The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley
The 1960 first edition of the book.
Author(s)	Alan Garner
Cover artist	Donna Diamond
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Children's novel, Fantasy
Publisher	William Collins, Sons and Co.
Publication date	1960
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	224
ISBN	ISBN 0-529-05519-8
OCLC Number	4593190
LC Classification	PZ7.G18417 We 1979
Followed by	The Moon of Gomrath

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley is a children's fantasy novel written by the English author Alan Garner (1934–). His literary debut, Garner began work on the novel after he moved in to the Late Mediaeval house at Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire in 1957, in doing so being heavily influenced by the folklore of the neighbouring Alderley Edge which he had been taught as a child. The book was then picked up by the publisher Sir William Collins, who published it through his company Collins in 1960.

The novel is set in and around Macclesfield and Alderley Edge in Cheshire, and tells the story of two children, Colin and Susan, who are staying with some old friends of their mother while their parents are overseas. Susan possesses a small tear-shaped jewel held in a bracelet: unknown to her, this is the Weirdstone of the title. As its nature is revealed the children become hunted by the minions of the dark spirit Nastrond who, centuries before, had been defeated and banished by a powerful king. The children also have to compete with the wicked shapeshifting sorceress, Selina Place, and the evil wizard Grimnir, each of whom wishes to possess the weirdstone for themselves. Along the way Colin and Susan are aided by the wizard Cadellin Silverbrow and his dwarven companions.

Upon publication, the novel met with critical praise, and was soon followed by a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, published in 1963, but Garner eventually decided not to write the envisioned third part of the trilogy. By the late 1960s, he would come to reject The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, charactising it as "a fairly bad book". In 2010, the company HarperCollins brought out a special 50th anniversary issue of the book, containing a new preface by Garner and praise from various other figures involved in children's literature.

Plot

The book's introduction concerns the origin of the Weirdstone. Following the defeat of Nastrond, it was decided to take steps to prevent what must otherwise be his eventual return. This involved bringing together a small band of warriors of pure heart, each of whom must be partnered by a horse, and to gather them inside the old dwarf caves of Fundindelve, deep inside the hill of Alderley. The caves were sealed by powerful white magic which would both defend Fundindelve from evil, as the ages passed, and also prevent the warriors and their horses from aging. When the time was ripe, and the world once more in mortal peril, it was prophesied that this small band of warriors would ride out from the hill, trusting in their purity of heart to defeat Nastrond for good. Fundindelve was provided with a guardian, the ancient wizard Cadellin Silverbrow, and the heart of the white magic was sealed inside a jewel, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

At the beginning of the story, however, the Weirdstone has been lost, stolen centuries before by a farmer whose milk-white mare Cadellin had bought to complete the numbers in Fundindelve. The stone became a family heirloom and eventually found its way to Susan's mother, who passed it on to Susan, who is oblivious as to its history and purpose. Although the children become friends with Cadellin, the wizard fails to notice the bracelet, even when the children come to visit him in Fundindelve. However, its presence does not go unnoticed by Selina Place and the witches of the morthbrood, who send their minions to steal it. Susan finally realizes the identity of the Weirdstone, and fearing its destruction, sets out to warn the wizard. The children return to Fundindelve but Cadellin is nowhere to be found, so they set out to reclaim the stone on their own. They are successful but become lost in a labyrinth of mineshafts and caverns. As the members of the morthbrood close in on them, they are rescued by a pair of dwarves, Fenodyree and Durathror, who are close companions of Cadellin. After passing through many perils the group returns to the farm where Susan and Colin are staying to spend the night. They set out with the farm's owner the next day to return the weirdstone to Cadellin before it can fall into the wrong hands. Their travels take them through forests, mountains, and snowy fields while striving to avoid the attention of the morthbrood.

At the climax of the story, a great battle takes place on a hill near Alderley during which the children and their companions make a desperate last stand to protect the Weirdstone. However the enemy forces prove too strong and Durathror is mortally wounded. Grimnir takes the Weirdstone for himself and, in the ensuing chaos, Nastrond sends the great wolf Fenrir (in some editions Managarm) to destroy his enemies. As the remaining companions begin to despair, Cadellin appears and slays Grimnir, whom he reveals to be his own brother. The Morrigan flees in terror while Cadellin uses the power of the Weirdstone to subdue once again the forces of darkness.

