Things Rosemary Sutcliff Did Not Make Up

[bunn]

In googling for something quite other, I found an old discussion of Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset (a book of which I am unreasonably fond), in which the commenters lay into the author for having written on a topic they found distasteful.  Incest.   Yes, they felt that including incest in an Arthurian story was something that rendered the whole book unreadable.  

 I assume they haven't read Malory.  Good grief.   I then became annoyed, and wished to share my annoyance with The Internet.   Then I had a long agonised internal debate with myself whether to use my 'history' tag for this post.  This was quite ludicrous. I am therefore tagging it 'loons' and including myself in the tag... 

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Not read Malory, certainly. Or T.H.White, come to that. And I read both in my early teens. I'm not fond of Sutcliffe, myself, but I love both Malory and White.

The sort of people who want warnings on books in the same way they insist on excessive warnings in fan fiction and want the 'n-word' removed from Huckleberry Finn/.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

"...and want the 'n-word' removed from Huckleberry Finn/."


Or indeed 'The Dambusters'.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I'm more upset about the Twain, in that the purpose of the book is to highlight the treatment of Black slaves (and freedmen) in the Southern States, and that Jim is more intelligent and more courageous than the supposed hero of the book.

I can see the point of view of the film makers in respect of The Dam Busters remake. They're almost sure to muck around with history anyway (the original film did too, to a small extent, including exaggerating the impact of the raid) and that code word (and animal name) while historically accurate, is just going to cause trouble if left in - and would probably mean an 18 rating in this country and an R in the States, when they are all almost certainly aiming for a 12...