Sword at Sunset

This brilliant Arthurian epic cuts through the mists of pagan, early Christian, and medieval splendors that have gathered about the subject and tells the authentic story of the man who may well have been the real King Arthur-Artos the Bear, the mighty warrior-king who saved the last lights of Western civilization when the barbarian darkness descended in the fifth century. Presenting early Britain as it was after the departure of the Romans-no Round Table, no many-towered Camelot-the setting is a hard, savage land, half-civilized, half-pagan, where a few men struggled to forge a nation and hold back the Saxon scourge. Richly detailed, the story chronicles the formation of a great army, the hardships of winter quarters, the primitive wedding feasts, the pagan fertility rites, the agonies of surgery after battle, the thrilling stag hunts, and the glorious processions of the era. Stripped of the chivalric embellishments that the French applied to British history centuries ago, the Arthurian age here emerges as a time when men stood at the precipice of history-a time of transition and changing values and imminent national peril.

Author: Rosemary Sutcliff
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 05/01/2008
Pages: 495
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.26lbs
Size: 8.32h x 5.62w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781556527593
ISBN10: 1556527594
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Historical | General

About the Author

Rosemary Sutcliff wrote more than 40 historical novels for young adults--including The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, The Sword and the Circle, and Black Ships Before Troy--five adult novels, and several books of nonfiction.