Background

Alan Garner

"As I turned toward writing, which is partially intellectual in its function, but is primarily intuitive and emotional in its execution, I turned towards that which was numinous and emotional in me, and that was the legend of King Arthur Asleep Under the Hill. It stood for all that I'd had to give up in order to understand what I'd had to give up. And so my first two books, which are very poor on characterization because I was somehow numbed in that area, are very strong on imagery and landscape, because the landscape I had inherited along with the legend."

Alan Garner, 1989.

Alan Garner was born in the front room of his grandmother's house in Congleton, Cheshire, on 17 October 1934. He grew up not far away, on Alderley Edge, a well-to-do rural Cheshire village that by this time had effectively become a suburb of Manchester. Growing up in a "a rural working-class family", Garner's ancestry had been connected to Alderley Edge since at least the 16th century, with Alan tracing his lineage back to the death of William Garner in 1592. The Garner family had passed on "a genuine oral tradition", teaching their children the folk tales about The Edge, which included a description of a king and his army of knights that slept under it, guarded by a wizard, and in the mid 19th century, Alan's great-great grandfather Robert had carved the face of a bearded wizard onto the rock of a cliff next to a well that was known in local folklore as the Wizard's Well. Alan's own grandfather, Joseph Garner, "could read, but didn't and so was virtually unlettered", but instead taught his grandson the various folk tales about The Edge, with Alan later remarking that as a result he was "aware of [the Edge's] magic" as a child, when he would often play there with his friends. The story of the king and the wizard living under the hill played an important part in the young Alan's life, becoming "deeply embedded in my psyche" and heavily influencing his later novels, in particular The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

In 1957, Garner purchased Toad Hall, a Late Mediaeval building in Blackden, seven miles away from Alderley Edge. In the late 19th century the Hall had been divided into two agricultural labourers' cottages, but Garner obtained both for a total of £670, and proceeded to convert it back into a single home. It was at Toad Hall that Garner set about writing his first novel, which would be titled The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley. Whilst engaged in writing in his spare time, Garner attempted to gain employment as a teacher, but soon gave that up, believing that "I couldn't write and teach; the energies were too similar", and so began working as a general labourer for four years, remaining unemployed for much of that time.

Mythology and folklore

In 1957, Garner purchased and began renovating Toad Hall at Blackden in Cheshire.

The story borrows extensively from Celtic, Norse and Arthurian legends, as well as the folktale "The Legend of Alderley", which Garner was told as a child by his grandfather. A version of the legend serves as the introduction to the novel. The author claims that all names of legendary beings were taken directly from mythology, although some are used with vastly different meanings from their traditional roots - for example, Nastrond and Grimnir. Durathror is a deer in Norse mythology, whereas he is depicted as a dwarven warrior in the book.^{[citation needed]}

Many of the locations in the book and its sequel are actual places which Garner knew from his childhood. These include the sandstone escarpment of the Edge, the Wizard's Well and its inscription, the open mine pits, and the Beacon.^{[citation needed]}

Publication

Garner sent his debut novel to the publishing company Collins, where it was picked up by the company's head, Sir William Collins, who was on the look out for new fantasy novels following on from the recent commercial and critical success of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Garner, who would go on to become a personal friend of Collins, would later relate that "Billy Collins saw a title with funny-looking words in it on the stockpile, and he decided to publish it." Following its release in 1960, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen proved to be a "resounding success... both critically and commercially", later being described as "a tour de force of the imagination, a novel that showed almost every writer who came afterwards what it was possible to achieve in novels ostensibly published for children."

50th anniversary reprint

The special 50th anniversary publication.

In the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published by HarperCollins in 2010, several notable British fantasy novelists praised Garner and his work. Susan Cooper related that "The power and range of Alan Garner's astounding talent has grown with every book he's written", whilst David Almond called him one of Britain's "greatest writers" whose works "really matter". Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, went further when he remarked that:

"Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful... Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names. But that's the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires. I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration."

Another British fantasy author, Neil Gaiman, claimed that "Garner's fiction is something special" in that it was "smart and challenging, based in the here and the now, in which real English places emerged from the shadows of folklore, and in which people found themselves walking, living and battling their way through the dreams and patterns of myth." Praise also came from Nick Lake, the editorial director of HarperCollins Children's Books, who proclaimed that "Garner is, quite simply, one of the greatest and most influential writers this country has ever produced."

