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sutcliff_space"Novelist's Hat and Minstrel's Bonnet" is an essay of about 1350 words in which Rosemary Sutcliff reflects on her evolving style of writing, and the relationship between her historical fiction and her retellings of myth and legend.
Sutcliff wrote the essay for Bookmark 11, the September 1983 issue of an Edinburgh-based periodical about children's literature she apparently subscribed to and had written for at least once already (Bookmark 4). It was reprinted in the 1994 collection The Best of Bookmark: Children's Writers Talk About Their Work. Also included is "Rosemary Sutcliff – A Personal Memoir" by the editor Jeffrey Aldridge, which I'll post in a few days.
(NB I've ventured to make a couple of edits to the Best of Bookmark text: "has always been my best beloved" instead of "had always been", "of its own accord" instead of "on its own accord". As always, please feel free to point out typos or other issues.)
NOVELIST'S HAT AND MINSTREL'S BONNET
I have always been an historical writer of one sort or another; but quite early on, my writing turned a corner and, still within the bounds of the historical story, set off in a completely different direction from the one in which it had been travelling before.
To be sure, my very first book The Chronicles of Robin Hood was reasonably tough as the subject demands, though sometimes I think that I should like to rewrite it now with a keener edge to it. But after that I settled down to three books, The Queen Elizabeth Story, The Armourer’s House and Brother Dusty-Feet. I loved them dearly; I love them still; but I have to admit to myself that they were charming more than anything else, pretty historical pageants rather than solid stories, and their chief readership – even Brother Dusty-Feet which was about a boy – was among little girls. Then my mother, who was strongly Parliamentarian in her Civil War sympathies, demanded that I should write her a Civil War story from the Parliamentarian point of view. The plot grew out of local history, for the final campaign of the War was fought in our own West Country, and one of the last big battles, which seldom finds so much as a one-line mention in any School History, was fought through the streets and over the surrounding fields of our little market-town of Torrington. So I embarked on Simon which was the start of the turning point.
My father, I learned later, was much disturbed in his mind lest I had bitten off more than I could chew. What, after all, could I know about warfare, about horse management, men’s behaviour among themselves? But the book, when finished, pleasantly surprised him by showing that I could in fact manage a boy’s story set in a man’s world; that I could even cope with battles. It is odd about the battles; I have never understood tactics or strategy (I am not even sure, off-hand, which is which) and have always hated getting involved in fights of any kind; but my books being the kind they are, I almost inevitably do get involved with them, and somehow I have generally contrived to make them work.
The next book, The Eagle of the Ninth, has always been my best beloved among my own books, though Frontier Wolf written only a few years back, runs it close, and with it, the turning-point was complete, and I set out on the line on which I have continued ever since. There has been no question in this of finding a formula and sticking to it; it has been all the while, and still is, a progression, a journey, and I have always known that for better or sometimes worse, each book is different from the ones that have gone before.
Only a few months ago, a friend whose opinion I value, told me that my books were ‘still travelling’, which is one of the nicest things that anyone has ever said to me as a writer.
Another, less acute, turning-point came with Blood Feud which was, I think, one of my less successful efforts. Frontier Wolf and my new not-yet-published Bonnie Dundee are both definitely post Blood Feud. Tougher books with less of the enrichment that I used to delight in, and a leaner line. But I do not know why this change has come about; certainly it has not been done by deliberate intention, but has happened of its own accord as the result of some natural process of growth and change.
I have always been a two-hatted writer: an historical novelist and a singer of songs. Beowulf I produced while I was still writing my little girls’ books; and after him, running concurrently with the novels, have come re-tellings of various Celtic myths and legends, of Cuchulain, Finn Mac Cool, Tristan, Arthur.
Arthur is the point where the two streams (am I getting my metaphors mixed?) meet and mingle, for I have written about him wearing both my historical novelist’s hat and my minstrel’s feathered bonnet. Under the first, I wrote The Lantern Bearers, officially for children, and Sword at Sunset, officially for adults, one taking over three days after the other leaves off. In The Lantern Bearers the central characters are fictional, with Arthur among the ‘real’ people in the background. In Sword at Sunset, Arthur is the central character; indeed he tells the story. I have always believed that behind every hero myth lies a real person; someone with a larger-than-life personality, who has formed a kind of power-centre to which other people’s stories, folklore and hero myth gather like shreds of straw to warmed amber; and this I am especially sure is true of Arthur. Someone stopped the Saxon advance for a life-time, long enough for its character to have changed when at last it was resumed, and by doing so, changed history. And for years I had wanted to tell his story; to get back through the accretions of Celtic myth, and mediaeval religion and romance, to the kind of person who this lost war leader might have been. But I knew that I was not yet ready for the challenge. And the day came when I was ready, and made a start – made three starts, all of them false; until I realized that the story could only be told in the first person singular. Arthur, in fact, or rather Artos the Bear wanted to tell it himself.
