Eagle of the Ninth

Disclaimer: I don't have any of books in Rosemary Sutcliff's The Dolphin Ring Cycle, so I'm having to refer to information I'm finding on line, which is not guaranteed to be reliable.

At the time I'm writing this, the series page lists 8 books:
1 The Eagle of the Ninth
2 The Silver Branch
3 Frontier Wolf
3 The Lantern Bearers
3 Three Legions
4 Sword at Sunset
5 Dawn Wind
6 The Shield Ring

There seem to be a couple of problems with this, but I'm not well enough informed to be certain that I've got the correct information.

Firstly, There seem to be very few references to the series under the name "Dolphin Ring Cycle". Googling for it produces LibraryThing as the top hit. Most people seem to refer to the series as "Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles" (or series). There's a new edition of the omnibus of the first three books due out in June, under the title "Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles". I'm wondering if the series should be retitled.

More importantly, there are three books listed at position number 3. "Three Legions" I added yesterday, and it's an omnibus of "the first three" books. I'm expecting that the cache will catch up shortly. It contains "Eagle of the Ninth", "The Silver Branch" and "The Lantern Bearers" (this being evidence that those are, in fact, the first three books! They're certainly the first three in publication order, published between 1954 and 1959).

"Frontier Wolf" was published in 1980, seventeen years after "Sword at Sunset", which makes it the sixth book published, not the third. It's possible that, chronologically, it's set between TSB and TLB, but, as I say, I don't have the information. (The new "Chronicles" book doesn't include FW in its content either.)

Finally, The Shield Ring, listed as sixth, was published in 1956, which would have made it the second book published. But Wikipedia actually excludes it from the list entirely, counting it as a stand-alone book. (Ah, but The Wikipedia page on Eagle of the Ninth inconsistently does list TSR, and excludes FW. I'd guess that's the source of the inclusion in the LibraryThing list, and is wrong. Can anybody clarify?

Can't help with much, but Omnibuses (Omnibii?):

General practise is to send these to the end of the list. Use the format:

Series Name (100 | Omnibus books 1-3)

Publishing order doesn't always match series chronology. If this matters create a 2nd series labelled choronological order and re-order them to suit.

Ah, thanks for that. I'd dealt with Omnibuses, but not for ages (and then, of course, three come along at once!). I've reformatted the entry for that, and it's now displaying properly in the series list. So that was my mistake, not the cache, and I was wrong to blame it.

I've dropped messages to the three users who originally compiled the series list, in the hope that they can clarify things.

The internal chronological sequence is: The Eagle of the Ninth (AD 133), The Silver Branch (c AD 280), Frontier Wolf (AD 343), The Lantern Bearers (AD 450), Sword at Sunset (immediately follows the events of Lantern Bearers) and Dawn Wind (AD 577). The extended sequence of stories of the descendants of Marcus Flavius Aquila continues with Sword Song (c AD 900) and The Shield Ring (c AD 1070).

ETA fix touchstone (mutter)

1, 4: Yes, that's the right chronological sequence.

As to the name, I think "dolphin ring" describes it better than "eagle of the ninth." The ring is in every story, while the eagle is only in two.

eta: I notice the touchstone for "Sword Song" is wrong, btw.

#5

Maybe it does. However if a series has a commonly known name - which in this case I think it does - I think it should be in CK. That is not to say that "The Dolphin Ring Cycle" should be replaced by "Eagle Of The Ninth Chronicles". If both names are in common use both should appear.

Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles best describes the Romano-British books. Dolphin Ring Cycle covers the extended series.

Ok, thanks for clearing up my lack of knowledge!

Um, out of curiousity, is it work adding the chronological dates from #4 to the actual series information, to show where the large time gaps are. (Answering self: probably not, as it's not common practice!). I'll put a description in though.

I never heard it described by either name until I saw it on librarything. (Shrug). I think "Dolphin Ring" describes it better because the ring (and of course the bloodline) is the thing which links them all. But hey, I'm only a fan (and a writer inspired by her books to write my own). I don't think series need to appear under more than one name; if people insist on changing it, I won't change it back.

Apologies for any incoherence in #5, btw, I had just got up here in Denver.

eta: Maybe the Roman books could be a subseries in the overall series?

Huh. Having created a publication order series, The Shield Ring makes the citation for the collected works quite inconvenient (since it's 1, 2, 4 in chronological order, and 1, 3, 4 in publication order). Ho hum :)

eta: my apologies to gwernin for inviting her to think before coffee ;)

Multiple series are common where the internal chgronology does not follow the published sequence.

10> What do you mean by "citation".

#12
As I said (unclearly!) in my post: omnibus collections are usually collections of consecutive books of a series, such as "1-3". However, for both orderings of this series, due to the unusual order in which the books were written, the omnibus is a collection of non-consecutive works: it's the first three of the "pure" series, in the order they were written.

But since we're talking about the extended series, including the The Shield Ring, it's the first, third and fourth in publication order. Which is correct, but unusual. And means I can't "cite" it as simply as "1-3" or "1-4".
And, in chronological order, due to the late writing Frontier Wolf, the omnibus isn't the first three chronological works: this time it's books 1, 2 and 4. Which again is unusual for an omnibus.

Maybe my use of the word "citation" was wrong. In any case, it's not really a problem, just a quirk. And there's nothing to be done about it. So it was just an observation, not a request for help :)

#13 Check out the Nero Wolfe series http://www.librarything.com/series/Nero%20Wolfe : he has 13 omnibuses, but only one of them is in sequential order.

13> Well, you could make two series with the Romano-British books called Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles and the extended series called Dolphin Ring Cycle. Thus your omnibus would be books 1-3 of the Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles. There is precedent for having multiple series like this but I don't know that you'd want to do it for this series.

re message 9
Rosemary Sutcliff herself did not think of any of this actively or very consciously as one or more 'series' although the re-appearance of the dolphin ring was intentional.

I have a little knowledge of all this because I grew up with her as a close relative, but I was never attentive enough to all that she said about her writing. The company which looks after her books now she is dead is the one she set up in her lifetime called 'Sussex Dolphin'.

Also her signature involved an elaborate Dolphin too...see www.rosemarysutcliff.wordpress.com ...and do contribute. Also do help with my Library Thing project to collect all editions and repreints of the books with the right covers world-wide. I have only just started.

>17 aglawton: Did you mean http://rosemarysutcliff.wordpress.com/ ?

Oops thank you: I have changed it!