Critical reception

Upon initial publication, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was a critical success. However, within several years Garner himself had begun to find fault with his debut; in a 1968 interview he referred to it as "a fairly bad book" whilst in 1970 he went further, deriding it as "one of the worst books published in the last twenty years... technically... inept". Writing in 1981, Neil Philip noted that it had become "fashionable to condemn Garner's early work, perhaps because of his own dismissive attitude to it."

"The language of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen has neither the rhythmic assurance nor the compression nor the directness of Gardner's later work. He had not yet found his voice; nor had he won through to a balanced relationship with dialect."

Neil Philip, 1981.

Philip himself would devote a chapter to both The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath in his book A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner (1981), which was based on his earlier Ph.D thesis awarded by the University of London the previous year. Noting that the two books "may be flawed", he also accepted that "they are arguably Garner's most popular books; certainly it is on them that his reputation as a purely children's author rests." Dealing specifically with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Philip argued that the book's "lack of characterisation" is its "most serious flaw" but that it also suffers from "the triteness of its central premise". Despite these issues, he also felt that the book had much to commend it, having a narrative structure that while "unstructured", was "gripping and enthralling", holding the reader's attention and keeping them "guessing what is going to happen next." Proceeding with his praise for the book, he commented on "Garner's assured, poetic command of English", with a writing style that is "more fleshy, more prolix than the pared-down economy of Garner's later style". He also praised Garner's "awareness of ambiguity" in the novel, and also the manner in which the author had rooted his story "painstakingly and convincingly in a real topography".

Locations

Map drawn by Charles Green to illustrate the book.

Map of The Edge drawn by Charles Green to illustrate the book.

A number of Cheshire locations are mentioned in the story:

• Alderley Edge
• St. Mary's Clyffe
• The Edge
  • Castle Rock
  • Holy Well
  • Stormy Point
  • Iron Gates
  • Druid Stones
  • Old Quarry
  • Golden Stone
  • The Wizard Inn
  • West Mine
• Highmost Redmanhey
• Radnor Wood
• The Parkhouse
• Dumville's Plantation
• Monks Heath
• Sodger's Hump
• Bag Brook
• Marlheath
• Capesthorne Hall
• Redesmere
• Thornycroft Hall
• Pyethorne Wood
• Gawsworth
• Danes Moss
• Macclesfield Forest
• Shuttlingslow
• Piggford Moor
• Clulow Cross

Adaptations

In the 1970s, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was adapted as a musical by Paul Pearson and was staged in Manchester and Essex. The cast included Hugo award-winning artist Sue Mason, who also designed the programme book. The songs from the show were recently re-arranged by Inkubus Sukkubus with hopes of resurrecting the musical for a modern audience, but copyright restrictions have made it unlikely that it will be presented again. Both the novel and its sequel have also been dramatised for BBC Radio.^{[citation needed]}

In the 2011 BBC Radio 4 adaptation Robert Powell played the narrator; he has known Garner since he was a schoolboy at Manchester Grammar School. Struan Rodger who played the dwarf Durathror, was in a radio production of another Garner story, Elidor, when he was thirteen years old.

References

Bibliography

Academic sources

• Butler, Charles (2009). "Children of the Stones: Prehistoric Sites in British Children's Fantasy, 1965–2005". Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing): 145–154. 
• Butler, Charles (2006). Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Lanham MD: Scarecrow. ISBN 978-0810852426. 
• Philip, Neil (1981). A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner. London: Collins. ISBN 0-00-195043-6. 

Non-academic sources

• The Blackden Trust (2008). "Toad Hall". http://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/aboutus_toadhall.php. Retrieved 10 September 2011. 
• Garner, Alan (6 June 1968). "A Bit More Practice". Times Literary Supplement (London). 
• Garner, Alan (2010). "Introduction by the author". The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (50th Anniversary Edition) (London: HarperCollins Children's Books): 05–14. 
• Lake, Nick (2010). "A Note from the Publisher". The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (50th Anniversary Edition) (London: HarperCollins Children's Books): 315–320. 
• Pullman, Philip; Gaiman, Neil; Cooper, Susan; Nix, Garth; Almond, David and Faber, Michael (2010). "Praise for Garner". The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (50th Anniversary Edition) (London: HarperCollins Children's Books): 01–02. 
• Thompson, Raymond H. and Garner, Alan (subject) (12 April 1989). "Interview with Alan Garner". http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/garner.htm. Retrieved 10 September 2011. 

See also

• Brisingamen — a necklace belonging to the Norse goddess Freyja.