Sword at Sunset by Sutcliff

[Mithfanion]

This is hailed as a classic of Arthurian legend retellings and has just been reprinted in a handsome format. Has anyone here read it? If yes, what did you think? Does it measure up to Stewart and Cornwell's fine trilogies?

 

[Mary Hoffman]

This is hailed as a classic of Arthurian legend retellings and has just been reprinted in a handsome format. Has anyone here read it? If yes, what did you think? Does it measure up to Stewart and Cornwell's fine trilogies?

I haven't read Stewart and Cornwell but I HAVE read Sword at Sunset and its one of my favourite books. It tells the story as it might have happened in history, without magic. But Sutcliff also wrote a trilogy of retellings of the Arthur legends, which are also very fine. Mary

 

[murphy]

I read this years ago and remember being very impressed at the time. I haven't done a reread, so I don't remember a lot about it.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I, too, read it so long ago that I don't remember much about it (maybe nothing, since it's merged in my mind with so many other Arthurian retellings), except that I liked it very much at the time.

It's one of those books I mean to reread, but somehow never do.

 

[Clansman]

I wonder how it compares to Jack Whyte's telling of the Arthurian legends, which was similarly a "guess at a historical" account without the fantastic elements usually associated with the stories.

 

[murphy]

It was the first time I had ever read a story of Arthur that could be a factual accounting of actual events. That's what I found so impressive.

 

[Clansman]

It was the first time I had ever read a story of Arthur that could be a factual accounting of actual events. That's what I found so impressive.

You would probably then enjoy Jack Whyte. He did an interpretation of the Arthurian legend in rather historical way, and quite differently from Mary Stewart.

 

[murphy]

You would probably then enjoy Jack Whyte. He did an interpretation of the Arthurian legend in rather historical way, and quite differently from Mary Stewart.

I read most of the Jack Whyte books, except for the last two or three. I did enjoy them, but there was a different feel about them from the Sutcliffe book. The first of anything is always the one that impresses itself on your mind. Gillian Bradshaw also did a fine trilogy on the Arthur legend.

 

[Riselka]

This is what Jack Whyte had to say about Sutcliffe's Sword at Sunset on his own message board recently:

Also, there's a brand new edition of one of my favourite books of all time, recently published by Chicago Review Press and containing a new foreword by me. This book, Sword At Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliffe, was the first novel I ever read that treated King Arthur as what he must have been, a British, post-Roman warlord. I didn't know it at the time, but that book's effect on me was to change my entire life and it gave me the start of the perspectives I would form on Arthur's Britain over the decades that followed. It's been out of print for years and years, but this is the fortieth anniversary of its original publication and I was stunned when the editors at CRP aproached me to write a foreword for the re-issue they were preparing.

 

[Clansman]

That is very cool. I'll have to pick Sutcliffe's book up.

 

[Mithfanion]

The new edition has the entire foreword by Whyte in it, but it's not so much that you should buy the book just for that, but rather for itself.

 

[Clansman]

That's what I meant. I'm not a huge Whyte fan, but read a lot of his stuff back in the 90's. I never finished the series, because it wasn't finished, though I will probably return. I found Whyte very intelligent and engaging, and if the author was that inspired by Sutcliff, it is worth a good look.