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Sword At Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff (view source)
Revision as of 06:48, 10 December 2012
, 06:48, 10 December 2012no edit summary
In England, Robin Hood and his merry men, is one such. The other is King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
It is this latter that Sutcliff chose. No-one is really sure who King Arthur was, but whoever he was any notion of French chivalric tradition later associated with him was clearly ""''spin""''. He existed – if he existed – in a time of turmoil. The Romans had deserted, the civilisation they had brought was slowly being allowed to disintegrate (probably for the lack of funds to keep it up as much as anything else), but the British were hanging on.
Two problems.
Secondly: there were the Saxons. They were interlopers, and they were bent on domination.
It would take a miracle to unite the tribes and defeat the Saxons. And so miracles were ascribed… miracles and magic and betrayal…all the stuff of legends. The sword in the stone. The magician Merlin. Dragons arising out of mountains. The half-sister Morgan le Fay and the dreaded fate of Mordred. The beautiful Guinevere who would betray Arthur's love with his closest comrade in arms, Lancelot. (And that's before we start to wonder if there ever was a round table or go off with Sir Gawain after the Holy Grail).
Sutcliff ignores all of this in large measure in her re-telling of the Arthurian legend. As in her other historical novels, she allows for a certain amount of a certain kind of what might, to some eyes, just possibly look like magic, but mostly she goes to the record (such as it is), goes to the archaeological evidence and asks: what might it really have been like. ? If any of this, she seems to ask, had any origin in truth, what might that truth have been?
In the short author's note that precedes the tale she sets out her stall. For her, there was ''No knight in shining armour, no Round Table, no many-towered Camelot; but a Romano-British war leader, to whom, when the Barbarian darkness came flooding in, the last guttering lights of civilisation seemed worth fighting for.''
And those battles are won without the help of wizardly intervention but by the usual combination of better tactics, ability to use the lie of the land, more advanced equipment and weaponry and the necessary dose of luck.
The story is told by Arthur himself, as he lies dying. It is a memoir full of glorious deeds, but also of an unasked for love that could not be rendered, of deep friendships and comradeship. His beautiful wife brings as her dowry not a round table for debating around, but a hundred fighting men and her brother to lead them. Artos the bear as he known affectionately right up until the decisive battle of Badon which will see him anointed something akin (but not quite) to High King, also speaks of his animals. His horses and dogs mean as much to him as his Company. ""''The Companions"" '' Sutcliff calls them. It's a perennial idea no doubt echoed in all the war stories in all the world. For me it called to mind Cornwell's ""''Chosen Men"" '' in the Sharpe stories.
There are all the rituals and superstitions you might expect of a story set in ancient Britain, a time when the old religions and the new were existing side by side. It is a largely Christian country already, but followers of Mithras are still unremarkable, and who knows what the little dark people of the forest believe.
The Arthurian legend may well be a fairy tale, but even fairy tales work best when they are told in a way that makes them easy to believe. Sutcliff did a stunning job with this one.
For those who know nothing of the Arthurian legend, I might advise caution in reading this book. It will spoil the delights of the traditional tales if this is your first encounter with the once and future king. Go read some of the more fantastical renditions first. Go especially to Monmouth's telling. But then come back.
For everyone else, brought up as I was on tales of Camelot, this is the ""''grown up"" '' version of the story. A ''truth'' that is even easier to believe in.
If you want to know what might have happened next, try [[Bloodline by Katy Moran]] which follows Cei after Arthur's death.