Black Ships Before Troy

My 6-year-old and I have been working our way through Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy for several weeks. It corresponds with a period we just studied in our Story of the World tour of ancient history.

I have mixed feelings about how well the book worked for us, but not about the book itself, which won a Kate Greenaway medal. As a simplified retelling of Homer’s Iliad, the writing is lovely and keeps the story managable at 125 pages. It gets some of the classic stories (like the Trojan horse), archetypal heroes (like Odysseus), and archetypal situations (like war) across to kids in a way that holds their interest and equips them to appreciate the many versions of these basic ingredients that they’ll find elsewhere in their reading lives. (And moviegoing lives. And art-viewing lives. And, one could argue, just plain lives.)

The illustrations are marvelous. They’re by Alan Lee, who did some of the concept art for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, and you can see the resemblance between the warriors and settings in this story and the movies. They certainly bring the story dramatically to life, and my daughter, who’s always drawing and creating, enjoyed them very much. On the downside, some of them are disturbing. They were okay for her, but I didn’t let my 4-year-old look through the book without me there to censor certain pages.

But what else would I expect? The illustrations are disturbing where the story is disturbing, and that’s… well, most of it, unless you’re fond of pages and pages of war and slaughter.  This is the tale the adult version of which David Denby calls a war poem with an ”excruciating vividness, an obsessive observation of horror that causes almost disbelief” (Great Books).

I wouldn’t say Black Ships Before Troy quite fits this description. (I surely wouldn’t have used it if it did.) It abridges the story somewhat. But reading it aloud, I took the liberty of abridging it still more when it came to passages describing bodies being dragged behind chariots, funeral pyres, sea serpents crushing Trojan priests, and the like. On the whole, given these adaptations, it worked pretty well for us. My daughter struggled to keep names straight all the way through the story, but she asked questions when she needed to, paying attention and enjoying it to the end. On the whole, I think I as a so-called adult was more aware of, and bothered by, the potential for scariness than she was.

I (sheepishly) admit that I grasped the story a whole lot better than when I read it in poetic form in college. (I wasn’t interested then, and that didn’t help any.) At the same time, for our purposes this would probably have worked better in a few years. For now I think it would have been fine to settle for an even simpler version, or even a few episodes translated into children’s form: the Trojan horse story, and a few of Odysseus’s escapades in The Odyssey probably would have been enough. But this was what was recommended to me, and though it was challenging, I’m glad we read it.