Winged in a Wheelchair: Celebrating the Literary Magic of Children’s Author Rosemary Sutcliff

“Raw with newness.” That’s a phrase from the most famous book by the great English writer Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). She’s describing Hadrian’s Wall, the giant Roman fortification completed in about 130 A.D., nearly two thousand years ago. That’s what the book, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), allows both children and adults to do: fly back through the centuries to a world where Hadrian’s Wall is new and Celtic Britain part-conquered by Imperial Rome. Sutcliff had a very powerful pair of what another great English writer, Lytton Strachey, once called “the wings of Historic Imagination.” And she was a winged wordsmith in more ways than one, skilled at breathing life into what Homer called ἔπεα πτερόεντα, epea pteroenta, “winged words” that could fly without limit through space and time.

Tamed wolves and honey cakes

Her words had wings because she had wings. Sutcliff could fly back into the past of the British Isles with the speed and strength of an eagle. Once she was there, she could transform into another kind of bird. She was a literary hummingbird too, darting and dipping and hovering, able to examine people and clothing, buildings and weapons in minute detail and from every angle. And then, with the magic of words, she could make her readers see those details too: the brand of Mithraic initiation between the brows of a Roman officer; the wind-and-water-like whorls decorating a Celtic shield; the crumbling red sandstone of an abandoned fort in the northern wilds.

Winged in a wheelchair: Rosemary Sutcliff and her most famous book

But sight isn’t the only sense she can evoke with surety and skill. When you read Sutcliff, you hear, smell, touch and taste the past centuries of Britain too. You hear “the bright notes of a struck harp” in the Saxon town she brought to life in The Lantern Bearers (1959). You smell “roasting meat, and seaweed, and dung” there. You touch the fur of a tamed wolf in Eagle of the Ninth and taste “honey cakes” cooked by a slave called Sassticca (sic). The past lives for all of the senses in Sutcliff’s books. And so does the present. She could evoke what has been lost for millennia and also what is still here, because she knew and loved Britain’s wildlife and wildflowers, streams and stones, light and landscape. She could give life to foxes and ferns and rivers and rain and everything else that came before and lived on after the Romans. Here is the Roman protagonist of Eagle of the Ninth experiencing two thousand years ago in the far north what some of us still experience today:

Marcus sat with his hands locked round his updrawn knees and stared out over the firth. The sun was hot on the nape of his neck, scorching his shoulders through the cloth of his tunic. … He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the birch-woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 12)

That’s an example of how Sutcliff had learned from one of her own literary heroes. As a child, she had praised Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) to her mother, saying that “other people write about things from the outside in, but Kipling writes about them from the inside out.” Sutcliff too wrote from the inside out, allowing her readers to experience the world of her characters with all the senses. And with all the emotions and intellect. In her books, Sutcliff is always contrasting and connecting the human world and the world of nature, just as she’s always contrasting and connecting civilization and barbarism. There are two young men at the heart of Eagle of the Ninth, a Roman called Marcus and a Celt called Esca. They become friends across the gulfs of culture and experience that separate them. Again and again, there’s contrast and connection. First Esca is slave to Marcus, then he’s freed by Marcus. First the two of them live on Roman territory to the south, then they pass beyond the raw newness of Hadrian’s Wall and enter the barbarian north:

[T]hey rode together in companionable silence, their horses’ unshod hooves almost soundless on the rough turf. No roads in the wilderness and no shoe-smiths either. The country south of the Wall had been wild and solitary enough, but the land through which they rode that day seemed to hold no living thing save the roe-deer and the mountain fox; and though only the man-made wall shut it off from the south, the hills here seemed more desolate and the distances darker.

