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Quondam et Futurus interview (1991)
"An Interview with Rosemary Sutcliff" by John Withrington is another focused on Sword at Sunset. It appeared in the Arthurian journal Quondam et Futurus, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter 1991), as you can see here on JSTOR.
The conversation also ranges over her latest novel The Shining Company, her work in progress Sword Song, the dolphin ring series, naming habits, bowdlerisation, other Arthurian writers, and more interesting tidbits.
Spoilers for Sword at Sunset, The Shining Company, and The Mark of the Horse Lord.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF
JW You’ve been drawn several times to the Arthurian legend, notably in Sword at Sunset, but also in a series of books beginning with The Sword and the Circle. What inspired you to tackle the legend of Arthur in the first place?
RS I suppose originally just the fact that I was brought up on Arthur: from a very small child it was a part of my heroic life. I suppose the mystery was the great thing about Arthur: obviously the Arthur that Malory produced is gorgeous, but he’s not really very reliable factually. But one does feel strongly that behind all this there’s certainly––well I think there’s certainly––a man, possibly a group of men, but I think just one man, who all the other sort of legends have sort of accrued to.
JW Do you believe he actually existed?
RS Yes, I do. I don’t think he was King Arthur. He was just a war leader of some sort, possibly a member of the old Royal House, as I made him in Sword at Sunset. There’s a fascination, a mystery, as far as I’m concerned. And for me in a way he stands for Britain, for the Celtic way of life.
JW You use a poem by Frances Brett Young in the introduction to Sword at Sunset. Did that actually inspire you in any way, or was it a fortuitous discovery?
RS No, it didn’t inspire me. I had thought of, begun to think of, the reconstruction of the historical Arthur, and then I came across this poem; didn’t know who it was by, but it sort of rang bells for me in all directions. It did have a great effect on getting me going on the book.
JW The poem itself makes great use of the theme of darkness, a theme that comes through in your work as well: for example, The Lantern Bearers. Do you think there’s something about the Arthurian legend which invites a naive nostalgia for a Golden Age, or does the legend contain within it some kind of essential truth?
RS I think it contains an essential truth, and I think that at present we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur “lights up” the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.
JW The sense of a developing nation comes across very strongly in Sword at Sunset.
RS Yes. The whole world is under siege.
JW You mention Malory as a source for this book, but what others did you employ?
RS Well, of course, all the usual medieval ones: Chrétien de Troyes––I never know how to pronounce his name!––and, oh, I’ve forgotten what their names are now. All the sort of accepted medieval sources. A wonderful book that I found in the war––a little book, and it was by an absolute crack-pot––and it was called The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century. It was all about getting back to a historical Arthur, and the position of people like Vortigern, and people like that, who and what they probably really were. It was sort of quite crazy, but I’ve always found a really good crack-pot very often sort of hits on some idea of what could be true, where the sort of serious history would undoubtedly miss. So he did a lot for me too. As did Geoffrey Ashe. He was a great source of inspiration.
JW When one goes back and reads Sword at Sunset thoroughly it’s possible, in a way that’s not possible in Malory’s Morte Darthur, for example, to construct a perfectly workable internal chronology, right down to the dates one can find from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. How much of a challenge was that to you?
RS Well, it was a terrific challenge. And it was a challenge I loved. It made me feel rather like being on a sort of gigantic detective story.
JW Have you read any other novelists of the twentieth century who’ve treated the Arthurian legend in their own distinctive ways? T.H. White, Mary Stewart perhaps? Susan Cooper?
RS Mary Stewart I don't like, not as an Arthurian student. I like her books because they’re really in a way like the most gorgeous fairy stories, sort of fairy-stories-cum-science-fiction. They don't have the slightest sense of the Dark Ages. Although they’re lovely entertainment.
JW You mention in your recollection Blue Remembered Hills your love for the works of Kipling, and that it was Puck of Pook’s Hill which led directly on to The Eagle of the Ninth. What other writers and poets do you admire?
RS Housman. Most of the war poets. I regret I’m not fond of the Lakeland poets and people like that: we also read Browning at school, and I found them all very boring!
JW Charles Williams?
RS No, frankly, I haven't read Charles Williams.
JW Sword at Sunset is one of a series in which you use a leitmotif, that of the flawed emerald signet ring, to trace the history of a family from Roman Britain right through to Norman times. The first novel in which you used this was Eagle of the Ninth in 1954, but it appears later in Frontier Wolf in 1980. Was it your intention to construct a magnum opus, an epic from start to finish, in which Arthur appeared in the middle?
