bunn

The 2014 collection is open! I haven't read all the stories yet...

But I have read my gift, Fiat Justicia by opalmatrix. It's all about Aunt Honoria, a minor character in The Silver Branch who I personally consider to be more interesting than the protagonists, and she really lives up to that billing in this story, being both awesome and ruthless!

motetus drew me an Aunt Honoria as a treat, and she is a perfect fit with the story.  There is even more Aunt Honoria to look forward to in the other stories too.  She seems to be turning into something of a third century version of Judi Dench's M, which is a move that one can really only applaud delightedly.

With bonus extra Vikings!
I wrote two things for Sutcliff Swap this year, and both of them were kind of Vikingy:

Born in the Purple is ostensibly a Blood Feud story - although to be honest there is a bushel of history in there and not much more than a teaspoon of Sutcliff. My heroine, Anna Porphyrogenita, the princess of Constantinople who was sold to the Viking Rus in 988AD in return for an army, only appears by report in Blood Feud, and was a real person.

I had a lot of fun researching Constantinople and the Rus (although in the end there was less Rus than I'd intended).   It was a difficult story to write though, because it's basically the story about forced marriage that I managed to wangle my way out of writing when I wrote about Flavia.   I don't know why I chose to come back to that theme, given that I'm sure I've complained before that historical fiction has way too much rape in it, and far too few people with hernias or toothache or being trampled by cows.   Maybe next time I should make an effort and have everyone tragically trampled by cows or killed by a randomly collapsing building.

The second thing I wrote was:
Audrsaga, for osprey_archer. It's a Sword Song story, based on Sutcliff's last and posthumously published novel about a hot-tempered Viking boy who is given a five-year sentence of exile for murder in around 890AD, and spends the time wandering around Dublin and the Western isles as a sword-for-hire.   He ends up in the Hebrides and Caithness, working for first Thorstein the Red, and then his mother, Aud the Deep-minded.  Like Anna, Aud and Thorstein were real people.  Aud is one of the founder-figures of Iceland, so she appears in a number of the Icelandic sagas, as well as being one of the more memorable characters in Sword Song.    The prompt asked what Aud did after she sailed out of the book to settle on Iceland.

This was much easier to write!  According to both the sagas and Sutcliff, Aud was a portly lady in her early sixties, a Christian in a period when most Vikings weren't, and very definitely a personality.   If I hadn't been struggling to write about Anna at the same time it could easily have been much longer, and I think I may try to take it up to at least the point where Aud sets up her own settlement at Hvamm. 

Notes for The White Hare

The Eagle of the Ninth was published in 1953 - Rosemary Sutcliff's first Roman Britain book. She hadn't realised that there was no archaeology at the time that supported the idea that Exeter had a Roman occupation, and was delighted to find out, later on, that 'traces of the Second Legion were being dug up all over the city'.

Snag is, it turns out now that a lot more excavating has been done that the Second Legion occupation of Exeter was in the first century, not the second, when Eagle of the Ninth is set. It looks like the Second Legion campaigned successfully in the Southwest, then left. By the time Marcus was supposed to be posted to Isca, they had moved elsewhere, leaving their huge legionary fortress on the Red Mount largely empty, and Isca Dumnoniorum was a city served by an aqueduct (although exactly how developed it was is not entirely clear, because of medieval ground clearances which have removed a lot of the Roman bits).

( Read more...and more... and more! To the point of mild monomania, possibly. )

For some reason I am howling with laughter at the 'haunted house' in this week's Sleepy Hollow.  Supposedly this house was overtaken by fearful Eldrich Forces in the eighteenth century, and nobody has spent more than a few days in it since, because it is inhabited by a Scary. ( I don't think this is a spoiler.  Or, only a tiddler, anyway.)

Here it is: http://www.entertainmentoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Sleepy-Hollow-Sanctuary-02.jpg

It's so CLEAN!  Those bricks!  I could cheerfully eat a meal off those bricks! And that paint!  It GLOWS!

Clearly the Scary has spent most of its time since 1781 scrubbing like mad.  I wonder if I can get one to move in with me...?

Of course the whole series is riddled with anachronisms of all kinds, but (perhaps because I live in a place so damp that all surfaces turn green in weeks)  this one really spoke to me. :-D

I kept seeing people recommending this Second World War novel, about a British agent (Scottish!) and her English pilot in occupied France. Eventually, I buckled to the power of suggestion and came by a copy. Then it sat on my 'to read' shelf for ages without quite managing to pull me in. Yesterday, I finally got around to it - and got sucked in with a sort of loud SCHLOOP noise like something going horribly wrong with plumbing. I read the whole thing pretty much at one sitting.

