Trivia / The Dolphin Ring

• Died During Production: Sword Song was first published five years after Sutcliff's death, based on the second of her usual three drafts.
• Referenced by...:
  • Poseidon's Gold (1993), the fifth volume of the Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis, is dedicated "In memory of Rosemary Sutcliff, who died while this was being written: on behalf of all the children who know how far it is from Venta to the mountains", a reference to the bird-catcher's code phrase "It is all of two hundred miles..." in The Lantern Bearers.
  • "Fire" (1993), a short story of a British thrall's captivity among Saxons in The Lion Hunters series by Elizabeth Wein, opens with an epigraph from The Lantern Bearers.
  • The ring turns up in a lost temple in The Thief (1996), first of The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner.
    In the sunlight I could see that the emerald was flawed, milky white on one side. The seal engraved in it was a curving fish, maybe a dolphin. The white flaw was a breaking wave.
    
    The magus leaned over me to lift it off my thumb. "The writing on the ring itself is in the old style, pre-invader. Whoever wore it here must have had it in his family for many generations."
    
    "Or he lost it here a long, long time ago."

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