RS No, it just happened. It did that of its own accord.
JW In the foreword to Sword at Sunset you mention the twin themes of retributive sin and broken fellowship as carrying “the inevitability and pitiless purity of outline that one finds in classical tragedy.” Later in the book Artos recalls that “Medraut and I came together naturally, and inevitably, as to a meeting long appointed.” One is remind of the fateful meeting at the cross-roads between Oedipus and his father although, of course, Artos and Medraut meet at a ford. Did you consciously try to shape this novel according to any kind of classical framework?
RS No, I didn’t. But I tried to shape it after an archetype. Of course, the best battles always do take place at fords and involve single combat, as with Cuchulainn. I just felt that the ford was the right place.
JW Of course, many of the twelve battles described by Nennius take place near water.
RS Yes.
JW While Oedipus and Artos both commit the sin of incest, they commit it in ignorance, but nonetheless have to pay. Artos, however likeable, seems nonetheless not wholly free from any blame, given his neglect of his wife. Are we to wonder, or did you intend, any kind of ambiguity about Guenhumara’s own criticism of Arthur for leaving her in the Hollow Hills? Are we at all supposed to think she may have been right, and that something did happen indeed on that occasion?
RS Well, I leave it…she was, she is, an overwrought woman undergoing childbirth, but the whole idea is a very hard one. I never made up my own mind whether anything happened or not.
JW But it does have a bearing on the poor fellow, doesn't it?
RS It does have a bearing on the poor fellow.
JW In The Shining Company Prosper knows that Conn will survive, and in Sword at Sunset Artos refers to “the oneness of things,” saying that “Fate does not allow it to men to unpick part of the pattern.” You mention in Blue Remembered Hills that you have a kind of “two-thirds belief in horoscopes,” and that you yourself inherited from your mother a “residual trace of the second sight.” Would you describe yours as a fatalistic view of the universe which has permeated, or influenced your writing in this respect?
RS No, oddly enough, I don’t think I do have a fatalistic view. I think the archetypical side of things is kind of there, the fatalistic side is there. It’s…do I mean the warp or the weft? The piece of the loom, the threads that go on and over. And into that, your own life is woven. But while you can probably do quite a lot about varying the pattern and so on yourself, there remain these basic threads. And I think I have got a feeling that there are times you notice in your own life sometimes, when life suddenly starts to make patterns.
JW Throughout your work, sacrifice is a major theme. You mention in Sword at Sunset the leader’s “divine right.”
RS That has always fascinated me.
JW In The Mark of the Horse Lord Phaedrus kills himself for his adopted kingdom, the sacrifice of Aquila and his men at Badon is described as “a glorious piece of waste,” and in The Shining Company you deliberately invite a parallel between the battle of Catterick and Thermopylae. Do you think that in order to write a successful tragedy, sacrifice is necessary? That sacrifice is a necessary part of life, even?
RS I think it probably is.
JW You’re the first historical novelist, as far as I’m aware, to merge the characters of Bedivere and Lancelot. Many of your characters however retain names that you use elsewhere outside Sword at Sunset; Gault turns up in The Mark of the Horse Lord; Teleri in Frontier Wolf; Prosper in The Shining Company. Why?
RS I suppose for one reason, just because there aren’t a vast number of suitable Celtic names that we know about, and one is tempted to use the names one likes all the time!
JW Would you ever consider writing another Arthurian novel, or was Sword at Sunset too intense an experience to repeat?
RS I think probably Sword at Sunset was too intense to do anything about it again. I’d love to write another one, actually.
JW Would you consider doing the same story from a different angle, from a different character’s point of view?
RS I hadn’t thought about it, actually. I suppose I would, if somebody came up with a really good idea to give me a sort of kick in the right direction.
JW Do you have any other projects or books in hand at the moment?
RS I’ve got a book that I’m doing at the moment, which is a Viking story about the Hebrides and the Western Highlands––largely based on saga material, but of course with my own characters woven into it––and it will feature the dolphin ring. You’ll recall the dolphin ring last turns up in the Lake District? This is about one hundred and fifty years before that, and it’s the point at which the dolphin ring changes over from Marcus’s family to the Norse line. The young Viking in it gets his Welsh girl, who’s the last of her race and who has the signet ring, and she brings it with her for her dowry.
