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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Rosemary Sutcliff

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

Pretty much everything that you really need to know about paganism, you can learn from the novels of Rosemary Sutcliff.

Thanks to her, I—a little tow-headed kid in suburban 1960s Steeltown, USA—grew up knowing about Samhain and Beltane, Horned Gods and Kings who Die for Corn. Each year at Samhain, I pour to her hallowed memory.

Recently, rereading her novel The Lantern Bearers, I came across a poem in which a Woman of the Other Side, one of the Undying, the Lordly Ones, calls from That Land, the Land of Youth, to a mortal listener here in our world. In the haunting images and bright enameled colors of the Celtic Otherworld, she calls, and the birds of Rhiannon sing.

 

Song of the Woman of the Sidhe

To Oisín*


The apple tree blooms white

in the Land of the Living;

the shadow of the blossom

falls across my door stone:

a bird flutters in the branches, singing.

Green is my bird

as the green earth of men,

his song is forgetfulness.

Listen, and forget the earth.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Flame Between the Antlers

Let me tell you a secret.

You know King Arthur, him we call Artos the Bear?

Well: at the heart of his story throbs the Witches' Sabbat.

Really.

I first read Rosemary Sutcliff's flawed amethyst of a masterpiece Sword at Sunset when I was still in elementary school—too young, really. It was my first Arthurian novel, and—quite frankly—it ruined me for anything else. Mallory's knights in shining armor, White's sly satirical anachronisms, Bradley's horrible nun-priestesses: none of them quite stack up in comparison to the real thing.

Because that's what you think when you read Sword: this is exactly how it must have been.

Sutcliff's Artos—our Artos—is a Dark Age Keltic chieftain in a gritty post-Roman Britain where Old Gods and Old Ways are still vibrantly, resoundingly alive, a world in which a grizzled old horse-herd, after a lifetime of work in the breeding-runs, can believe that the Horned One has finally sent him the perfect horse. A world in which Artos the Bear is raised to kingship in an impromptu coronation (after a resounding victory in battle against the Saxons) on the Eye of the White Horse of Uffington.

Sutcliff knows three things supremely well: the land of Britain, the history of Britain, and the Old Ways of Britain. In Sword at Sunset, these three knowledges, which are one knowledge, converge in one splendid, shining tale of fierce battles and piercing loves.

And at its very heart burns the blue-dark flame of the Witches' Sabbat.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Greybeard
    Greybeard says #
    I ordered a book. Haven't gotten it read yet. Thanks for the recommendation.
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    While I've come to love Mallory for his language and mystery, despite his medievalism, I find both Stewart and Paxson's Arthurian
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I took a class in Arthurian Literature in college back in the 80's. I had read some of Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy as a teenage
The Story of Saba and Brychan: A Folk-tale of the Dobunni

Saba was in love.

At fourteen summers, she was ready, and surely she was glad to be second daughter to the chief and not first. For her sister Cordaella, as chief's first daughter, was thereby Royal Woman of the tribe, whose husband would some day be king, and such things cannot be left to chance and mere liking.

Well, Cordaella was newly married and seemed pleased enough with the choice that the elders had made. But Saba, second daughter, could, in the way of things, choose for herself. And of all the young warriors, her eye had turned upon tall Brychan, he of the gray eyes and mouse-pale hair.

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