It was almost like seeing a friendly face in a crowd of strangers when, long after noon, they came dipping down over a shoulder of the high moors into a narrow glen through which a thread of white water purled down over shelving stones, where the rowan trees were in flower, filling the warm air with the scent of honey. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 11)

That’s another good example of Sutcliff’s literary skill and powers of evocation, of the contrasts she could draw and the connections she should make. A change in landscape is like a friendly face, familiar amid forbidding wilderness. But Marcus and Esca had known the wild even while they lived in a Roman town far to the south. They need to test the loyalty of a wolf they’ve tamed in cubhood, so they release him to explore a forest, then wait to see if he returns:

In their silence, the wild had drawn close in to the two in the vantage point. Presently a red glint slipping through the uncurling bracken and young foxgloves at the lower end of the clearing told them where a vixen passed. She paused an instant in full view, her pointed muzzle raised, the sun shining with almost metallic lustre on her coat; then she turned in among the trees. And watching the russet glint of her flicker out of sight, Marcus found himself thinking of Cottia. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 9)

Cottia is a Celtic girl with red hair; Marcus is a dark-haired Roman forced out of military service by a wounded thigh. They both live in Britain, but Cottia is like the native fox, Marcus is a foreigner, an outsider to the Celts. But he’s learned to speak Celtic just as Cottia has learned to speak Latin. And she’s an outsider in a Roman town. Sutcliff is always contrasting separate worlds and always exploring the ways in which they meet and mingle: the wild and the human; the barbaric and the civilized; the Celtic and the Roman. Her own name captures those contrasts and comminglings. Like her books, it embraces complexities of culture, language and religion. The name of the herb rosemary is ultimately from the pagan Latin ros marinus, meaning “sea-dew.” But it’s become assimilated to the name of Mary, mother of God in Christianity. Sutcliff is an Anglo-Saxon name from the great northern county of Yorkshire. It literally means “south cliff,” with assimilation of -th to the following consonant. And the “u” represents an older pronunciation, before the Great Vowel Shift that converted monophthongal oo into diphthongal ow in words like “south” and “mouth” and “drought.”

That took place after 1350. Except that it didn’t in some parts of northern Britain. You can still hear the ancient pure vowel in Scottish cities like Glasgow and English cities like Newcastle, where those words are “sooth,” “mooth,” “drooth.” And some Scots still pronounce the fricative consonant of gh, preserved in modern spelling but long vanished from the mouths of most speakers of English. The British Isles are rich and complex in all manner of ways: landscape and history, language and culture, flora and fauna. These green islands have been washed over by repeated waves of invasion, have retained the past here, mutated the past there, lost the past elsewhere. Rosemary Sutcliff was a winged wordsmith who could bring all of that richness and complexity to life with the magic of simple black marks on plain white paper.

Miniatures, not megalomania

But she was “winged” in two ways. To be winged can mean to possess and use wings or to be wounded in the wings, unable to fly. Both senses applied to Rosemary Sutcliff. She could vividly evoke the violent deeds of a cavalry charge or the valiant daring of chariot-racing in her writing, but she was in fact a cripple who was unable to ride or run or even leave the confines of a wheelchair. In early childhood she had been struck by Still’s disease or systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, as modern medicine calls it. That’s an ugly collocation for an ugly condition that condemns its victims to chronic pain and confinement. I can still remember the shock I felt when I first saw that photograph of the adult Sutcliff in a wheelchair (see above). Her arms are stubbed by Still’s, her hands seem almost useless, and one shoulder is much smaller than the other. It seemed obscene that such a lively and light-winged writer should be trapped in such a pitiful and powerless body. But Sutcliff is smiling in the photograph. Her spirit is unbowed and she knows she has wings.

Nietzsche says “Nein!” to Marx

I’m reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche, another great White writer whose literary wings carried him to great heights and across vast distances, despite chronic illness and bodily infirmity. But Nietzsche had huge flaws and succumbed to megalomania and madness. Sutcliff never did. She isn’t just smiling in her photograph: she looks sensible. As she began her adult life, Sutcliff didn’t begin feeding megalomania but dedicated herself to miniatures. Like Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), another great English children’s writer, she first worked as an artist before she turned to literature. She was an only child like Potter too and like Potter she never had children of her own.

