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David McK (3921 KP) rated The Eagle of the Ninth in Books

Jan 28, 2019  
The Eagle of the Ninth
The Eagle of the Ninth
Rosemary Sutcliff | 2000
6
6.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
So, this is history (and told in the foreword of this novel): Sometime about the year AD 117, the Roman Ninth Legion marched north to deal with an uprising among the Caledonian tribes (in what is now Scotland), and were never heard of again. Also, nearly eighteen hundred years later during excavations at Silchester, a wingless Roman Eagle was dug up, buried under the fields.

But how did it come to be there?

While no-one knows for certain, those 2 facts together form the starting point for this story, which sees the son of the last commander of said Legion traveling North 'beyond the [Hadrians] wall' to search for and return said Eagle after his partial recovery from his laming during an attack on his outpost, and after he hears rumours of an Imperial Eagle in the Celts hands.

He is accompanied on this journey by his freed slave, whom he had previously (before the journey, during his recovery) rescued from the Arena.

While I had previously seen the 2011 film of the same name, I'd actually never read the source material before, so was unable to say how truly it stuck to the same.

Now I have, and I have to say: said movie does stick remarkably close, even if not entirely faithfully. the book, I found, could be a bit slow at times, and also tended to gloss over the less pleasant (shall we say) aspects of Roman society, with the Romans largely portrayed as civilized as compared to the uncouth Barbarians.

But then again, this is -supposedly - a children's book, and also a product of its time (first published, remember, in the 1950s).
  
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Michael Apted recommended Wild Strawberries (1957) in Movies (curated)

 
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
1957 | Drama
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"The first one is Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman. It’s what I saw when I was 15, and it showed me that films could be something more than just entertainment or going and staring at girls in the cinema or whatever, but film could have the kind of weight of a book or something like that. I used to be a big reader, and I loved going to the movies, but I had no sense of taste in the movies. You know, I grew up in a suburb of London, and I went to school in the middle of London, and that’s when I found myself, one wet afternoon, in an arthouse, and there was Wild Strawberries, and that, for me, was the beginning of it all. It had so many ideas, and it played with dreams, and I thought, “Oh my God. This is quite something.” So it really was a kind of major event in my life."

Source