George Whyte-Melville: another Victorian literary influence on Sutcliff?

[smillaraaq]

As many of you Gentle Readers already know, the Usual Suspects behind this comm are prone to getting into long discussions about the names Sutcliff gave her characters, trying to identify their sources and picking them apart linguistically. Esca's name has been a particular puzzlement for all of us, because unlike so many of her other "Celtic"

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[carmarthen]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOT ENOUGH ! IN THE WORLD.

Well, well, well. I still think "Esca" works as a British name (and more appropriately to the period than just about anything else in her books except Cunorix and Cunoval and a couple others), but this seems like a much, much more likely source for Sutcliff to have found the name.

And it makes me wonder where THIS author got it from, especially since they don't seem to have realized that 'esca' is a perfectly good Latin word that would be a bizarre name to any Roman.

I am going to try to track down a copy of BRH; from what I've heard it doesn't talk about the writing of EOT9, but I will keep an eye out for mentions of Whyte-Melville.

IN CONCLUSION: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[smillaraaq]

Yeah, I'd love to see if there's anything out there where Sutcliff herself talks specifically about this book, but between the enslaved-British-prince-turned-gladiator Esca and his loyalty to an affectionate Roman master, the unsympathetic and effete Tribune Placidus, and the wealthy society matron Valeria, not to mention two of her favorite recurring hound names in the same passage, I think it's pretty safe to call this one a blatant influence! If the biographical article is to be believed Whyte-Melville is one of the authors Sutcliff's mother read to her when she was small, so there might be some mention of him in BRH.

And I simply do not have enough capslock and exclamation points in the world to express my glee at finding this. (Modified rapture only due to there being no clean human-proofread versions on Project Gutenberg yet, so I'm having to strain my eyes on scans straight from the original book -- the plaintext version is full of small but annoying OCR errors and the ereader conversions are even worse...)

[carmarthen]

*nods* Man, I can't believe she didn't even change the names more (!).

I want to read this so much. :-(

[smillaraaq]

They must have made a serious impression on her!

(I've now made it up to the first chapter with Esca's master Caius Licinus -- he's much more of an Uncle Aquila retired-officer type than a Marcus, more master-as-foster-father than master-as-bromantic-BFF. I am calling it for the record RIGHT NOW that I suspect Esca's mother will turn out to have been Licinus' lost British love Guenebra.)

[smillaraaq]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I was right. Esca's mother was the sweetheart of Licinus' youth, who wound up married to a stern British chieftain after they were parted for reason of plot, and Licinus was immediately drawn to purchase the wounded British slave, and so affectionately disposed towards him, because of the subconsciously-perceived resemblance. Like Uncle Aquila, he had his one great love and remained a bachelor for life after he was parted from her. (And there's even a tragic post-mortem reunion scene that's more than a little reminiscent of the bit where Artos and men find Rowena's body in Sword At Sunset...)

[smillaraaq]

BWA-HA-HA. So by Chapter XV the eeeeeeeeevil scheming Placidus is setting Esca up for a gladiatorial challenge, with himself as a retiarus and Esca as a secutor! HISTORY REPEATING.

[tehomet]

Sprry to interject, but may I ask what Esca means in Latin?

[carmarthen]

'Meat' or 'bait' or 'animal food,' more or less.

[tehomet]

Thank you very much!