That must have been part of why both women chose to write for the children of others, conjuring the joys and wonders, the sorrows and sadness, of the world for boys and girls they would never meet. Potter is far more famous today, thanks in part to the way she combined words and images and to her more obvious humour. But I think Sutcliff was the better and more subtle writer. There’s an acute intelligence and insight in her books that most young readers will fully appreciate only when they return to the books as adults.

Autographic Eagle

It’s often disappointing to return to a childhood favorite like that. But not when the book is by Rosemary Sutcliff. She doesn’t condescend to her readers or try to soften the sorrow and suffering of the world. Unlike the past she conjured so well, sorrow and suffering were things she knew in the flesh. I didn’t know about her illness when I read her as a child; re-reading her as an adult, I can see the autobiography in her stories. There are constant themes of health shattered and hopes dashed, then of rehabilitation and happiness restored by hard work and unshaken will. In Eagle of the Ninth, her young protagonist Marcus looks forward to a long career in the legions, but is invalided out of his first command after being seriously wounded in a battle with rebellious Celtic tribesmen. He has to overcome pain and endure operations without anaesthetic before he’s able to ride a horse and seek adventure again. There’s autobiography and wish-fulfilment there. And there’s autobiographic symbolism in the quest that Marcus undertakes after his recovery. Sutcliff describes the genesis of the book like this in her foreword:

Sometime about the year 117 A.D., the Ninth Legion, which was stationed at Eburacum where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again.

During the excavations at Silchester nearly eighteen hundred years later, there was dug up under the green fields which now cover the pavements of Calleva Atrebatum [Calleva of the Atrebates], a wingless Roman Eagle, a cast of which can be seen to this day in Reading Museum. Different people have had different ideas as to how it came to be there, but no one knows, just as no one knows what happened to the Ninth Legion after it marched into the northern mists.

It is from these two mysteries, brought together, that I have made the story of ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’. (The Eagle of the Ninth, foreword)

And the story is that a rumour comes to the civilized south telling of a Roman eagle honoured in the rites of a remote Celtic tribe beyond Hadrian’s wall. Invalided out of service and uncertain about his future when he hears the rumor, Marcus guesses that it was inspired by the lost eagle of his father’s old legion, now preserved and honored by the tribe that wiped out the Ninth Hispana. So he goes in quest of the eagle with his freed slave Esca, hoping to return to civilization with it and enable the legion to be reformed. He’s half successful, retrieving the eagle but unable to reform the legion. The eagle has lost its wings, after all. It can no longer fly. It’s aquila non alata, a wingless eagle. There’s important — and autobiographic — symbolism there that Sutcliff would pursue in two sequels, The Silver Branch (1957) and The Lantern Bearers (1959), the latter of which won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction.

From Greek to Latin to Saxon

In The Lantern Bearers, there’s a Roman soldier who doesn’t befriend a slave but actually becomes a slave himself. He’s captured by some of the Saxon raiders tearing at the dying remnants of Roman Britain in the fifth century. The soldier is dark-headed Aquila, meaning Eagle, and he owes his life to a dolphin tattoo that he bears on one shoulder. The tattoo catches the eye of a golden-haired young Saxon, whose raiding party need a new oarsman. And so they enslave Aquila rather than kill him, taking him away to servitude far from home. He introduces his new masters to old Homer, when they belatedly find a scroll in one of their items of loot, a “bronze box beautifully and curiously enriched with blue and green enamels.” The scroll is a Latin translation of the ninth book of the Odyssey. After he persuades them not to burn it as mysterious and perhaps maleficent magic, Aquila translates the scroll again, turning it into the new tongue he’s learnt living amongst them.

