Elidor

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Elidor has been translated into multiple languages and adapted for radio and television for CBBC in 1995. As one of the UK’s most significant and prolific children’s writers, Garner has won and been nominated for many awards, including winning the Carnegie Medal in 1968 for The Owl Service. In 2001 he was awarded an OBE. As one by one the children are lured through the portal into the twilight world of Elidor, we view this through Roland's eyes, and feel what he feels. Roland is the most sensitive, the one we identify with. He is the one in the group whom nobody else will listen to, but is proved to be right. All the children are sensible and courageous, but only Roland remains clear-thinking and loyal under almost intolerable peer pressure. All the children must make choices and take on responsibilities far beyond anything their parents could understand. And here again is an irresistible tacit assumption made by older children's books, that the adults have closed minds. Adults may be cruel, stupid or risible - mere figures of fun. They may on the other hand be kind and sensible. But they are always, without a doubt, unimaginative and clueless.

The four castles of Elidor – Findias in the South, Falias in the West, Murias in the North, and Gorias in the East – correspond to the four cities of the Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish mythology – Finias (sic), Falias, Murias, and Gorias. [7] I thought I'd read this book as a child, but no - reading it to my daughter Celyn this week has convinced me that I just remember passages of it from drama classes in my primary school when I was very small.

What can I read next?

Elidor is a children's fantasy novel by the British author Alan Garner, published by Collins in 1965. Set primarily in modern Manchester, it features four English children who enter a fantasy world, fulfill a quest there, and return to find that the enemy has followed them into our world. Translations have been published in nine languages and it has been adapted for television and radio. Little do the children know that chance didn't bring them there, but a prophecy hundreds of years old. One by one they realise that the church isn't all it seems, as the fabric of time and space opens and they are propelled into the dying and strange world of Elidor... The book is very much concerned with Roland and his search for identity, meaning and purpose in his life; he agrees to go into the mound of Vandwy to recover the treasures of Elidor for Malebron; but he gets the courage for this from his sense of loyalty to others. His brother and sister are trapped in the mound, and he feels he has no choice but to rescue them. Hence any dedication to the cause of “Good” here is unconscious and bound up in the specific act of rescuing his loved ones. It is only later than Roland begins to conceive of himself as in some way allied with Malebron in the battle between light and dark forces in Elidor. Nevertheless a quest has been undertaken, and in very traditional terms; to go into the Magic place – the place of death, the dark tower, the underworld – and rescue the good that is trapped there. In this quest, Roland is successful. He rescues Helen from the equivalent of Elfland, just as his original in the ballad does. [13] These netherworlds are more than the brilliant imaginings of a gifted writer. Garner uses the power of myth in his stories – even myths that are not well-known – letting their ancient and often violent power blend with his spare, direct prose style. They give Garner’s story a deeper resonance whether or not the reader is aware of them.

I first read this when I was 7 years old. A reread today 40 years later to my youngest who had forgotten hearing this some time ago when she was small. And this is not the only myth that has a resonance in the story – there is a less commonly known Welsh folk-tale about a priest called Elidor (or Elidorus) who, as a child, was also granted entrance to a mysterious world. And the names of the four castles in Elidor appear in some of the oldest Irish mythology. Garner takes these mythic stories and gives them a concrete reality, one that spills into the actual concrete reality of his characters, the Watson children, who have to cope with moving house, getting to school and the suspicions of their parents while also guarding the treasures of Elidor and dealing with the threats they pose to everyone’s safety. And the conclusion of the novel is a masterpiece of terror, leaving the reader wanting more - yet dreading what it might portend. For there is never an easy, happy ending, in a pagan myth. In 1967 Stephen King first got the idea to write an epic series inspired by the poem "Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning in 1855. And Browning took the line from King Lear, written by Shakespeare in 1607 ... in which it is a line of nonsense from a man pretending madness.This novel was originally written by Alan Garner in 1965, from his own radio play. It features four young teenage children, David, Nicholas, Helen and Roland, who inadvertently break though the fabric of time and space at a weak point, to find themselves in another universe. The plot moves to and fro between the sprawling city of Manchester, and Gorias, the gateway to Elidor. Elidor is, as it sounds, a magical fantasy world; a world of beauty and goodness, a golden Utopia, as described by one of its inhabitatants, Malebron, but a world which is under threat from evil forces.