JW In The Shining Company there’s a definite feeling of transition: one of the characters remarks that King Mynyddog is “not Artos,” but while Sword at Sunset ends on a fundamentally hopeful note, this book has the lone survivors leave for Constantinople. Does this represent a grimmer, more pessimistic outlook on your work in the years which divide the two books?
RS I don’t think so really, but I think on that particular occasion…I enter very much into the background, and this, I think, is a darker, smaller background, and it wouldn't have as much “blending” into other civilisations, other ways of life. The characters are much more bounded by what they themselves see as happening. And it was pretty dark in the North at that time. Whereas Arthur I think I made into a chap with a very long sight, with a feeling that there was a light coming back from the end of the tunnel.
JW The Shining Company has a very much more claustrophobic kind of atmosphere.
RS Yes. Well that’s it, they're just not very aware of the rest of the world.
JW I thought it interesting that in Sword at Sunset the sons of enemies could play together, that there was still some hope, but one never gets that feeling in The Shining Company.
RS No. But that’s, as I say, because of them, not because of me.
JW You’re best known as a writer of children's books, but some of your work contains scenes of quite graphic brutality, scenes wholly lacking in sentimentality. One thinks of the death of Gault in Sword at Sunset, and Cy[n]ran in The Shining Company. How would you describe your writing?
RS I think in a way it’s more like a man’s writing. Quite a lot of people have told me that it was a man’s voice, until they met me. Whether that’s so I don’t know. But I think increasingly, as the years have gone on, I’ve become a fairly sort of tough writer. Looking back, a lot of what I’ve done I’ve sort of enjoyed, and I think, “I’ve done that awfully well, but it’s much softer than what I would do now.”
JW Would you regard that as prentice work?
RS To a certain extent, yes, but gradually evolving towards completely finding my own voice. I don't think I’ll find it yet. I’m looking all the time, I think.
JW In Sword at Sunset, you seem to have succeeded in getting underneath the skin of Artos, of actually writing in the first person. How difficult was this, and how long did it take you to write the book?
RS About three years, I think… It was difficult, it was very strange. Because it was really was as though I became possessed, or something. It drove me. It was rather like having somebody standing over me with a whip, and saying, “Get on with it! get on with it!”
JW The 1965 Peacock edition of Sword at Sunset was carefully abridged: in particular the sexual references, the tension between Artos and Guenhumara, the gay relationship between Gault and Levin were all missing…
RS Part of the plot doesn’t make sense otherwise!
JW …while in the unabridged version Artos reveals the truth to his wife about Medraut’s conception. Even one of the chapters is retitled. How do you feel about alterations to your work?
RS I don’t like it. I didn’t really know what was happening about that one, until it just sort of came out, you know.
JW We’re told on several occasions that Artos “feels too much,” that he shows in his eyes too clearly what he thinks. And you, of course, make of Gwalchmai a surgeon, and come from a family of doctors. Raymond Thompson has observed of Sword at Sunset that what distinguishes this novel from any others of its type is “its powerful sense of caring.” Would you agree with that sentiment?
RS I think perhaps I would. I hadn’t thought of it before. I think I do quite often use healers and army-surgeons and people in a book. And I do get a terrific feeling for the mending side of life.
JW How and for what would you like to be remembered? Of which of your works are you most proud?
RS I suppose Sword at Sunset, really.
JW You sound doubtful?
RS No, I don't think I’m doubtful: only because I’m sort of trying to think it out and not just give the slick answer. I think, I do think that Sword at Sunset is the best thing I’ve ever written. And probably the best I ever will write.
JW I think The Shining Company came close.
RS That’s lovely, because, you know, it’s a new, recent book, and it’s lovely to hear that something you’ve written fairly recently is… You’re always terrified that the books you write are going to go downhill!
Lancaster University
The conversation also ranges over her latest novel The Shining Company, her work in progress Sword Song, the dolphin ring series, naming habits, bowdlerisation, other Arthurian writers, and more interesting tidbits.
Spoilers for Sword at Sunset, The Shining Company, and The Mark of the Horse Lord.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF
JW You’ve been drawn several times to the Arthurian legend, notably in Sword at Sunset, but also in a series of books beginning with The Sword and the Circle. What inspired you to tackle the legend of Arthur in the first place?
RS I suppose originally just the fact that I was brought up on Arthur: from a very small child it was a part of my heroic life. I suppose the mystery was the great thing about Arthur: obviously the Arthur that Malory produced is gorgeous, but he’s not really very reliable factually. But one does feel strongly that behind all this there’s certainly––well I think there’s certainly––a man, possibly a group of men, but I think just one man, who all the other sort of legends have sort of accrued to.