The premise is that it's 1943, and the agent, Queenie, has been captured. The Gestapo have been torturing her (rather more torture description than I prefer to read in general, but I never felt that it tipped over into being gratuitous or self-indulgent) - and she's writing down everything she knows about the British War Effort.

For some reason, she is writing it in the form of a story told from the point of view of the female pilot who flew her to France. Queenie is an aristocratic scion of an old Scottish family, the pilot is heir to modest wealth from the new motor cycle industry, and the story is really about how they have become friends.

( Seriously, read this bit only if you have already read the book. It's a really good and enjoyable book but if you read this first it will spoil it. )
It was a bloody good book though.

"Grattius, too, writes that "great glory exalts the far-distant Celtic dogs" and refers to the Vertragus, an ancestor of the modern greyhound. "Swifter than thought or a winged bird it runs, pressing hard on the beasts it has found" (204ff).

Arrian has much to say about the dog in the Cynegeticus, written in Greek about AD 150 as a supplement to the manual of Xenophon. Arrian suggests that Xenophon must not have known of the Vetragus, which was named for its swiftness; otherwise, he never would have written that a hound cannot catch a hare except by luck. If the Vertragus does not run down the hare, it must be because of broken ground or a concealing thicket or ditch. A hare startled too close will not even have a chance to run at all.

"Splendid animals, the best bred of them, with fine eyes, fine bodies all over, fine coats, and fine appearance" (III.7), they should be long from head to tail, with a sturdy build, a muzzle that comes to a point, and large soft ears. The eyes should be prominent, large and bright and "should astonish the man who sees them" (IV.5). Again, he corrects Xenophon: "The color makes no difference, whatever it may be, not even if hounds are black or tan or white all over" (VI.1)."
(from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/canes/canes.html )

Now here was I thinking that the Large Soft Ears were just him! Not that he would catch a hare, but mostly because he agrees with Arrian : " "For one does not take hounds out in order to catch the beast, but for a race and competition, at least if one is a true sportsman."

( Read more... )

And here is the fort at Castellum. I must say my mental image of the area was more moorlandy, somehow. 

"In conducting espionage, Scipio seems to stand out as an exception among Roman commanders.  When his siege of Utica was stalled, he sent a legation to the camp of the Numidian King Syphax.  Scipio's emissaries were accompanied by centurions disguised as slaves.

The legate Gaius Laelius was fearful that one of these men, Lucius Statorius, might be recognised since he had visited the camp before.  To protect his agent's cover, Laelius caned him publicly.  This episode plays upon the known Roman practice of subjecting only social inferiors  to corporal punishment, and is of particular interest because it specifically identifies centurions and tribunes as active participants in espionage missions.

While the legates were in conference, the "slaves" were to wander about the camp in different directions and reconnoiter the premises, taking note of entrances, exits and the location of each division."

- Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome : Trust in the Gods, but Verify by Rose Mary Sheldon.

Clearly concerned that the Romans were pulling ahead in the field of melodrama, Hannibal responded by inventing Snakes on a Ship.  Which is where you fill a lot of pots with venomous snakes and fling them at your enemies' ships, hoping that their barefooted sailors will all jump into the sea in horror.

I was told today that when foundations were being laid for the new road bridge across the Tamar in Launceston some years ago, the excavations uncovered a set of Roman bridge foundations. (Launceston may, or may not, be the same place that is called Uxelis in Ptolemy's Geography). The internet knows nothing of this intriguing fact(ish)*. My source is the business partner of the coordinating civil engineer on the bridge (now retired).

This sort of thing is the reason that I still haven't got my 'Marcus Goes To Dumnonia' story into any kind of order despite having started it about a year and a half ago. I am almost tempted to ditch it as fiction and issue it as a local history leaflet instead. :-D


*factish is a word I think I have just invented for something that may, or may not, be a fact. 

Kathleen Herbert wrote a selection of fascinating academic books about interesting topics - Women in Early English Society, Lost Gods of England, English Heroic Legends. All of these are topics where the available evidence is, like the books, a bit slim, but she packs what information there is in and they make a nice change from the usual endless ecclesiastical stuff that fills books about Anglo Saxon England.

So, when I discovered she had also written some historical novels set in seventh century Northumbria and Mercia, I was really keen to read them. These are : Queen of the Lightning, and the sequel, Ghost in the Sunlight.
( Apparently I had a very great deal to say about these rather obscure books. )