And that was really how it seemed. For eighteen months I had no freedom from him; I went to sleep at night thinking of the next day’s work, and woke up in the morning still thinking of it. I have never been ridden so mercilessly by any book before or since, though some of them have been pretty possessive. And when it was finished, it took me six weeks to get back into a woman’s skin.
In writing The Sword and the Circle, The Light Beyond the Forest and The Road to Camlann I was wearing my minstrel’s hat, as in all my ‘re-tellings.’ The tales were founded on existing material; on the Mabinogion and Middle English poetry, on Malory most of all. But I retained the right, like all minstrels, not merely to transmit, but also to add bits of myself, to modify this and that; to leave the story – I hope – just that little bit richer by a gift of love from my own spirit, than I found it.
But even allowing for all differences of approach, there is, I am sure, no hard-and-fast demarcation line between history and tradition/myth/legend. Historical fact is often enshrined in hero myth, fairy story, even nursery rhyme; and the true minstrelsy come closer to the history of the spirit, which is nearer to Truth, than the history of fact. Any country without a minstrelsy would have only very dry and mummified history to link it with its past. Arthur is a subject for the historian and the historical novelist and the singer of songs.
Certainly in switching from Dark Ages to Malory’s Arthur, I was not aware of any change of direction. My delving back through the mythological and legendary materials of The Matter of Britain in the attempt to reach the real Arthur at the heart of it, thinking deeply about the Legend and trying to recreate what it was all about, made me want to deal with the Legend itself, to re-tell it for children better than it had been done before. For none of the gaily-illustrated volumes of ‘Tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table’ that had come my way as a child had ever satisfied me.
Whether I have succeeded or not, I do not know. I have done my best.
Sutcliff wrote the essay for Bookmark 11, the September 1983 issue of an Edinburgh-based periodical about children's literature she apparently subscribed to and had written for at least once already (Bookmark 4). It was reprinted in the 1994 collection The Best of Bookmark: Children's Writers Talk About Their Work. Also included is "Rosemary Sutcliff – A Personal Memoir" by the editor Jeffrey Aldridge, which I'll post in a few days.
(NB I've ventured to make a couple of edits to the Best of Bookmark text: "has always been my best beloved" instead of "had always been", "of its own accord" instead of "on its own accord". As always, please feel free to point out typos or other issues.)
NOVELIST'S HAT AND MINSTREL'S BONNET
I have always been an historical writer of one sort or another; but quite early on, my writing turned a corner and, still within the bounds of the historical story, set off in a completely different direction from the one in which it had been travelling before.
To be sure, my very first book The Chronicles of Robin Hood was reasonably tough as the subject demands, though sometimes I think that I should like to rewrite it now with a keener edge to it. But after that I settled down to three books, The Queen Elizabeth Story, The Armourer’s House and Brother Dusty-Feet. I loved them dearly; I love them still; but I have to admit to myself that they were charming more than anything else, pretty historical pageants rather than solid stories, and their chief readership – even Brother Dusty-Feet which was about a boy – was among little girls. Then my mother, who was strongly Parliamentarian in her Civil War sympathies, demanded that I should write her a Civil War story from the Parliamentarian point of view. The plot grew out of local history, for the final campaign of the War was fought in our own West Country, and one of the last big battles, which seldom finds so much as a one-line mention in any School History, was fought through the streets and over the surrounding fields of our little market-town of Torrington. So I embarked on Simon which was the start of the turning point.
My father, I learned later, was much disturbed in his mind lest I had bitten off more than I could chew. What, after all, could I know about warfare, about horse management, men’s behaviour among themselves? But the book, when finished, pleasantly surprised him by showing that I could in fact manage a boy’s story set in a man’s world; that I could even cope with battles. It is odd about the battles; I have never understood tactics or strategy (I am not even sure, off-hand, which is which) and have always hated getting involved in fights of any kind; but my books being the kind they are, I almost inevitably do get involved with them, and somehow I have generally contrived to make them work.