They’re captivated by Homer’s winged words, flown from Greek to Latin to Saxon. A “fierce old warrior” feels kinship with the warrior-sailor Odysseus and tells Aquila: “Speak me more words of this seafarer who felt even as I did when I was young and followed the whale’s road.” Sutcliff is contrasting and commingling again: a literate Roman and illiterate Saxons; a southern story that delights a northern audience. But even as she’s celebrating the power of her own storytelling craft, she’s celebrating the magic of the written word. Homer was millennia dead even in Aquila’s day and he too had lived in a world without writing. But when his winged words were set down on papyrus, they became what the Roman poet Horace called aere perennius, “more lasting than bronze.” And as writing they would fly further than blind Homer — or many sighted Homers — could ever have dreamed.

Cut off, not connected

Homer’s words flew to Rosemary Sutcliff among countless others. They inspired her to create winged words of her own. Now Sutcliff herself is dead, following her heroes Homer and Kipling into whatever awaits us beyond Ianuae Mortis, the Gates of Death. But, like theirs, her winged words are still flying. And they’ll continue to take flight within the brain of whoever takes up one of her books. It’s just today that her words don’t fly as often as they should. For decades, her books have been connecting White British children with their ancestry and their history. But modern leftists want White British children to be cut off, not connected. Sutcliff is no longer a fashionable writer and leftists see her power to conjure the past for White British children as a danger, not a delight. After all, increasing numbers of children in Britain are neither White nor British. Leftists don’t value the past for its power to enrich and enlighten the present.

Alien faces, alien races: Rosemary Sutcliff was not writing for non-British children like these (leftist propaganda at the British National Health Service or NHS)

No, they value it for its power to breed either shame or resentment. Leftists want White children to feel shame about British history and non-White children to feel resentment. That aids the leftist project to destroy the West and rule the ruins. The wonderful books of Rosemary Sutcliff don’t aid that project, which is why her words are taking wing in the brains of fewer and fewer children. Yes, she was “disabled” but she didn’t center her identity on her misfortune. She didn’t distill bitterness and envy from her suffering or try to instill them in her readers. Sickness and suffering are often present in her stories, but they’re there to be transcended by her heroes and heroines.

“All along the boughs”

Mostly her heroes, because Sutcliff didn’t center her identity on her sex either. Something else that makes her books wholly unsuitable in leftist eyes is that she didn’t hate men or seek to subvert masculinity. Worse still, she didn’t hate Whites or Western civilization. Darting and dipping and hovering like a hummingbird, she saw and described civilization and barbarism from all sides, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Modern leftist education rejects her because her sympathies were too wide and her subtleties too skilful. And because her history was rooted in reality, not based on bollocks. Her books don’t support the absurdities of what I call Black Bullshit Month, which pretends that the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (145-211 AD) was Black because he was born in northern Africa. Indeed, Black Bullshit Month pretends that Severus was both Black and British, because he lived in Britain for a time.

When Rosemary Sutcliff died in 1992, that kind of nonsense hadn’t conquered British education and children’s literature wasn’t devoted to the worship of darkness in all senses — not the darkness of non-White migrants or the darkness of perverted ideologies. Sutcliff didn’t create Somali heroes or celebrate transgenderism. She didn’t pour poison into children’s brains. No, she conjured beauty and understanding in their brains instead. But she certainly knew darkness and evil. The stale pale males in her books experience suffering, cruelty and loss, then overcome all three in both body and spirit. And when their bright world is overwhelmed by the dark, they know that the dark will not reign for ever. That’s the central message of books like The Lantern Bearers. Roman Aquila is a soldier who became a slave then a soldier again, an eagle who’s winged, wingless, then winged again. And this is what the reader sees through his eyes in the closing words of the book:

He looked up at the old damson tree, and saw the three stars of Orion’s belt tangled in the snowy branches. Someone, maybe Ness [his Celtic wife], had hung out a lantern in the colonnade, and in the star-light and the faint and far-most fringe of the lantern glow it was as though the damson tree had burst into blossom; fragile, triumphant blossom all along the boughs.

Further reading

• Rosemary Sutcliff, the official website

• Celebration of Sutcliff at the Critic, which calls her a “writer of genius, capable of conveying the feelings and lives of those who lived in the distant past”