The Liebster Blog Award

A big thank you to Carla Nayland for giving The Bard’s Nest the Liebster (German for ‘favourite’) Blog Award!  

The rules of the Liebster Award are:

     Thank your Liebster Blog Award presenter on your blog and link back to the blogger who presented this award to you.

     Answer the 11 questions from the nominator, list 11 random facts about yourself and create 11 questions for your nominees.

     Present the Liebster Blog Award to 11 blogs of 200 followers or less who you feel deserve to be noticed and leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been chosen.

     Copy and Paste the blog award on your blog

Here are my answers to Carla’s questions:

What's your favourite novel and what do you love about it?

-I generally find it hard to pick favourites of this sort, but I'll make an exception in this case: Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff, for the sheer power of the storytelling and the depth of emotion she conveys.  

Do you have any pet peeves in historical fiction?

-Excessive gadzookery. Historical inaccuracies that could have been easily prevented by checking in a book or, more recently, by just Googling phrases like 'did they have cucumbers in early medieval Britain?'    

What are you most proud of?

-In terms of something I've done? Probably the novel I finished a few years ago. (Now I just need to finish revising it...)

Your favourite and least favourite people in history?  (As few or as many as you like!)

-I do have a soft spot for Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth I's favourite godson, best known for inventing a flushing toilet (you can read more about him in my blog post here). I also like Henry IV of France for the fact that he seems to have been a capable ruler genuinely interested in the welfare of even his poorer subjects.

-Least favourite: A few too many to list…

The country, city or other place you'd most like to visit?

-There are a lot, so just picking one at random: Germany.

Which five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?

-Dumnorix (1^st century BC anti-Roman Gaul); Cartimandua (1^st century AD queen of the Brigantes); Vortigern (by tradition early medieval usurper and tyrant extraordinaire); Taliesin (6^th century British bard) and Myrddin (the original Merlin, lived sometime in the 6^th century). All shadowy figures – some viewed less positively than others – whose lives and times I’d like to know more about.

Facebook or Twitter or neither?

-Neither.

What's one of your goals for the future?

-To actually write the novel I'm currently researching...

What's your favourite season?

-I like all the seasons, as long as the weather isn't horrendous!

Dogs or cats or neither?

-Dogs, no contest. 

What's your favourite hobby?

-Writing, researching for writing, and reading fiction. Weaving and drawing. And walking in the countryside.

11 blogs I enjoy and think are well worth a visit:

A Lot of Gaul

Diane L. Major

Elizabeth Chadwick

Esmeralda's Cumbrian History and Folklore

Gemæcca

Lucienne Boyce

Royalty Free Fiction

Sally Wilde

Sir Read-A-Lot

The Lost Fort

Trifolium Books

I know several of these have already been nominated at least once; please feel free to take part as you choose and do as much or as little as you’d like.

The Shining Company - Rosemary Sutcliff

(Currently OOP. My edition: Bodley Head, 1990, 260 pages, ISBN: 0370314670)

It has been many years since Arthur, Britain’s famous warrior-king, drove the Anglo-Saxon invaders back from the lands of the Britons. Now the tide is beginning to turn once again, and Mynyddog, king of Gododdin, summons young princes from throughout the British tribes in a bid to forge a crack fighting force which could crush the Anglo-Saxon advance forever. Prosper, second son of a petty chieftain of Gwynedd, has longed to travel to the foreign lands of merchants' tales; but his call to adventure comes from much closer to home. Summoned by the Gwynedd prince Gorthyn, Prosper travels north alongside him to share in the training, the feasting, the drawing together of a brotherhood of warriors who will ride to meet the Anglo-Saxons at Catraeth. They are the Companions – the Shining Company.

Rosemary Sutcliff took her inspiration for the novel from a northern British poem, ‘Y Gododdin’, composed by the bard Aneirin some time in the 6^th or 7^th century. This tells of the titular tribe’s attack on Catraeth, whilst also eulogising the warriors involved. Many of those men named in the poem appear in the novel, but Prosper, along with his family and close friends, is fictional.

At the novel’s beginning, Prosper is still a boy with some growing to do. Honest, possessed of a sense of justice and given to bursts of compassion, nevertheless he can also be self-absorbed and bordering on arrogant where his inferiors are concerned. I sometimes found him hard to like, but the truth is that as well as being about the conflict between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons, The Shining Company is about a boy maturing into a young man, gaining new perspectives and a deeper understanding of love, friendship, hatred; and, of course, war. This is a novel which doesn’t just show us a campaign and the warband fighting it, but takes a long, hard look at everything that goes into both, from the bonds and petty rivalries that grow during training, to the devastation of losing one’s companions in battle. Sutcliff has never been a writer to glorify war, but this novel stands out for me both for its vivid images, which manage to be raw yet not brutal, and its unflinching depiction of the acute mental distress, the anger, bewilderment and loneliness, felt by those warriors who have survived when their friends haven’t.

Like other Sutcliff novels I’ve read, The Shining Company elicits a profound sense of the past, not only in drawing the reader back to Prosper’s time, but in showing that Prosper, too, is aware of what has gone before. Carvings in an old Roman fort made by men long dead, which Prosper adds too; a boundary stone that, like those before him, he touches as he passes by; the myths and legends of pagan forebears – all these bring out a continuity, a sense of shared humanity, which throws the characters and events of the novel into relief. I’m not especially keen on the writing style Sutcliff uses here, which seems a little more old-fashioned than in some of her other novels and is inclined to produce a slightly stilted tone, but it does help to convey the stretch of time between narrator and reader, while at the same time remaining comprehensible. The prose seemed sparser than in some of the other novels by Sutcliff which I’ve read recently, but still had her characteristic touch, that limpid, immediate imagery which makes her characters and their surroundings both beautifully and hauntingly real.

A map at the front of the book places the relevant tribes within Britain and shows the major locations which appear in the novel, whilst an Author’s Note at the end gives the background to the story. 

Poignant tale of friendship and loss amid the conflicts of early medieval Britain.