I picked up Blood Feud by Rosemary Sutcliff at the weekend, in the Old Children's Bookshop in Edinburgh, on the excellent advice of katlinel. I read it on the train home, and I think that it may possibly be just a tiny bit slashy...?
The Lantern-Bearers was published 1959, and Blood Feud was 1976. They both have a character called Thormod in them, who is the master of the lead character while he is enslaved, but I think Blood Feud is entirely about the love between Jestyn and Thormod, with all the mucking about Byzantium really a setting for the love story. Thormod frees Jestyn in a manner reminiscent of Marcus freeing Esca in The Eagle of the Ninth. But Thormod in The Lantern-Bearers is by no means the love of Aquila's life!
Jestyn in Blood Feud is interesting because he is disabled (like Marcus, like Sutcliff herself), and because he ends up shifting from soldier to healer (I believe Sutcliff wanted to be a doctor but gender and ill-health prevented that).
I heard a radio interview with Rosemary Sutcliff once where the interviewer asked her about the intense male friendships in her books and she referred to them as "heroic friendship" and, if I'm remembering rightly, said she didn't quite see them as homosexual. I've got to say though that it seems to me she got closer and closer to slash as she got older.
Oh, that's interesting to know, thank you. Blood Feud is by far the slashiest I've read, including The Eagle of the Ninth, and I think is one of her later ones (1976).
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2007-03-20 03:04 pm (UTC)Jestyn in Blood Feud is interesting because he is disabled (like Marcus, like Sutcliff herself), and because he ends up shifting from soldier to healer (I believe Sutcliff wanted to be a doctor but gender and ill-health prevented that).
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Date: 2007-03-20 09:54 pm (UTC)