The Eagle of the Ninth

Sutcliff was born in 1920 and spent much of her childhood in Malta. Her father was a Royal Navy officer and was stationed there. Sutcliff suffered from Still’s disease (a type of childhood arthritis) as a child and used a wheelchair for much of her life. From an early age, Sutcliff’s mother told Sutcliff Celtic and Saxon legends. Though Sutcliff sometimes attended school, her attendance was intermittent due to her illness. As a teenager, she attended art school and became a miniature painter. She published her first book, The Chronicles of Robin Hood, in 1950. The Eagle of the Ninth, published in 1954, was her second work and quickly became her most popular and well-known novel. She went on to have a prolific career as a writer for both children and adults, publishing dozens of children’s novels (including eight in the Eagle of the Ninth series), several adult novels, a radio play, a stage play, and a screenplay. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1975 for her contributions to children’s literature and wrote up until the day she died in 1992.

The Roman Empire expanded into and colonized Britain beginning in 43 CE. Britain was inhabited at the time by the indigenous Celtic Britons, which included numerous tribes and kingdoms, including the Caledonians and the Picts (referred to in the novel as “the Painted People”). By the time the novel begins, somewhere around 127 CE, the Roman territory known as Brittania encompassed all of southern and central England, reaching as far north as Hadrian’s Wall. While The Eagle of the Ninth was inspired by several historical events and artifacts, it is not faithful to history. Sometime after 108 CE, the Ninth Legion did march north to attempt to subdue the northern tribes (Sutcliff’s author’s note suggests this occurred in 117). However, historians disagree on whether the legion did indeed meet its end at the tribes’ hands, as some evidence suggests that the Ninth Legion was still active in the Netherlands after that time. In any case, there’s no record of the Ninth Legion after 120 CE. The eagle that Marcus and Esca pursue, meanwhile, is known as the Silchester Eagle. It was discovered in 1866, missing its wings, during the excavation of a Roman basilica in Silchester, England. Roman legions did carry eagle sculptures that carried enormous spiritual weight, but again, historians disagree on whether this particular eagle belonged to a legion or, more likely, was part of a sculpture at the basilica—or whether it may have simply been scrap.

Though Sutcliff didn’t conceive of them as an official series, The Eagle of the Ninth is the first of eight books that all follow Marcus’s family members and the family’s emerald signet ring. The Silver Branch follows Eagle, and it was a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. The fourth book in the series, The Lantern Bearers, won the award in 1959. Sutcliff’s portrayal of the indigenous British tribes arguably plays into the “noble savage” trope, idealizing the tribesmen and their way of life. One famous novel that also utilized this trope include The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. Amos Fortune, Free Man, a 1950 historical fiction novel for young readers by Elizabeth Yates, explores American slavery, but it takes a similarly uncritical view of slavery as The Eagle of the Ninth.