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The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff

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parthianbow
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My goodness

Post by parthianbow » Wed October 7th, 2009, 8:47 am

I'm not sure that I read this one as a kid. After all your comments, it's just shot to the top of my to buy list. Thanks for the tip.
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annis
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Post by annis » Wed October 7th, 2009, 5:04 pm

I missed this one when I was a kid too, but as you can probably tell from my rave I was blown away by it :) Its theme of ritual kingship and sacrifice is also apparent in Sutcliff's Arthurian novel, Sword at Sunset, written a couple of years earlier. Sword at Sunset has also been been recently reissued.

I was just thinking how you get these strange reading patches where you quite coincidentally pick up several novels with similar themes. Just recently I came across Henry Treece's The Green Man, an unforgettable, savage reworking of the story of Hamlet (review here). Athough I read several of Treece's books when I was younger, I'd never heard of this one. It also plays with the theme of ritual kingship and a main character who represents the King of the Year. Then I picked up Joan Wolf's Daughter of the Red Deer, set in prehistoric Europe. It's a story of conflict between two tribes who respectively worship the masculine Sun-God/Horse-Lord and the Great Mother.
Last edited by annis on Wed October 7th, 2009, 5:16 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Post by Carla » Wed October 7th, 2009, 5:48 pm

Were they all written at a similar time, Annis? Just wondering if the ideas of ritual kingship and sacrifice were seen as a sort of universal theme at the time the books were written. I associate it with The Golden Bough, which is so old that Casaubon could have written it (!), but maybe the idea came back into vogue.

Not that that would explain why you happen to pick them all up at once. Spooky :-)
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Post by annis » Wed October 7th, 2009, 6:11 pm

That's an interesting thought, Carla! I just checked. Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset was published in 1963 and Mark of the Horse Lord in 1965. Treece's Green Man was published in 1966 (it was the last novel he wrote before his death). So yes, there coud have well been been a swell of interest in Celtic mythology at that stage, and maybe mythology in general as Treece draws attention in his novel to the universal nature of mythic imagery, and particularly the similarities between some of the Celtic/Germanic legends and the Eleusinian Mysteries. I'll have to go back and see what the scholarly influences were in the fifties and sixties! "The Golden Bough" could well have been influential as it was released for mass market in the 1920s, and perhaps also the work of people like Joseph Campbell, whose Hero With a Thousand Faces was published in the late 1940s. Wolf's Daughter of the Red Deer was written in the early '90s, but doesn't emphasize the idea of ritual kingship quite as strongly.
Last edited by annis on Wed October 7th, 2009, 6:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by MLE (Emily Cotton) » Wed October 7th, 2009, 8:07 pm

I found a lot of similarity between Horse Lord and Mary Renault's the King Must Die. Although I think Renault was earlier than Sutcliff.
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Post by annis » Thu October 8th, 2009, 1:01 am

Out of curiosity I checked and see that Renault's The King Must Die was published in 1958, and The Bull From The Sea in 1962, so reasonably similar in timeframe to Treece and Sutcliff. It does make you wonder what common element there might have been for these English authors writing on themes of legend and mythology during the late '50s and '60s.

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Post by annis » Thu October 8th, 2009, 2:54 am

Eigon, I'm wondering if the illustrator you remember is Charles Keeping. He did illustrations for several of Rosemary Sutcliff's books, and also, incidentally for children's books written by Henry Treece - I still have a copy of Treece's Invaders, with Keeping illustrations. Here's a typical example of his work.

Image

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Post by Carla » Tue October 13th, 2009, 1:35 pm

[quote=""annis""]Out of curiosity I checked and see that Renault's The King Must Die was published in 1958, and The Bull From The Sea in 1962, so reasonably similar in timeframe to Treece and Sutcliff. It does make you wonder what common element there might have been for these English authors writing on themes of legend and mythology during the late '50s and '60s.[/quote]

This might be a clue. Margaret Murray's book The God of the Witches was republished in 1952, and her follow-up The Divine King in England was published in 1954. In the first of these she put forward her theory that William Rufus and Thomas a Becket were sacrificial kings (Becket as a substitue for the monarch, obviously.) In the follow-up she extended the theory to include every violent royal death and a good many executions of failed politicians up to 1600.

Her books were tremendously influential, and stayed influential even in academia up to the 1970s, when examination of the actual evidence discovered that there wasn't any. There's a good account in Ronald Hutton's book, Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles), in the chapter called Legacy of Shadows.

The image of the universal sacrificial king is such a powerful one that it wouldn't be at all surprising if Margaret Murray's theory inspired a generation of novelists.
PATHS OF EXILE - love, war, honour and betrayal in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria
Editor's Choice, Historical Novels Review, August 2009
Now available as e-book on Amazon Kindleand in Kindle, Epub (Nook, Sony Reader), Palm and other formats on Smashwords
Website: http://www.carlanayland.org
Blog: http://carlanayland.blogspot.com

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Post by annis » Wed October 14th, 2009, 4:44 am

Interesting, Carla - thanks. Your theory about Margaret Murray's books as a common souce of inspiration sounds very plausible. I have to admit that I hadn't heard of them before. Obviously Valerie Anand had either read them or been influenced by them as well, when she wrote her book about William Rufus as sacrificial king called "King of Wood".

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Post by Carla » Wed October 14th, 2009, 9:35 am

My understanding is that Margaret Murray's theory was immensely influential in Britain, but whether her fame extended to other countries I don't know.
PATHS OF EXILE - love, war, honour and betrayal in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria
Editor's Choice, Historical Novels Review, August 2009
Now available as e-book on Amazon Kindleand in Kindle, Epub (Nook, Sony Reader), Palm and other formats on Smashwords
Website: http://www.carlanayland.org
Blog: http://carlanayland.blogspot.com

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