In this episode we talked about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) by Alan Garner.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

If you wish to see Ali's drawing of a mara, their instagram is Liminitch.

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re joined by special guest Ali to talk about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. Enjoy!

Ren Hail, O eaters of Toadstools! I say again! We had a little snafu but I’m doing the same intro because I like it.

Ali It was pretty good. It holds up to repititon.

Adam I mean, I can imagine you gnawing on a toadstool while recording, crouched there by your laptop.

Ren Hi Adam and hello Ali our returning guest, our folk horror and standing stone correspondent.

Ali Well thank you, I’m honoured by that description.

Ren Who you may remember from such episodes as Paperhouse and Marianne Dreams, and Children of the Stones!

Ali It’s nice to be back.

Ren Today we are back after something of a haitus, for various reasons. It’s fine, we’re here, we’re just ailing, and today we’re talking about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner, which I think was your suggestion Ali?

Ali I certainly suggested Alan Garner broadly, he’s probably written a few books that could make an appearance, but this is definitely a good one to start with.

Ren This is more fantasy than we usually trend but it’s definitely dark fantasy. It fits the remit, I think.

Ali It definitely falls into spooky, I think, in places anyway.

Ren Alan Garner is an English author still alive, at the time of recording he’s 89 years old, and he writes novels, primarily for children, which are rooted in fantasy and folklore, probably the best known of which is The Owl Service, from 1967.

But the Weirdstone of Brisingamen is his debut novel, first published in 1960, and therefore one fo the older things that we’ve talked about on the podcast, apart from the Water Babies!

Adam Thankfully this isn’t puritanical Victorian horror.

Ali It’s quite funny to think about The Water Babies as being the founding stone of children’s horror.

Adam The Reverend didn’t know what he had wrought!

Ren This novel, like many of Garner’s is set in Cheshire, which is in the North-West-ish of England. It has Liverpool and Manchester above it and Wales to the West.

Adam Have you ever been to Cheshire, Ali?

Ali Well, Alderley Edge is quite close to Manchester, I’ve been to Stockport a few times because I have family there. My brother actually works in Alderley Edge, so he commutes there. It’s obviously expanded quite a bit since 1960, I think quite a lot of footballers live there.

Adam What kind of landscape is it?

Ali Well, I probably know more about the landscape from this book than from actually going there, because you don’t necessarily get the strongest sense of landscape from the town. But as Garner says it’s pretty flat but Alderley Edge is this peculiar hill that sticks up out of the plane.

Ren And now if you visit Alderly Edge there is an augmented reality app, that you can download and as you explore the Edge you can see wizards and knights and white horses appearing around the landscape.

Ali Wow! Okay.

Ren That’s just something I found out when I was researching!

Ali That’s amazing. I would be very interested to know what he thinks of that.

Ren So this story is inspired by the legend of the Wizard of the Ledge, which Garner presents as a prologue.

But because i started researching this and went on a diversion I’m going to tell you about it

So the histories of this legend online attribute the first written account of the legend to a letter by someone called Parson Shrigley of Alderley to a newspaper called the Manchester Mail in 1805. Which sounds plausible, except as far as I can tell there has never been a newspaper called the Manchester Mail. Yeah.

Ali Obliging gasp

Ren There are quite a few actual Manchester newspapers, and some of them have been lovingly documented online, but I could not find any evidence of this 1805 letter by Parson Shrigley.

Ali I mean, Garner’s claim is that it goes back a lot further than 1805 because he says in at least one interview that he’d traced the story back and claims that it’s pre-Authurian and in fact goes back to the Bronze Age. I don’t know what his evidence for this is and he does in the same interview point out that he is a writer and he does makes things up.

Adam Like quite a lot of older children’s fiction, I’m thinking also of Moondial, it has this strange shifting sense of time, it’s almost like various times are being overlaid on top of each other, there’s this deep time as the character’s move through the landscape. And there’s this sense that you get in Narnia, to be fair, of an adventure that takes both aeons and a week, that things are both small and vast at the same time. In the way that they can feel when you’re a child, the way the summer holiday stretches out for ever when it’s only six weeks.

Ali I think that idea of deep time is quite a core part of Garner’s work which changes over the course of his career, but there’s often a sense of time and connecting back.

We have a candidate for claim of the Week.

Adam Claim of the Week!

Ali In that he does claim that he’s traced via the legend of the Wizard of Alderley Edge that he’s traced this far back to the Bronze Age.

RenI’m chosing to believe him.

Ali In the interview where he makes this claim claim he does say that he’s a writer and his job is to makes things up, so I don’t know to what extent he’s interested in providing hard evidence for that.

Adam It’s a deeper truth, the filmmaker Werner Herzog says this: “It’s an ecstatic truth, it’s not the truth of accountants.”

Ali I think Garner would be pretty on board with this approach!

Adam So what is this ancient stone age myth then, Ren?

Ren The short version of this legend is that a farmer is riding his milk-white mare to the fair in Macclesfield, when a tall old man with a long hair and beard appears and asks to buy the horse. The farmer refuses, but the old man says that no-one will buy the mare, beautiful as she is, and he will be waiting for the farmer that evening.

And so it happens, no one buys the horse and that evening the old man appeared again, he took the farmer to a great rock in the hillside, touched his staff to it and it split in two. Inside there was a pair of iron gates, then a tunnel, and a cavern filled with the sleeping forms of one hundred and forty knights, and beside each but one a milk-white mare:

“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 mother’s weep. 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.”

So. So, that’s the set-up and then we get our protagonists.

Who are Colin and Susan, who are sent to stay with Bess and Gowther Mossock in Alderley Edge. Bess had been the children’s mother’s nurse, and she’s happy to take Colin and Susan in for six months when their mother has to join their father ‘abroad’. So long, parents! Summarily dispatched from the story.

The children set off wandering and are warned by Gowther not to stray into any of the old mine tunnels, and stumble across first an inn called The Wizard, and then “a stone trough into which water was dripping from an overhanging cliff, and high in the rock was carved the face of a bearded man, and underneath was engraved:
Drink Of This
And Take Thy Fill
For The Water Falls
By the Wizard’s Will”

Which is a real landmark of Alderley Edge.

Ali Alan Garner says it was carved by his great-grandfather.

Ren Oh really! So they’re like, “huh, lot of wizard chat around here, wonder what that’s all about”.

Adam That’s not a verbatim quote.

Ren You’re right, that’s not a verbatim quote. And they go and ask Gowther, but are intercepted by a middle-aged woman in a car, who insists that they accept a lift, even as the farm is only a few yards away, then begins muttering in Latin when they refuse.

Adam Oh it’s awful! It’s a real stranger danger moment this, it was like when I was eight and was walking to primary school or through the village and some man slowed down to ask me for directions and I went” “