JW Do you believe he actually existed?
RS Yes, I do. I don’t think he was King Arthur. He was just a war leader of some sort, possibly a member of the old Royal House, as I made him in Sword at Sunset. There’s a fascination, a mystery, as far as I’m concerned. And for me in a way he stands for Britain, for the Celtic way of life.
JW You use a poem by Frances Brett Young in the introduction to Sword at Sunset. Did that actually inspire you in any way, or was it a fortuitous discovery?
RS No, it didn’t inspire me. I had thought of, begun to think of, the reconstruction of the historical Arthur, and then I came across this poem; didn’t know who it was by, but it sort of rang bells for me in all directions. It did have a great effect on getting me going on the book.
JW The poem itself makes great use of the theme of darkness, a theme that comes through in your work as well: for example, The Lantern Bearers. Do you think there’s something about the Arthurian legend which invites a naive nostalgia for a Golden Age, or does the legend contain within it some kind of essential truth?
RS I think it contains an essential truth, and I think that at present we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur “lights up” the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.
JW The sense of a developing nation comes across very strongly in Sword at Sunset.
RS Yes. The whole world is under siege.
JW You mention Malory as a source for this book, but what others did you employ?
RS Well, of course, all the usual medieval ones: Chrétien de Troyes––I never know how to pronounce his name!––and, oh, I’ve forgotten what their names are now. All the sort of accepted medieval sources. A wonderful book that I found in the war––a little book, and it was by an absolute crack-pot––and it was called The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century. It was all about getting back to a historical Arthur, and the position of people like Vortigern, and people like that, who and what they probably really were. It was sort of quite crazy, but I’ve always found a really good crack-pot very often sort of hits on some idea of what could be true, where the sort of serious history would undoubtedly miss. So he did a lot for me too. As did Geoffrey Ashe. He was a great source of inspiration.
JW When one goes back and reads Sword at Sunset thoroughly it’s possible, in a way that’s not possible in Malory’s Morte Darthur, for example, to construct a perfectly workable internal chronology, right down to the dates one can find from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. How much of a challenge was that to you?
RS Well, it was a terrific challenge. And it was a challenge I loved. It made me feel rather like being on a sort of gigantic detective story.
JW Have you read any other novelists of the twentieth century who’ve treated the Arthurian legend in their own distinctive ways? T.H. White, Mary Stewart perhaps? Susan Cooper?
RS Mary Stewart I don't like, not as an Arthurian student. I like her books because they’re really in a way like the most gorgeous fairy stories, sort of fairy-stories-cum-science-fiction. They don't have the slightest sense of the Dark Ages. Although they’re lovely entertainment.
JW You mention in your recollection Blue Remembered Hills your love for the works of Kipling, and that it was Puck of Pook’s Hill which led directly on to The Eagle of the Ninth. What other writers and poets do you admire?
RS Housman. Most of the war poets. I regret I’m not fond of the Lakeland poets and people like that: we also read Browning at school, and I found them all very boring!
JW Charles Williams?
RS No, frankly, I haven't read Charles Williams.
JW Sword at Sunset is one of a series in which you use a leitmotif, that of the flawed emerald signet ring, to trace the history of a family from Roman Britain right through to Norman times. The first novel in which you used this was Eagle of the Ninth in 1954, but it appears later in Frontier Wolf in 1980. Was it your intention to construct a magnum opus, an epic from start to finish, in which Arthur appeared in the middle?
RS No, it just happened. It did that of its own accord.
JW In the foreword to Sword at Sunset you mention the twin themes of retributive sin and broken fellowship as carrying “the inevitability and pitiless purity of outline that one finds in classical tragedy.” Later in the book Artos recalls that “Medraut and I came together naturally, and inevitably, as to a meeting long appointed.” One is remind of the fateful meeting at the cross-roads between Oedipus and his father although, of course, Artos and Medraut meet at a ford. Did you consciously try to shape this novel according to any kind of classical framework?
RS No, I didn’t. But I tried to shape it after an archetype. Of course, the best battles always do take place at fords and involve single combat, as with Cuchulainn. I just felt that the ford was the right place.
JW Of course, many of the twelve battles described by Nennius take place near water.
RS Yes.
