Sarum (book)

Sarum is a historical novel by Edward Rutherfurd from 1987. The German edition was published in 1988.

content

The novel tells the story of the historic Old Sarum and later city Salisbury using fictitious family stories, ranging from the more stone-age hunters who reached after the end of the last Ice Age was the first the landscape around Salisbury, on the farmers that the Henge of Stonehenge built and the Roman and Anglo-Saxon past of this area back to Salisbury in 1985.

In addition to the location, the main characters function as a connecting link over the centuries. These initially come from two clans, some of which are competing, as shown by physical characteristics and later also name similarities. Their ancestors are the couple Hwll with his wife Akun on the one hand and Tep with his family on the other.

In the further course of the various waves of immigration, other people came into the area, each of whom became ancestors of their own clans. With the Neolithic immigrants comes Nooma and, in the course of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, Aelfwald.

At the end of the book, Jennifer Porters, a descendant of Tep, and her husband Alan Porters, who is descended from Hwll and Autun, and Sir Kersey Godfrey, a descendant of Aelfwald, and Maggie, whose ancestors are Aelfwald and Nooma.

construction

The book is divided into two larger sections, each covering the time of the emergence and flowering of Old Sarum and its decline and the rise of Salisbury . The individual episodes with their historical context are listed below.

The old Sarum

• The Journey to Sarum ( Prehistoric England)
• The tumulus (arrival of new Neolithic settlers )
• The Henge (construction of Stonehenge)
• Sorviodunum (Arrival of the Romans)
• Twilight (departure of the Romans and arrival of the Anglo-Saxons)
• The two rivers (time of the Anglo-Saxon empires)
• The fort (after the conquest by the Normans)

The new Sarum

• The Foundation (construction of Salisbury Cathedral )
• Death (At the time of the plague, 1348 )
• The Rose (The Wars of the Roses )
• The journey from Sarum
• New World (After Falling From Catholicism)
• Unrest (shortly before the English Civil War )
• Quiet (after the establishment of the House of Hanover )
• Bonie (At the time of the Napoleonic Wars )
• Empire (In the Victorian Age )
• The Henge (The First World War )
• Military camp (just before D-Day )
• The spire (present)

expenditure

• Edward Rutherfurd: Sarum . Original edition. Century Hutchingson Ltd. ISBN 0712614478 .
• Edward Rutherfurd: Sarum . Translator: Susanne Felkau, Claudia Felkau. Knaur. Munich 1990. ISBN 3-426-03005-5 .