The lamps are going out
The idea of the 'lights going out' and the barbarian darkness flooding in comes up a lot in Sutcliff - in the Lantern Bearers, of course, Sword at Sunset, and Dawn Wind - but also in the Silver Branch, where even though it's only 293, the aspiring emperor Carausius can apparently forsee a future where Britain might have to stand alone against the barbarian hordes and his claim to be emperor is justified in terms of strengthening the province against that time.
In Dawn Wind, the 'light' is I *think* more or less explicitly Christian - it comes with Augustine and his monks (I love Sutcliff for the ambivalent way she paints Augustine!), but also lingers on Priscus and Priscilla and their little wild preacher in the Welsh hills.
Arguably the light is somewhat Christian in the Lantern Bearers too, with Paulinus, the conspirator who sacrifices himself to save the other characters from Allectus's barbarian guards, but of course it isn't in Eagle of the Ninth, where Marcus's god Mithras and Esca's Lugh of the Long Spear are both portrayed as light-bringers against the darkness of the Horned God.
I think in The Lantern Bearers, she draws her clearest picture with light, and the light isn't Christian at all there. I think Sutcliff sees light as to do with literacy. You get that heart-breaking picture of the little farm where free people - men and women - are listening to The Odyssey being read by candlelight, and then suddenly outside, darkness and axes and flame and the end of the world...
Artos thinks of his heritage as having a dark side, a 'woman's side' which is none the less 'nearest the heart' - I find that interesting, because Artos is often a bit black and white in his attitudes - in his war on the Saxons: he barely seems to see them as human.
The idea of the 'lamps going out', I think has a definite resonance with the first World War quote ("The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time") and I wondered if that's deliberate.
In Dawn Wind, the 'light' is I *think* more or less explicitly Christian - it comes with Augustine and his monks (I love Sutcliff for the ambivalent way she paints Augustine!), but also lingers on Priscus and Priscilla and their little wild preacher in the Welsh hills.
Arguably the light is somewhat Christian in the Lantern Bearers too, with Paulinus, the conspirator who sacrifices himself to save the other characters from Allectus's barbarian guards, but of course it isn't in Eagle of the Ninth, where Marcus's god Mithras and Esca's Lugh of the Long Spear are both portrayed as light-bringers against the darkness of the Horned God.
I think in The Lantern Bearers, she draws her clearest picture with light, and the light isn't Christian at all there. I think Sutcliff sees light as to do with literacy. You get that heart-breaking picture of the little farm where free people - men and women - are listening to The Odyssey being read by candlelight, and then suddenly outside, darkness and axes and flame and the end of the world...
Artos thinks of his heritage as having a dark side, a 'woman's side' which is none the less 'nearest the heart' - I find that interesting, because Artos is often a bit black and white in his attitudes - in his war on the Saxons: he barely seems to see them as human.
The idea of the 'lamps going out', I think has a definite resonance with the first World War quote ("The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time") and I wondered if that's deliberate.