"History and Time" is a paper presented by Rosemary Sutcliff at a conference entitled "Travellers in Time" held by Children's Literature New England at Cambridge University's Newnham College from 6–12 August 1989. The essay discusses ancient conceptions of time and cycles in history, the use of historical fiction in teaching history, and her own writing process.
It also refers to an anecdote covered in greater detail in the earlier "Combined Ops" and reuses some text from "History is People." Struggles with the composition of Black Ships Before Troy, inspirations for The Shield Ring and "Flowering Dagger," and connections between Frontier Wolf and The Shining Company, Warrior Scarlet and Knight's Fee are also discussed.
The essay was published in the conference proceedings Travelers in Time: Past, Present, and to Come (1990) and reprinted in the 2001 anthology Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past, edited by Fiona M. Collins and Judith Graham.
Synopsis[]
Sutcliff opens with a survey of the development of ancient cultures' beliefs about time as a cycle, from rituals to renew the sun, to astronomical observations, to astrology; from Homer's indifference to realistic chronology to Herodotus's tall tales to Thucydides's skeptical reportage of current events. Christianity's belief in the uniqueness of Christ's crucifixion made its view of history linear instead of cyclical, but the philosopher Giovanibattista [sic] Vico argued that similar historical periods – Heroic, Classical, Dark – succeed one another in predictable fashion. Sutcliff concludes that a grounding in history prepares us to understand our present and future.
She maintains that historical novelists clothe the bare facts of history in immediacy which makes them more accessible to children. Dullness arises from history lessons in which the perspective is a detached overview, and the continuity of real life is cut into artificial divisions; a truer sense of history is to be gained by seeing it as a living process. She believes that "the young have a strong feeling for the primitive and fundamental things of life," evoked in hero myths and legends and their modern incarnations, Westerns, as well as the historical fiction she tries to write. She does not feel able to write time-travel stories with their complex plots; her method is a 'one-way trip backwards' to a period she tries to re-create as convincingly as possible, to give a sense of being there. She describes an exercise with which she used to begin talks to schoolchildren, in which she asked them to imagine themselves as either a Roman soldier on Hadrian's Wall, or a merchant's daughter in Medieval London, then revealed that both figures she evoked were real people attested in an inscription and a letter.
This practice of imagination is part of Sutcliff's own writing process, but only after research into the period, dictated by a 'Basic Idea' for a story, sparked from within or without. With the theme provided by the Basic Idea, she researches the historical, social, and geographic setting, and characters begin to emerge. She maintains that human nature remains essentially the same from one age to another, but care must still be taken with changes in outward manner. The writing begins before the research ends, with the characters becoming defined in the process, and she feels alone without them when the writing is done, until the arrival of another Basic Idea.
Sutcliff concludes by emphasizing again the importance of a sense of historical continuity, which she derived from her earliest reading with her mother. One way in which it worked itself into her own books were two allusions she did not plan in advance, which she illustrates with quotations: the standing stone called the Lady in Frontier Wolf, noticed by the narrator of her just-completed book The Shining Company; and the left-handed stone tool discovered in a reference after the publication of Warrior Scarlet, which she retroactively assigned to its one-armed hero by showing it to the medieval protagonists of Knight's Fee.
References[]
The following people or media are mentioned in the essay:
- Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (1951)
- Nemesius, bishop of Emesa
- The Stoics
- Vergil
- Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey
- Herodotus, The Histories
- Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
- St. Paul, Epistle to the Hebrews
- Giambattista Vico
- R.G. Collingwood
- St. Dunstan
- Westerns, e.g. High Noon (1952)
- Pantomime
- Alan Garner – Red Shift (1973)
- Alison Uttley – A Traveller in Time (1939)
- Philippa Pearce – Tom's Midnight Garden (1958)
- Barates and the funerary inscription for Regina (RIB 1065)
- Letter to Catherine (medieval)
- Handbook on the Lake District, probably Nicholas Size – The Secret Valley (1929)
- Lily dagger at an Athens museum
- Etruscan tomb of a man and woman
- Left-handed flint celt (tool) from the Downs, in unidentified book
- Rupert Brooke, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" ("And is there honey still for tea?")
External links[]
- Read Travelers in Time: Past, Present, and to Come on Internet Archive
- Read Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past on Google Books (limited preview)
Publication history[]
- Travellers in Time conference. Cambridge, UK : Children's Literature New England, August 1989.
- Travelers in Time: Past, Present, and to Come. Cambridge : Green Bay/CLNE, 1990. pp.150-156.
- Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past. Ed. Fiona M. Collins, Judith Graham. Great Britain : David Fulton Publishers, 2001.
- Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past. Ed. Fiona M. Collins, Judith Graham. New York : Routledge, 2012.
- Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past. Ed. Fiona M. Collins, Judith Graham. David Fulton Publishers, 2013. Kindle edition.