I had forgotten many things about this book - forgotten or ignored, maybe, when I read it when I was 10; when I was read it in the end-of-day story time. Odd figures stand out for me: Storri Sitricson, who perfectly encapsulates what being a missionary Christian priest must have entailed; Haethcyn the Harper and his repertoire and his professional pride. But it is the central story of Frytha and Bjorn that carries the whole book, as the ragtag remnants of the destruction of Saxon and Viking culture stand against the Norman military might. I may need to come back to this in another forum.
This is, for me, Rosemary Sutcliff at her descriptive finest: the landscape is full of little, vivid details - the "dappled and glimmering sky...the ancient strong point, undisturbed unless by the stray ghosts drilling on the lost parade-ground..." "Light...a rolling tawny smear in the murk..." This comes to a magnificent climax in the chapter The Last Battle, the bloody confrontation between the forces of Ranulf le Meschin and the war bands of Jarl Buthar, one of the most expressive battle sequences I think I have ever read: here is landscape writing of a high order, interleaving of different perspectives to give different standpoints and emotions, sonorous text to rival (maybe surpass?) Tolkien, details of battle.
And through it all, the harp, the images of the ravens, a sense of an ending of a way of life, and the promise of a continuation through the dolphin ring that occurs as a witness in a string of Sutcliff's stories.