Priests in Sutcliff

[osprey_archer]

Are there any good priests in Sutcliff? There are a few who are simply ineffective: the fellow who teaches Randal to read in Knight's Fee, and the guy who teaches Minnow to read in Lantern Bearers.

No, wait, Lantern Bearers also has the monk fellow with the bee skeps who helps Aquila. He was awesome. I latched onto him like a bear to honey because he was the only happy person in that whole book.

Plus he had bees. Beekeepers are automatically amazing.

But otherwise, Sutcliff's priests always seem to be whipping people into violent frenzies. (The bee monk never seems to preach to people; possibly that's why he's a good guy.) In Eagle of the Ninth it's the druid priests who drive the locals to their suicidal attack on the Roman fort, and the druid priests stir up trouble again in Frontier Wolf (though of course there's more to it than that). In Knight's Fee, the bad guy dresses up as a priest to rally a nearby village to attack the castle where Randal lives.

It's too bad that Randal didn't catch hold of the villain then, because I bet the church would have happily dropped a cathedral on his priest-impersonating head. And I can't imagine anyone would have trusted De Courcy again after that. It's hard to get less honorable than pretending to be a priest in order to bring a witch hunt down on your enemies.

And of course the action in Sword Song kicks off when Bjarni drowns a priest who kicked his dog. Bjarni and the narrative seem to agree that this was a regrettable but nonetheless justified act, which is a little weird. Not that I'm in favor of kicking dogs, but murdering dog-kickers seems like an overreaction.

(I'm having trouble getting into Sword Song. Bjarni is prickly and self-centered, and not in a fun way. He seems to think it vaguely unjust that he's being punished for committing murder.)

...as so often with these posts, I don't have some grand theory to wrap this up: it's just a pattern that I've noticed. And I think a story from the point of view of one of those trouble-making druids might be interesting.

Comments

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Religious belief doesn't drive people to extremities in Sutcliff; it's always the priests. Especially, as you say, the pagan priests.

The narrator in SAS is really not sympathetic to the Christians, even though he nominally is one, I think. Except it's...very nominal. I don't think Sutcliff was more skeptical of pagan priests, so much as Christians don't come into the picture much in most of her novels. Overall I think she was more sympathetic to pagans, actually...

There are lots of sympathetic Christian and other characters with faith of some kind, although generally protagonists seem to be very accepting of other faiths, which I find harder and harder to suspend disbelief on the further the setting gets from the ancient world. I think the skepticism's really about the power of pro religious folks to manipulate people.

...I'm trying to remember now if the male love interest's dad in Flame-coloured Taffeta is a minister....

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The accepting of other faiths thing I *think* is a bit difficult to gauge?

Once you get to about 1000-ish, fair enough, but before that, not so sure, because everything we have about the Dark Ages / early Middle ages comes so comprehensively filtered through the very dogmatic prejudice of the later medieval period.

Alfred the Great, for example, despite being considered a bit of a champion of Christianity and learning, I believe is supposed to have had quite an interest in earlier pagan learning as well? But we don't have his collection of pre-Christian works, because it was destroyed by... oh who was it? Athelstan, if I remember rightly.

(Alfred's pre-Christian literature collection is one of the things on my 'if I could just borrow your tardis for 5 mins' bucket list :-D )

I don't know about views of other faiths in the Roman-British tradition though. Maybe they were more picky earlier.

Artos in SAS is definitely very dubious about the Christian church hogging resources that he could be using for fighting Saxons, but I'm not sure how he feels about Christianity as a faith - I get the impression it's not something he would think about a lot. More Ambrosius's kind of thing maybe.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

CURSES UPON ATHELSTAN.

There are few things in the world as wretched as hearing about the wreck of a library.

I did think it was odd, in Knight's Fee, not necessarily that Randal seemed to take Anhalt-the-Little-Dark-Person in stride - after all, he was raised in a dog kennel, I can't seem him getting too upset about religious distinctions - but that there wasn't more religion in their lives.

I'm more familiar with the later medieval period, not 1100, so perhaps the infusion of Christianity into daily life grew exponentially, but I really expected there to be more references to Bible stories or comments on meat vs. fish days or celebrations of saints' days or something in Randal's life.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I agree that she seems sympathetic to paganism (I haven't read enough of her books set during Christian eras to know how it compares) - the protagonists tend to end up fighting people whipped up by pagan priests because, well, that's the kind of priests who were around to whip people up.

And she seems strangely fond of the Little Dark People - I'm thinking specifically of Anhalt in Knight's Fee, who is very positively portrayed for a non-warrior in Sutcliff. (Of course, she is a healer. Drat, now I'm going to be thinking over all the Sutcliffs I've read to see if there are any acceptable career paths other than warrior or healer.)

Are the Little Dark People in any of her other books? I want to know more about the Little Dark People.

And I agree, it's specifically the priests and their ability to manipulate people she's skeptical about. The religious laypeople just get on with their lives, about as sympathetically as everyone else.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think she really just didn't trust people in a position of telling people what to believe.

The Little Dark People play a pretty big role in Sword at Sunset! The protagonist of Sun Horse, Moon Horse is half LDP. And they show up in some of the short stories...there's a nifty scene with a woman of the LDP working magic (maybe) in The Capricorn Bracelet. They're also in Mark of the Horse Lord. They show up a lot, really, but I think SAS is their biggest role. I'm...not sure how I feel about her treatment of them in SAS.