JW While Oedipus and Artos both commit the sin of incest, they commit it in ignorance, but nonetheless have to pay. Artos, however likeable, seems nonetheless not wholly free from any blame, given his neglect of his wife. Are we to wonder, or did you intend, any kind of ambiguity about Guenhumara’s own criticism of Arthur for leaving her in the Hollow Hills? Are we at all supposed to think she may have been right, and that something did happen indeed on that occasion?
RS Well, I leave it…she was, she is, an overwrought woman undergoing childbirth, but the whole idea is a very hard one. I never made up my own mind whether anything happened or not.
JW But it does have a bearing on the poor fellow, doesn't it?
RS It does have a bearing on the poor fellow.
JW In The Shining Company Prosper knows that Conn will survive, and in Sword at Sunset Artos refers to “the oneness of things,” saying that “Fate does not allow it to men to unpick part of the pattern.” You mention in Blue Remembered Hills that you have a kind of “two-thirds belief in horoscopes,” and that you yourself inherited from your mother a “residual trace of the second sight.” Would you describe yours as a fatalistic view of the universe which has permeated, or influenced your writing in this respect?
RS No, oddly enough, I don’t think I do have a fatalistic view. I think the archetypical side of things is kind of there, the fatalistic side is there. It’s…do I mean the warp or the weft? The piece of the loom, the threads that go on and over. And into that, your own life is woven. But while you can probably do quite a lot about varying the pattern and so on yourself, there remain these basic threads. And I think I have got a feeling that there are times you notice in your own life sometimes, when life suddenly starts to make patterns.
JW Throughout your work, sacrifice is a major theme. You mention in Sword at Sunset the leader’s “divine right.”
RS That has always fascinated me.
JW In The Mark of the Horse Lord Phaedrus kills himself for his adopted kingdom, the sacrifice of Aquila and his men at Badon is described as “a glorious piece of waste,” and in The Shining Company you deliberately invite a parallel between the battle of Catterick and Thermopylae. Do you think that in order to write a successful tragedy, sacrifice is necessary? That sacrifice is a necessary part of life, even?
RS I think it probably is.
JW You’re the first historical novelist, as far as I’m aware, to merge the characters of Bedivere and Lancelot. Many of your characters however retain names that you use elsewhere outside Sword at Sunset; Gault turns up in The Mark of the Horse Lord; Teleri in Frontier Wolf; Prosper in The Shining Company. Why?
RS I suppose for one reason, just because there aren’t a vast number of suitable Celtic names that we know about, and one is tempted to use the names one likes all the time!
JW Would you ever consider writing another Arthurian novel, or was Sword at Sunset too intense an experience to repeat?
RS I think probably Sword at Sunset was too intense to do anything about it again. I’d love to write another one, actually.
JW Would you consider doing the same story from a different angle, from a different character’s point of view?
RS I hadn’t thought about it, actually. I suppose I would, if somebody came up with a really good idea to give me a sort of kick in the right direction.
JW Do you have any other projects or books in hand at the moment?
RS I’ve got a book that I’m doing at the moment, which is a Viking story about the Hebrides and the Western Highlands––largely based on saga material, but of course with my own characters woven into it––and it will feature the dolphin ring. You’ll recall the dolphin ring last turns up in the Lake District? This is about one hundred and fifty years before that, and it’s the point at which the dolphin ring changes over from Marcus’s family to the Norse line. The young Viking in it gets his Welsh girl, who’s the last of her race and who has the signet ring, and she brings it with her for her dowry.
JW In The Shining Company there’s a definite feeling of transition: one of the characters remarks that King Mynyddog is “not Artos,” but while Sword at Sunset ends on a fundamentally hopeful note, this book has the lone survivors leave for Constantinople. Does this represent a grimmer, more pessimistic outlook on your work in the years which divide the two books?
RS I don’t think so really, but I think on that particular occasion…I enter very much into the background, and this, I think, is a darker, smaller background, and it wouldn't have as much “blending” into other civilisations, other ways of life. The characters are much more bounded by what they themselves see as happening. And it was pretty dark in the North at that time. Whereas Arthur I think I made into a chap with a very long sight, with a feeling that there was a light coming back from the end of the tunnel.
JW The Shining Company has a very much more claustrophobic kind of atmosphere.
RS Yes. Well that’s it, they're just not very aware of the rest of the world.
JW I thought it interesting that in Sword at Sunset the sons of enemies could play together, that there was still some hope, but one never gets that feeling in The Shining Company.
RS No. But that’s, as I say, because of them, not because of me.
