The brotherhood of men fighting a common enemy features in Blood Feud (1976), and
Frontier Wolf (1980); a rare heroine appears in A Song for a Dark Queen (1978), Boadicea’s
story told in subtly singing language by her harper. Warrior Scarlet tells of Drem, who,
physically handicapped, fails his wolf slaying test, and Knight’s Fee, is a story of the
making of a knight set amidst the Sussex downs. Often from a few known facts,
Rosemary Sutcliff created a past so vivid that she stands head and shoulders above the
rest.
Ronald Welch also wrote of battles but as a military historian. In his best book Knight
Crusader (1954) the complicated political background of the Crusades is well set but it
is the scorching heat of the Middle East on knights in full armour, that the reader
remembers. Welch wrote a number of stories of young men under all sorts of fire from
bows and arrows to tanks.
Henry Treece made the Vikings, a subject no one else of stature has tackled, very
much his own field. In his three books covering the life of Harald Sigurdson, Viking’s
Dawn (1955), The Road to Miklagard (1957) and Viking’s Sunset (1960), the ethos and
brotherhood of the Vikings is expounded in a style evolved especially for the series; it is
a little stiff to read at first until one is used to the rhythm of his prose. In The Queen’s
Brooch (1966), he wrote a powerful and dramatic story of a Roman tribune involved in
Boadicea’s uprising and subsequent defeat by Suetonius. This stands well alongside
Rosemary Sutcliff’s stories of Roman Britain, although Treece’s is a less romantic view.
Gillian Avery chose a more recent period for her domestic comedies set in Victorian
England, using the narrow confines of the lives of middle-class children to make sharp
observations on their place. There is no wealth of detail in these books, but an
impression of what it was like to be a Victorian child. The Warden’s Niece (1957), in
which Maria runs away to join her uncle, who is warden of an Oxford college, and James
Without Thomas (1959), show her gifts to the full, her dialogue being particularly
entertaining and humorous.
In 1956 Ian Serraillier was the first to use the Second World War and its aftermath as
a backdrop in a book which has become a classic, The Silver Sword. Based on fact, it
tells of a journey across post-war Europe by four Polish children searching for their
parents; a stark and heart-wrenching tale. Rifles for Watie (1957) by an American,
Harold Keith, follows Jeff, drawn into the American Civil War by high ideals, only to find
that good and bad and right and wrong are more subtle concepts than he supposed.
Across Five Aprils (1964), by Irene Hunt looks at the same subject from a different
viewpoint, that of an Illinois farming family waiting for letters from the front. Both
stories are moving accounts of the horror and muddle of war. Elizabeth George Speare
won the Newbery Medal twice; first in 1959 with The Witch of Blackbird Pond, a
portrayal of an independent girl in the fiercely Puritan New England of 1687, who
befriends a Quaker accused of being a witch. It gives a fair picture of the bigotry of the
time and of the less-than-just rule from England. It was among the first and is still one
of the best books on this subject. The Bronze Bow, which won the 1962 Newbery, in
which the author chose the unusual territory of Israel at the time of Christ, makes it
easy to understand the impact of Jesus on a boy bitter at the death of his father at the
hands of the Romans, as he listens to I His teaching, and why events followed their
tragic course.
368 HISTORICAL FICTION