Rosemary Sutcliff community

I've read more than once that Rosemary Sutcliff's Anglo-Norse vs. Anglo-Normans novel The Shield Ring was founded on a book called The Secret Valley by one Nicholas Size. The Wikipedia page for Buttermere, for example, which calls it a "dramatized history," mentions their connection. Elsewhere his book is called a novel and this puzzled me a bit, as in this essay Sutcliff described her inspiration for The Shield Ring as "a little privately published handbook" – i.e. a work of non-fiction. Detective Me concluded she might really have meant Size's earlier treatment of the material, a little booklet mentioned on his Wikipedia page.

Of course this slight discrepancy might be moot if I could read Size's books, but I've never found a copy online (for free; there are limits to curiosity.) But now I have found a relevant excerpt from The Secret Valley in an anthology! "The Battle of Rannardale" covers the entire timeframe and alleged historical background of The Shield Ring. It's in My Favourite Stories of Lakeland edited by Melvyn Bragg (the radio host) and you can read it on Internet Archive.

But in case your curiosity on this point does not extend quite that far, I have extracted four bits that will sound familiar to readers of The Shield Ring. Casual readers like myself, that is; textual experts might well find more amid Size's welter of geographic details that Sutcliff could have cribbed. Non-readers will find these very vaguely spoilery.

• "Everybody knew that sooner or later the valley would be attacked from the North, but the novel defense which the Earl had been perfecting for years gave them confidence... This defense which pleased them so much was nothing less than the diversion of the road or track from over the shoulder of Rannardale Knotts, near the lake, to a narrow and dangerous valley close at hand, where everything was prepared for a great killing."
• "Here sat Earl Boethar with his son Gille, and his trusty brother Ackin watching the approach of the Norman army." (Sutcliff calls these characters Buthar, Gille, and Aikin in The Shield Ring. Boethar/Buthar at least is a local legend, but the internet hasn't informed me whether Size invented his brother and son. Ranulf Meschin is another familiar name, but it's because he definitely historically existed.)
• "Such a thing was, however, only likely to happen if some traitor had betrayed the preparations, and none of the poor souls the Normans captured would be likely to say a word even under torture." (Embryonic Bjorn?)
• "[T]he archers on the ridge were reinforced by women". (Zygotic Frytha?)

I'm still not sure which of Size's books Rosemary Sutcliff read, the novel or the little booklet. But I can certainly believe that one way or another Size's work was the basis for The Shield Ring.

This is the most complete list of Rosemary Sutcliff’s essays and interviews that I know of.* Wherever possible, I’ve linked to both the original publication if it's online, and the more easily readable reposts here or elsewhere.

I sourced it from various places: library catalogue WorldCat.org, Barbara L. Talcroft’s monograph Death of the Corn King, Anthony Lawton’s blog, Sandra Garside-Neville’s bibliography, Something About the Author (from which I haven't been able to check out every lead), JSTOR. Other bibliographies I’ve checked give no additional titles.
 
But I would be rather surprised if there weren’t more essays and interviews to be found. Sutcliff’s work at shorter than book length – i.e., in anthologies and periodicals, or other ephemera – isn’t well-documented online. Needless to say, if you know of any other articles by or interviews with Sutcliff, I’d like to hear about them.

At the end of the list, I give what further details I can about five four essays I haven't got hold of, in case someone else wants to look for them. Naturally, if I ever come across them, I’ll link them here.

* One category of essays I have not included: Sutcliff’s introductions to other people’s books. That is another post.

( Read the list )

This interview by Raymond H. Thompson will be already familiar to many here, as it's been on the University of Rochester's Camelot Project website for years. It was first published in the Arthurian journal Avalon to Camelot, and was the seed of Thompson's 1999 book, Taliesin's Successors: Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature, which you can read in full on site along with a great deal of other fascinating stuff.

This is a particularly rewarding interview for Sword at Sunset fans: it goes into the medieval and modern sources she drew on, the thinking behind some of her artistic decisions (like the Bedivere-Lancelot merger), and her experience of writing the book. There's also a little bit about her more traditional YA retellings, Tristan and Iseult and her King Arthur trilogy.

What do you guys think about Sutcliff's Arthuriana?

Sutcliff's 2000-word essay on Rudyard Kipling as a children's author and her experience of reading him as a child, written for the December 1965 issue of The Kipling Journal. Sutcliff had earlier published the monograph Rudyard Kipling on the same subject in 1960; parts of the article echo it closely.

The Kipling Society has put its back issues online, so you can read the article in its original context, and the Sutcliff estate's blog has also reposted the article. The cited works by Kipling are available on Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, and other public domain book sites.