74 pages • 2 hours read
Rosemary SutcliffBlack Ships Before Troy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Black Sails and Black Ships
The black sails of the novel’s title are a recurring motif, symbolizing mourning and foreshadowing the countless deaths of the war. The novel opens with the black ships of the Greeks sailing towards Troy, bringing countless warriors, armies, war, and ultimately, death. The ominous color heralds the eventual destruction of Troy.
The black ships are an omnipresent harbinger of death. Just as the Greeks cannot penetrate the walls of Troy, so the Trojans fail to burn down the black ships, despite there often being “men were among them with firebrands to burn the black ships on the day of the battle rage of Hector” (112).
The black ships are ultimately correct in their foreshadowing of Trojan ruin; the city is burned to the ground, its men and children slaughtered, and its women enslaved. After Troy is sacked, the ships finally sail off, this time bearing back some of the dead that they originally portended. Though the Greeks sail under the black banners and arrive in the black ships themselves, they are no less immune to the death and tragedy that the sails foreshadow. Even the most eagerly anticipated Greek warrior is now just black ship cargo: “they carried dead Achilles back across the plain through the bodies of the slain to the black ships” (119).
Fire
Fire symbolizes violence, strength, war, and the power of the gods. There is an inevitability to the flames, an uncontrollable burn that is destined and impossible to stop. Often, fire is a metaphor for destruction. For example, Paris’s birth prophesy dooms his city: He will be “a firebrand that should burn down Troy” (3). This “firebrand” comes to pass in the form of Greek soldiers: “a great and terrible charge, in which foot soldiers slew food soldiers and chariot men slew chariot men, and they broke into the Trojan mass as fire falls on a forest on a windy day, leaping and racing from tree to tree” (57). Finally, the mortal embodiment of the war, god-touched Achilles, has bright hair often likened to fire or flame.
At the same time, fire is a symbol of mourning, since both Greeks and Trojans burn their dead on pyres, or “death-fires” (18). During funeral rites, fire is no longer an avatar of power and strength; instead, it marks grief and the fleeting nature of moral life. When Achilles discovers that Patroclus has been killed, he flings himself “down beside the hearth-fire, and threw ashes and black dust over the brightness of his hair until Antilochus grasped his hands, fearing that he would slay himself in the wildness of his grief” (77). Achilles’s grief snuffs out his strength, weakening his self-control until Achilles’s is driven by pure rage. The ashes in his hair catch metaphorical flame—“fire seemed to spring up from the crown of his head, like the beacon blaze that summons help for a town attacked at night” (77).
Horses
Horses pull Trojan and Greek war chariots, so countless horses are killed in battle alongside their warriors and charioteers. The sheer number of dead horses echoes the endless deaths of nameless soldiers sacrificed in the war. Like the common soldiers, the horses have little choice whether to fight in the war. Horses are thus a symbol of the common warrior.
Other horses are singled out for their importance to their owners—these animals are avatars for their lords’ power. When he realizes that King Rhesus has the strongest horses of all the Trojan allies, Odysseus kills Rhesus and stealing his horses. The stratagem is wildly successful: Rhesus’s men abandon the war entirely when their leader’s emblem of power is gone. Similarly, after the death of Achilles’s beloved Patroclus, Achilles’s horses echo their lord’s unbearable grief. The two immortal horses, Xanthus and Balius, “stood with bowed heads and wept” for Patroclus, and “would not move from the spot, either to draw clear of the fighting or to join in” (74). Like Achilles, who can only be moved from his chosen course by divine intervention, his horses only regain their composure after Zeus intervenes.
Of course, the most important horse in the story is Odysseus’s ploy to bring Greek soldiers inside Troy’s walls. Heroes hide themselves within an enormous horse, steal into Troy under cover of night, and open the gates so the Greek army can sack the city. This horse is a perfect avatar for its lord, Odysseus—an ingenious ruse that brings victory through cunning, Odysseus’s calling card.
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By Rosemary Sutcliff