JW You’re best known as a writer of children's books, but some of your work contains scenes of quite graphic brutality, scenes wholly lacking in sentimentality. One thinks of the death of Gault in Sword at Sunset, and Cy[n]ran in The Shining Company. How would you describe your writing?
RS I think in a way it’s more like a man’s writing. Quite a lot of people have told me that it was a man’s voice, until they met me. Whether that’s so I don’t know. But I think increasingly, as the years have gone on, I’ve become a fairly sort of tough writer. Looking back, a lot of what I’ve done I’ve sort of enjoyed, and I think, “I’ve done that awfully well, but it’s much softer than what I would do now.”
JW Would you regard that as prentice work?
RS To a certain extent, yes, but gradually evolving towards completely finding my own voice. I don't think I’ll find it yet. I’m looking all the time, I think.
JW In Sword at Sunset, you seem to have succeeded in getting underneath the skin of Artos, of actually writing in the first person. How difficult was this, and how long did it take you to write the book?
RS About three years, I think… It was difficult, it was very strange. Because it was really was as though I became possessed, or something. It drove me. It was rather like having somebody standing over me with a whip, and saying, “Get on with it! get on with it!”
JW The 1965 Peacock edition of Sword at Sunset was carefully abridged: in particular the sexual references, the tension between Artos and Guenhumara, the gay relationship between Gault and Levin were all missing…
RS Part of the plot doesn’t make sense otherwise!
JW …while in the unabridged version Artos reveals the truth to his wife about Medraut’s conception. Even one of the chapters is retitled. How do you feel about alterations to your work?
RS I don’t like it. I didn’t really know what was happening about that one, until it just sort of came out, you know.
JW We’re told on several occasions that Artos “feels too much,” that he shows in his eyes too clearly what he thinks. And you, of course, make of Gwalchmai a surgeon, and come from a family of doctors. Raymond Thompson has observed of Sword at Sunset that what distinguishes this novel from any others of its type is “its powerful sense of caring.” Would you agree with that sentiment?
RS I think perhaps I would. I hadn’t thought of it before. I think I do quite often use healers and army-surgeons and people in a book. And I do get a terrific feeling for the mending side of life.
JW How and for what would you like to be remembered? Of which of your works are you most proud?
RS I suppose Sword at Sunset, really.
JW You sound doubtful?
RS No, I don't think I’m doubtful: only because I’m sort of trying to think it out and not just give the slick answer. I think, I do think that Sword at Sunset is the best thing I’ve ever written. And probably the best I ever will write.
JW I think The Shining Company came close.
RS That’s lovely, because, you know, it’s a new, recent book, and it’s lovely to hear that something you’ve written fairly recently is… You’re always terrified that the books you write are going to go downhill!
Lancaster University
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Her comments on Stewart and Tolkien make me wonder how familiar Sutcliff was with modern, adult fantasy novels. But it's nice that she liked the Merlin series.
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I imagine the answer would have to do with her access to libraries and bookstores. It has never been clear to me whether she visited them or whether she simply had books sent to her by request.
In the late 1990s, I systematically went through the entire adult fiction section of my midsized public library - twice - searching for historical fantasy novels. There weren't many Arthurian novels on the shelves at that time. I imagine there would have been even fewer in 1991.
And very few adult fantasy novels of any sort when she was writing her Arthurian novels. I own a 1982 book of essays on fantasy literature. At the end is what was intended to be a comprehensive bibliography of all modern English-language fantasy books published up to that date, starting in the 18th century. The number of authors of adult fantasy books that the bibliography lists, prior to the publication of "Sword at Sunset," is 37.
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I think she visited in person some of the time: in one of the essays she throws shade at a place with a wheelchair ramp but no lift inside. Beyond that, I'm unclear on it too.
I'm surprised that the count of fantasy authors was so low. I would've thought that it was decently well-established as a pulp magazine genre, at least, by mid-century. (Then there's the "all fantasy is for children" issue too...)
no subject
Yes, this was definitely a book bibliography focussed mainly on the types of books that would end up in libraries. And Sutcliff would likely not have been much exposed to the American pulp tradition. I know that there were plenty of American tales of superheroes, sword & sorcery, and weird fiction by this period, but I wonder what the popular traditions were in British fantasy?
"Then there's the 'all fantasy is for children' issue too"
She was writing during the Golden Era of children's fantasy (in my assessment). Given that she was being published as juvenile fiction, she must have been at least vaguely aware of the children's fantasy authors of that period . . . though whether she was reading them, I don't know. Some people stop reading children's fiction after childhood, poor folks.