Black Ships Before Troy
/
Odysseus leads a peacemaking delegation to Achilles in Black SHips Before Troy, illustrated by Alan Lee
One night last week I closed our copy of Black Ships Before Troy and set it aside. 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.
We sat quietly for a moment. 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.”
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. The book proved excellent on all three counts.
Despite its subtitle, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad tells the story of the whole Trojan War. 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. 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. It’s very well done.
I appreciate two things especially about Sutcliffe’s treatment of the war:
First, she doesn’t oversimplify the parts based on the Iliad. Black Ships Before Troy teems with characters and the plot rises and falls with the tidelike motion of the armies in Homer’s poem, in which the heroes on both sides first drive and then are driven by the enemy. She also includes the actions of the gods—Aphrodite saving Paris’s bacon during his duel with Menelaus, Apollo striking the Achaian camp with plague, Thetis rising from the waves to comfort her sulking son—and thereby preserves a lot of the tone and integrity of Homer’s original.
Second, and relatedly, she doesn’t soften the characters or the action. Her descriptions of things like the capture and enslavement of Briseis or the sacrifice of captive Trojans on Patroclus’s funeral pyre are neither gratuitous nor apologetic; she simply presents Homer’s heroes as Homer presented them, warts and all. This gave me with lots of opportunities for conversation with my kids, especially where deceit and cruelty factored into the plot as it does in so many places. Relatedly, Sutcliff does not stint on the violence of the combat. Again, it is neither gratuitous nor euphemized, but it is clear in this story that this terrible war ends lives in terrible ways, including those of characters we love.
Hence the anecdote at the beginning of this post. Although I was ready for it, revisiting Hector’s death and reading about the grief of a father, a wife, and a whole city while flanked by my children was overwhelming. It made the most moving moments in Homer newly fresh and impressed that story that much more upon my kids.
The upshot is that Black Ships Before Troy presents, on a kid-friendly level, the same themes of heroism and excellence and the same sense of tragedy as the Iliad itself. I had some great conversations with my daughter in particular about the relative virtues of Achilles and Hector—who was more of a hero, and why, and what we thought might happen when the two of them finally met. By about the midpoint of the book she had stopped asking which side was the good guys and which the bad guys but had decided opinions about which characters were good and which bad—a sign of Homer at work.
This is a children’s version but it is not a modernization or ideological reinterpretation, thank God. This is as close as I’ve seen it get to pure Homer for kids. We loved it.
Finally, Alan Lee’s illustrations. The book is lavishly illustrated. There are pictures on almost every page, from dramatic action scenes teeming with characters—picking out who was who in the battle scenes became a fun game, a Mycenaean Where’s Waldo? for the kids—to halcyon scenes of the peaceful times before the war. A recurring statue of Aphrodite proves particularly poignant. Lee clearly worked hard to make the figures, landscapes, architecture, and equipment as authentic feeling as possible, striking a balance in style between what we’ve recovered from Trojan War-era archaeological sites and later Greek fashions. It’s beautiful, and it works magnificently. The pictures evoke a feeling both of gritty reality as well as of heightened myth. Of one scene in which Achilles, newly armed by Thetis in a panoply forged by Hephaestus himself, charges across the blood-flowing river Scamander toward the gates of Troy, my daughter said, “He looks glorious!”
The publisher recommends Black Ships Before Troy for ages 7-10 or older. That’s probably about right if the child is doing the reading, as the language is slightly elevated and consciously old-fashioned. I read it aloud to my two older kids, which gave me a chance to stop and explain new words and refresh them on who was who. My six-year-old got a lot out of it and really responded to the story. My four-year old enjoyed the pictures and the fighting and had favorite characters (Hector especially) but didn’t seem to track with the story. But that didn’t seem to bother him. Both enjoyed it, and I savored the chance to share this with them.
Black Ships Before Troy is an excellent children’s retelling of the Trojan War. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a beautifully illustrated way to introduce Homer to and enjoy one of the great legends of Western civilization with your kids.
Addendum: The illustrated edition of Black Ships Before Troy was apparently out of print for a long time before being reissued recently. This can make it difficult to find the correct edition on Amazon, where used copies are currently listed for over $300. I’ve linked to the correct hardback reissue, which is less than $20, in this review.
