It can hardly have been by chance that in 1960 it was Rosemary Sutcliff who wrote the Bodley Head monograph on the children's books of Rudyard Kipling, nor is it surprising that in it she remarked " … of all the writers of my childhood, he made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgotten,"… for no reader of her own books—except one totally ignorant of Kipling—can fail to be aware of her debt to him. Quite apart from certain identities of subject, there is an underlying identity of theme: what one might call the Conflict of Duty and Inclination. In the monograph she wrote that the Mowgli stories are " … a following-out of divided life and divided loyalties, the unbearable choice that has to be made and has to be borne" …; this might equally well be said of her own works, since she has scarcely a hero who does not have to make that "unbearable choice," with the making of and abiding by that choice very often the mainspring of the book. Just how deeply she has been influenced by Kipling I suspect that even she is not fully aware; that it goes beyond a casual borrowing of subject material may be shown in a review of her major works…. (p. 90)

Simon is the first Sutcliff work to have a recognizably Sutcliffian—one might almost say epic—flavour. It has many of the typical Sutcliff ingredients: young adult rather than child hero, a David-and-Jonathan friendship, above all a central conflict of Duty and Inclination. Simon has to choose between his duty to Parliament—his own and his father's political creed—and his friendship with Royalist Amias, just as Mowgli must choose between the Jungle and his humanity…. Simon, too, could easily be the typical Kipling subaltern as he learns his job in the New Model Army with the covert help of his troop. If the book has still a certain amount of Elizabeth Goudge (the dominant influence of the earlier works) it has yet come a long way from the mere prettiness of The Queen Elizabeth Story or The Armourer's House.

With The Eagle of the Ninth … Rosemary Sutcliff achieved full maturity and did it with a significant dash of Kipling. Her Marcus is a blood-brother of Parnesius and Pertinax, those Roman subalterns of Puck of Pook's Hill, and her picture of the Roman army is rather more akin to Kipling's than to a historian's. (pp. 90-1)

Yet despite the Roman setting of The Eagle of the Ninth and its sequels it is not they but Outcast … which is the clearest example of Kipling's effect on Rosemary Sutcliff. It too has a Roman background, but it does not derive from the Parnesius stories. Consider, rather, where one would find the classic story of a boy reared from infancy among a people not his own, cast out by them on the verge of manhood through fear of his difference, meeting with incomprehension and ill-treatment among his "own" people and, after various adventures, ending as the trusted servant of a conquering and imperial power. The answer, of course, is Mowgli, but remove the Jungle and the answer is equally Beric in Outcast. (p. 91)

Characters apart, Outcast, like most of Rosemary Sutcliff's work, is full of verbal echoes of Kipling. It can hardly be a coincidence that the Druid speaks of the Dumnonii as "the Free People" just as so often in The Jungle Book the Wolves are "the Free People," or that Cathlan in his leavetaking of Beric gives him the Jungle farewell "Good hunting!" From Kipling must come the almost invariable reference to any baby or child as "cub" or "cubling" …, but not, I think, that other typically Sutcliffian formula "wolf kind," "Saxon kind," "shepherd kind," and so on.

Outcast was followed by The Shield Ring …, the least Kiplingesque of Rosemary Sutcliff's major works. It owes nothing to Kipling in either geographical or historical setting … or, indeed, in theme. It seems significant that it is the only major Sutcliff work to focus on a heroine rather than a hero, though of course for much of the book we share Fiytha's preoccupation with Bjorn. Nevertheless there are certain reminders of Kipling. The poor, broken-witted mazelin, whose wits return only at the end, seems to derive from "half-caulked" Penn in Captains Courageous—interestingly, the only echo from a book which Rosemary Sutcliff says in Rudyard Kipling that she did not meet until "well after I was grown up."… But the true derivative of Kipling's Norman stories was yet to come. (pp. 93-4)

The Lantern Bearers has very little surface Kipling; Knight's Fee … not only has a great deal, but is very nearly a sequel to Kipling's Norman stories centring on Sir Richard Dalyngridge. There is the same post-Conquest period, the same small Sussex manor, the same old Norman knight close to his stern but kindly overlord, each with his "glimmering gown" of chain mail, "nut-shaped" helmet, and notable sword. Both stories have an element of pre-Tenchebrai treason which may involve the loss of the beloved manor….

There are other, smaller likenesses. Both tales include a horse called Swallow [both greys], make play with "the Custom of the Manor" and involve voyaging with a Viking seaman….

But the main essence of Knight's Fee is the friendship of Randal and Bevis, with Bevis's death the fee Randal must pay for knighthood and manor, and though Kipling writes often enough of comradeship he never touches on that typically Sutcliffian subject, the parting—whether temporary or permanent—of twinsouled friends. Nor does Rosemary Sutcliff ever use Kipling's real-life experience of marriage to the sister of a dead companion. Even for a parallel with Sir Richard's marrying of Hugh's sister (though Hugh is not dead) we have to go right back to Simon. (p. 96)

Knight's Fee is, however, the Sutcliff story which bears most obviously those marks of Kipling which show in her books "like shadows on the Downs." It is also the last of her major works to do so at all. Neither Dawn Wind … nor The Mark of the Horse Lord … have more than a touch or two of Kipling. (p. 97)

[We] can now see that the prevailing sources of [Kipling's] influence appear to be the Mowgli stories and the Norman and Roman sequences in Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. Other books and stories have their echoes, but it is these which dominate. (p. 98)

But if it does seem that very often Rosemary Sutcliff has taken the kernel of a story or a point of detail from something in Kipling she has always developed it in her own way. It is not at all that she is imitating Kipling but rather that she has sometimes used the same stones to build something quite different. Outcast, for example, is not merely the Mowgli story in Roman dress, but a deeply realised description of rejection and reintegration. With Kipling we are nearly always given external views from a detached and objective angle; feelings and motives are very often understated or left to our own deduction. With Rosemary Sutcliff we are always at the heart of the action and experiencing it through a hero of whose feelings and motives we are piercingly aware. Kipling, in short, is on the outside looking in; Rosemary Sutcliff is on the inside looking out. (pp. 98-9)

The influence of Rudyard Kipling on Rosemary Sutcliff may well be said "to show and fade / Like shadows on the Downs," but it no more shapes her individuality than the marks alter the basic shapes of the Downs. (p. 101)