British force defeated in battle against the Saxons. The other survivor is a young British warhound, which he names Dog. In the ruins of abandoned Viruconium, he meets a girl, Regina, who was left behind by the fleeing population of the city when they fled. They try to leave Britain for Brittany, but Regina gets ill, and Owain ends up selling himself as a slave to the Saxons to get help for her, because that's all that he has left to sell.

I didn't like this book all that much when I first read it as a kid. But something has kept me revisiting it periodically ever since and I now think it's one of her cleverer and more complex books. It's about... responsibility, and aging, and promises, and getting the job done, and never giving up hope.

And I have a great deal more to say but that will do for now. :-D

I just read this recently! And I wasn't sure that I liked it that much, I think because I prefer the British to the Saxons. But I agree, I like the themes and the way they are expressed.

And holy crap, I am 2 chapters in and ADORING THIS. Did you know, btw, I am a sailor and meteorologist? :-)

I think Sutcliff felt the same way: even in her version of Beowulf, she makes them seem... kind of small and less impressive than I think they probably should be. Obviously she knew about Sutton Hoo, but I think her reading of the Saxons is still shaped by older stories where they were primitive savages.

And of course she has made the Saxons out to be the villains in all the previous books in the series, the barbarians snuffing out the light, so it is hard to make the about-face in our brains that suddenly (in the real world time has passed of course, but we have just gone from (Sword at) Sunset to Dawn (Wind) in one book) the evil invaders are now the pastoral and innocent land-dwellers.

I won't claim Warrior Scarlet is my favourite, but I think it deserves more love than it gets. It has, I think, the earliest setting of any of Sutcliff's novels, in the Bronze Age, in a small settlement on the South Downs. While it tackles her theme of outsiders, it's gentler than some of her novels, aimed at a younger readership, and with a much less bleak feel. And it's a really short novel, 232 pages in my edition.

The hero, Drem, has a withered arm, and the story tells of his struggles to gain acceptance among the men of his tribe as he grows from childhood to manhood. He has a mentor, Talore the Hunter, who lost his sword hand in a raid; a blood brother, Vortrix, son of the chieftain; a couple of very different elderly men who influence his life in different ways; and a half-wolf hound. There's a cunning new king, a hint of times changing with the coming of iron, conflict between races and bags of Bronze Age religion.

Drem's story is quite well explored, but I'd be really keen to see more on the adults, in particular the enigmatic Talore.

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Promote your favorite Sutcliff book(s)!

Re: Sun Horse, Moon Horse

Re: Blood Feud

The Shining Company

Sword Song

Re: Blood Feud

Re: The Silver Branch

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no subject

Re: Blood Feud

Re: Outcast

Re: Blood Feud

Re: Blood Feud

Re: Blood Feud

Re: Blood Feud

Re: Blood Feud

no subject

Re: The Shining Company

Re: The Shining Company

Re: The Shining Company

Dawn Wind

Re: Dawn Wind

Re: Outcast

Re: Dawn Wind

Re: Dawn Wind

Warrior Scarlet