The next book, The Eagle of the Ninth, has always been my best beloved among my own books, though Frontier Wolf written only a few years back, runs it close, and with it, the turning-point was complete, and I set out on the line on which I have continued ever since. There has been no question in this of finding a formula and sticking to it; it has been all the while, and still is, a progression, a journey, and I have always known that for better or sometimes worse, each book is different from the ones that have gone before.
Only a few months ago, a friend whose opinion I value, told me that my books were ‘still travelling’, which is one of the nicest things that anyone has ever said to me as a writer.
Another, less acute, turning-point came with Blood Feud which was, I think, one of my less successful efforts. Frontier Wolf and my new not-yet-published Bonnie Dundee are both definitely post Blood Feud. Tougher books with less of the enrichment that I used to delight in, and a leaner line. But I do not know why this change has come about; certainly it has not been done by deliberate intention, but has happened of its own accord as the result of some natural process of growth and change.
I have always been a two-hatted writer: an historical novelist and a singer of songs. Beowulf I produced while I was still writing my little girls’ books; and after him, running concurrently with the novels, have come re-tellings of various Celtic myths and legends, of Cuchulain, Finn Mac Cool, Tristan, Arthur.
Arthur is the point where the two streams (am I getting my metaphors mixed?) meet and mingle, for I have written about him wearing both my historical novelist’s hat and my minstrel’s feathered bonnet. Under the first, I wrote The Lantern Bearers, officially for children, and Sword at Sunset, officially for adults, one taking over three days after the other leaves off. In The Lantern Bearers the central characters are fictional, with Arthur among the ‘real’ people in the background. In Sword at Sunset, Arthur is the central character; indeed he tells the story. I have always believed that behind every hero myth lies a real person; someone with a larger-than-life personality, who has formed a kind of power-centre to which other people’s stories, folklore and hero myth gather like shreds of straw to warmed amber; and this I am especially sure is true of Arthur. Someone stopped the Saxon advance for a life-time, long enough for its character to have changed when at last it was resumed, and by doing so, changed history. And for years I had wanted to tell his story; to get back through the accretions of Celtic myth, and mediaeval religion and romance, to the kind of person who this lost war leader might have been. But I knew that I was not yet ready for the challenge. And the day came when I was ready, and made a start – made three starts, all of them false; until I realized that the story could only be told in the first person singular. Arthur, in fact, or rather Artos the Bear wanted to tell it himself.
And that was really how it seemed. For eighteen months I had no freedom from him; I went to sleep at night thinking of the next day’s work, and woke up in the morning still thinking of it. I have never been ridden so mercilessly by any book before or since, though some of them have been pretty possessive. And when it was finished, it took me six weeks to get back into a woman’s skin.
In writing The Sword and the Circle, The Light Beyond the Forest and The Road to Camlann I was wearing my minstrel’s hat, as in all my ‘re-tellings.’ The tales were founded on existing material; on the Mabinogion and Middle English poetry, on Malory most of all. But I retained the right, like all minstrels, not merely to transmit, but also to add bits of myself, to modify this and that; to leave the story – I hope – just that little bit richer by a gift of love from my own spirit, than I found it.
But even allowing for all differences of approach, there is, I am sure, no hard-and-fast demarcation line between history and tradition/myth/legend. Historical fact is often enshrined in hero myth, fairy story, even nursery rhyme; and the true minstrelsy come closer to the history of the spirit, which is nearer to Truth, than the history of fact. Any country without a minstrelsy would have only very dry and mummified history to link it with its past. Arthur is a subject for the historian and the historical novelist and the singer of songs.
Certainly in switching from Dark Ages to Malory’s Arthur, I was not aware of any change of direction. My delving back through the mythological and legendary materials of The Matter of Britain in the attempt to reach the real Arthur at the heart of it, thinking deeply about the Legend and trying to recreate what it was all about, made me want to deal with the Legend itself, to re-tell it for children better than it had been done before. For none of the gaily-illustrated volumes of ‘Tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table’ that had come my way as a child had ever satisfied me.
Whether I have succeeded or not, I do not know. I have done my best.
