The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

Cardboard cut-outs Susan and Colin (I just finished the book and still had to check their names) are sent to live in rural Cheshire with friends of their parents, who have gone overseas on business. That’s certainly how I feel about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Garner’s first novel, and the first part of a trilogy. The problem with beloved children’s authors is that a lot of people love them because they were raised on them, and if you come onto the scene decades later as an adult, you may fail to see what the appeal is, only to be met with wintry glares from everybody else, trying to enjoy their nostalgia binge. See this thread for more information.Īlan Garner is widely considered one of England’s most beloved children’s authors, so naturally I had to investigate what the fuss was about.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy. In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986).

Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).

Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.īorn into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner