life lessons

I was thinking earlier about the lessons one learns as a child from favorite authors.  There's a lot in Rosemary Sutcliff, but one thing you *definitely* learn is this: the people you like are going to die. Possibly at your hand. These are three out of the five named deaths from Frontier Wolf, but there's at least one death a book. Two end with the hero's suicide.

Young Rufus with a Pictish arrow in his throat, lying among the rest of the dead under the pulled-down roof of the old store-shed, and with him the limp bundle of bloody fur that had been Typhon. They had done everything together from that first day behind the armourer's shop, and they had not been parted in their dying.  [...]

Lucian with a great red-spear hole gaping juicily below his collarbone. He must have taken the thrust in over his guard in the very moment that the bridge went. [...] Blood was pumping from the hole under his collarbone in little jets; the bright blood that carries a man's life with it. He pressed a handful of his own cloak over it, but he knew that it was no good, not with blood that colour. Lucius opened his clouded eyes, and looked up into his face. "Has the bridge gone?"

"The bridge has gone," Alexios told him. "We'll be in Bremenium by noon."

"Just - let me get - my wind back - think I - must have swallowed - half the river."

"No hurry," Alexios said, his throat aching.

Lucius was silent a few moments. He looked faintly puzzled more than anything else. "Tired," he said at last. "Stupid - feel so - tired."

"You've had a hard morning's work. Go to sleep now."

And like a tired child, he turned his head on Alexios' knee and settled his cheek. He gave a small dry cough, and that was all."

It was like Lucius, his Commanding Officer thought, to die so quietly and neatly. 

[...]

The Chieftain's sword flew wide in mid-stroke, and with a defiant yell that ended in a horrible choking sound, he crumped on top of the man who had been his friend and heart-companion.

Alexios felt him twitch once, and lie still. He dragged himself out from under the death weight and lurched to his feet, aware of a roaring like a wild sea in his ears. And slamming his reddened sword back into its sheath, he stooped and turned the other onto his back. He lay hacked and twisted, a red gash gaping to the bone of his thigh, the jagged hole under his breastbone oozing out a soggy blackness. Even so, Alexios thought that he was still alive, but a mass of blood and vomit camre out of his mouth, and it was only the streaming torchlight as men crowded closer that flickered in his eyes and made them seem to move.

There had begun to be words in the sea-roaring; someone shouting "Kill! Kill!" But he had already killed his friend."

Comments

[Cian]

So what you're telling us is that you're a psychopath who has killed at least one of his own friends.

Kids, this is why you should read the Faraway tree.

[JamesP]

I just thought a faintly homoerotic relationship with a barbarian counterpart just beyond the frontier who you then end up forced to kill because of forces beyond either of your control was one of those rites of passage everyone went through.

[Martin Wisse]

Close reading of later Heinlein suggest that you can tell a woman's mood from her nipples. This has not been a good life lesson.

[jim5et]

My goodness. A Rosemary Sutcliff mention is one thing, a Frontier Wolf one I never expected. Next week: how I learned all I know about the Kingdom of Outremer from Ronald Welch?

[Chris Williams]

My mental images of the Latin Kingdoms are all those put there by Welch. This is especially significant in may case since (unlike the rest of you, as far as I know), most of the rest of what I know about them I was taught directly by Chris Tyerman, who (a) knows more about them than anyone else in the English-speaking world and (b) is not a man to keep his judgements to himself.

All this reinforces the dull nagging ache that I have about the near-total irrelevance of the professional history project when it comes to ceeating and replicating actual understanding of the past.

[CMcM]

the dull nagging ache that I have about the near-total irrelevance of the professional history project when it comes to creating and replicating actual understanding of the past.

Well, a well referenced analysis of Leicestershire Manorial Rolls and what they tell us about the penetration of the cash economy in the medieval English countryside is never going to compete with Spamalot on this front, is it? That doesn't mean that academic history is pointless, it just means it ploughs a different furrow.

But, hey, what do I know? I'm no academic and I still think Vikings wore helmets with horns on.....

[ejh]

Come to that, you know what I think whenever I'm in Pamplona? I think "this is the first city Asterix came to in Spain"...

[Phil]

Sometimes I think (with Alan Bennett) that if a thing's not worth doing, it's worth doing well. Mind you, sometimes I think that if a lecture's worth giving it's worth giving straight, and if an essay's worth marking it's worth marking hard, so maybe this is just the ritual code of the Guild of Academics speaking through me.