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The Shining Company

© Sara E. Polsky

The Shining Company
by Rosemary Sutcliff
Farrar/Straus/Giroux
296 pages
Recommended for all ages

Around the year 600 A.D., King Mynyddog of the Gododdin summoned three hundred warriors, the sons of minor kings, and six hundred shieldbearers to his capital of Dyn Eiden, now Edinburgh. For one year, Mynyddogg trained his warriors, shaping them into a fighting company the likes of which had not been seen in Britain since King Arthur's time. Mynyddog sent his warriors out to Northumberland and Yorkshire to push back the invading Saxon tide. Of the warriors who left Dyn Eiden to fight the Saxons, only a few returned. One of these was Aneirin, a bard who traveled with the warriors and recorded their story in The Gododdin, the first surviving North British poem.

Aneirin's poem forms the basis for Rosemary Sutcliff's wonderful young adult novel, The Shining Company. Told from the viewpoint of Prosper, shieldbearer to one of Mynydogg's warriors, The Shining Company details the adventures of the three hundred British warriors and their six hundred shieldbearers who rode out to meet the Saxons over 1500 years ago.

Prosper, the younger son of a minor British lord, has no thought of being a shieldbearer until he meets Prince Gorthyn, one of Mynyddog's three hundred warriors. Gorthyn asks Prosper to act as one of his two shieldbearers, and they ride together to Dyn Eiden. During their year-long training, they grow close to each other and to their companions. When it comes time to fight the Saxons, they will fight together -- even if it means that most of them will not survive.

Like all of Rosemary Sutcliff's books, The Shining Company is well-written. More importantly, its characters are realistic and well-defined. All of their emotions, from elation to feelings of betrayal, come through to the reader thanks to Sutcliff's excellent storytelling. Even though The Shining Company has at its center a piece of history, it is much more than a book about a group of warriors who fought the Saxons back in the Dark Ages. It is a story about characters whose feelings and experiences are, despite being set far back in the past, truly timeless.

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