the weirdstone of brisingamen reading age

While their parents travel, Colin and Susan are sent to Bess and Gowther, their mother’s old nurse and her husband, in Alderley Edge. He does, with unexpected and dire consequences for the future. In payment, the wizard tells the farmer to take whatever gold and gems he can fit into his pockets.

Then out from the hill these must ride and, in a battle thrice lost, thrice won, upon the plain, drive the enemy into the sea.” “Here they lie in enchanted sleep,” said the wizard, “until a day will come - and come it will - when England shall be in direst peril, and England’s mothers weep. The wizard, for that is what he is, tells the farmer why the knights are there: Inside sleep 140 knights, each, save one, with a perfect white mare by his side. The farmer hopes to sell his white mare at market in Macclesfield and when he agrees to sell it to the bearded man instead, he is shown a secret cave protected by an iron gate and filled with treasures. Just walking the woods and rises around Alderley Edge, they can be felt pushing themselves up from the earth and traveling along on the backs of breezes.īefore the story proper begins, Garner recounts a true legend of Alderley Edge - that of a farmer from the village of Mobberly and the strange white-bearded man he meets on the way to market.

It’s as if the land itself bred those stories and they are intertwined with it intimately and inextricably. There’s something deeper than that, though something that reaches beyond mere physical for Garner. His depiction of a land of rolling plains littered with farms and woods, riddled with thousands of years’-worth of mines makes it easy to see the svart-alfar, the “maggot-breed of Ymir,” boiling out of the earth. Halfway through my recent reread of Alan Garner’s 1960 debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, it became clear to me that the true protagonist was the land, not the ostensible ones, sister and brother Susan and Colin.Īlderley Edge, in Cheshire, England, is the name of both a village and a great sandstone cliff “six hundred feet high and three mile long.” For Garner there’s a connection between land and myth, artistically at least, that is deep.

The weirdstone of brisingamen reading age