I appreciate two things especially about Sutcliffe’s treatment of the war:įirst, she doesn’t oversimplify the parts based on the Iliad. Along the way she also incorporates incidents like the arrival of Penthesilea’s Amazons, Odysseus and Ajax’s dispute over Achilles’s armor, and the story of Philoctetes. Sutcliff gives special attention to the events of the Iliad-which takes place across only a few weeks near the end of the ten-year siege-but Sutcliff bookends the story of Achilles’s rage with chapters that explain the backstory and the war’s ultimate outcome, from Eris’s fatal wedding gift and the judgment of Paris to the construction of the Trojan Horse and the final sacking of the city.

The book proved excellent on all three counts.ĭespite its subtitle, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad tells the story of the whole Trojan War. I picked up Black Ships Before Troy for three reasons: first, my lifelong love of the story of the Trojan War and my constant search for good ways to introduce my kids to these stories second, the fact that it was written by Rosemary Sutcliff, author of much classic children’s historical literature, like her novel The Eagle of the Ninth and third-and decisively-the illustrations by Alan Lee, one of the great illustrators of Tolkien. At last my daughter, who had watched me intently throughout this chapter, said, “I’ve never seen a daddy cry before.” And then, “That was weird.”

It was bedtime, and I had just read to my six-year-old daughter and four-year old son about the long-fated duel of Achilles and Hector, of Hector’s death, his father King Priam’s pitiful trip into the night to beg for his son’s body, of the weeping of Troy’s women as they washed and dressed the body for the pyre, and the funeral rites performed for the dead prince. Removed Tts_version v1.One night last week I closed our copy of Black Ships Before Troy and set it aside. Urn:oclc:38916956 Republisher_date 20171027154937 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 262 Scandate 20171026151306 Scanner Scanningcenter hongkong Shipping_container SZ0024 Source Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 16:47:36.548183 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA1158319 City New York Donorīostonpubliclibrary Edition Pbk.

Blackships before troy