The Horse Lord's Appendix Removal

[hedgebird]

Hello, gentle readers, I'm back with another round of "Let's Compare Editions".

When I re-read The Mark of the Horse Lord recently, I was both pleased and indignant to discover that all this time, some editions have contained an appendix of "Places Mentioned in the Story" that is not present in the paperback I originally read. It translates the novel's "ancient" or invented place names into their modern equivalents. There was no need for me to have been quite so confused by the finer points of Earra-Ghyll geography as I always was!

Thanks to Internet Archive I was able to look at a few more editions and I have formed a hypothesis which I would like your help in checking. The hypothesis is this: UK editions of The Mark of the Horse Lord are descended from the 1965 Oxford University Press edition and contain this appendix, while most US editions are descended from the 1965 H.Z. Walck edition and don't contain the appendix. (Predicted exceptions: 1. Puffin paperbacks that appeared simultaneously in the UK and US, which I would guess were essentially identical. 2. A UK omnibus which perhaps drops the "extras" to save space.)

Here is a list of the editions I know of, and I'm hoping you folk can clear up some of the question-marked details:

UK editions
1965 Oxford hardcover: map, historical note, and appendix, illustrations by Charles Keeping
1983 Puffin paperback: ???
1987 Chancellor The Best of Rosemary Sutcliff omnibus hardcover: ???
2014 Random House e-book: historical note and appendix, no map or illustrations
2014 Random House paperback: same as e-book?
2017 Folio Society: new illustrations by Felix Miall and introduction by Philip Reeve, not sure about the rest?

US editions
1965 H.Z. Walck hardcover: different map, historical note, but no appendix or illustrations
1983 Puffin paperback: ???
1989 Dell paperback: historical note, afterword by Scott O'Dell, but no map, appendix, or illustrations
2005 Front Street paperback: map and historical note, but no appendix or illustrations
2015 Chicago Review Press paperback: map, historical note, afterword by Scott O'Dell, not sure about appendix?

Translated editions: ???

Broader questions: did you read The Mark of the Horse Lord with or without the appendix, and did you get lost in the Highlands? (If you know which crag is which in the battle of Glen Croe, please explain it to me...) How much do you care about following a story's geography?

Comments

[bunn]

My copy of MoTHL is a 1988 reprint of a 1983 edition, and says it is from Puffin Books in association with Oxford University Press. It DOES have a page labelled "Place-names Mentioned in this Story".

I still got lost in the Highlands.

I like following the geography of the places that I know better, eg York, Chester, Uffington etc but the Highlands is so very large and so very heathery. I find it hard to keep a mental map and secretly suspect that Sutcliff may have had similar problems.

(I got my copy of MoTHL second hand and it seems to have begun life as a school library copy from a school with remarkably little taste, since it has no stamps on the borrowing slip at all)

[hedgebird]

Haha, glad it wasn't just me! MHL is particularly hard to navigate because most of the landmarks are lochs and glens and mountains (some with misspelt Gaelic names), not cities and towns. The list of names helped me a lot with following along on a map this time round, but... mysteries remain.

(Poor neglected book! Does it have a particularly repellent cover or something?)

[verecunda]

oh! em! gee! I had no idea! I'd love to get my hands on an edition with the appendix, as I had some guesses about which locations were which, but I'd love to see if I was right - plus clarify the ones where I had no idea.

[hedgebird]

One way to do it is to borrow the Oxford University Press copy linked above from Internet Archive (it's free, signup just requires an email and a password.) I've also added most of the names from the list to the Sutcliff wiki (https://sutcliff.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mark_of_the_Horse_Lord#Places). I certainly hadn't always guessed right!

[anna_wing]

I was a child under 12 in Southeast Asia when I first read it and I remember that the book was a library copy of the one with the Charles Keeping illustrations, so it must have had everything attached. I remember particularly because it was not too long after I had read "The Lord of the Rings" for the first time, so the "Horse Lord" bit of the title caught my interest at once, even if it wasn't about the Rohirrim! The map and glossary I took as normal for a fantasy novel, which this one might as well have been,, but the geography was definitely secondary to working out what exactly was going on among all these strange, exotic people...

[hedgebird]

Aww, that's so cute. I often wonder how much of an overlap among Sutcliff and Tolkien readers there is generally, because I think there are some significant aesthetic similarities between their work. I just hope MHL didn't disappoint after LoTR!

I've read that much of the mid-20th century idea of ancient pagan religion used in Mark of the Horse Lord might as well be fantasy, lol.

[anna_wing]

I still remember the silver branch with apple bells that the wicked Queen used as her sceptre...

[hedgebird]

I wondered a lot about that thing... why a branch? Is it just like the musical instrument in The Silver Branch?

[anna_wing]

I assumed that there was some sort of religious/cultural significance about apples.

[hedgebird]

Turns out there's a "Silver Branch" Wikipedia page because they're a motif in Irish mythology. Apparently magic apple branches are good for all sorts of things.

[anna_wing]

Also of course if they're bells, you can ring it for "Silence in Court!"...