First Light by Erica Wagner

Author:Erica Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2016-04-29T12:59:29+00:00

Katherine Langrish is a critically acclaimed British author of several historical fantasies for children. Her titles include the trilogy West of the Moon, and Dark Angels (US title The Shadow Hunt), a tale of ghosts, elves and hobgoblins set in the Welsh Marches. You can find Katherine at her blog ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles’ [http://steelthistles.blogspot.co.uk/] where she writes on folklore, fairy tales and fantasy.

THE JOINING

OF THE SONG

Hugh Lupton

‘All in!’ shouted Ozzie Leah.

The three men took their scythes and a whetstone each and sharpened the blades, two strokes below, one above. The metal rang like swords and bells.1

The craft is held in the sharp edge of that fine honed blade where the written and the uttered word meet, where the eye meets the ear. On the one side we have ‘grammar and syntax’, on the other ‘pitch and cadence and the colour of the word’2.

Born into the first generation to reap the benefits of the 1944 Education Act, educated at The Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, it would have been easy for Alan Garner (like most of his generation) to leave his origins behind him and step into the bold new post-war world that promised to shake away the old class-ridden consensus.

But instead he returned. He went back to Alderley Edge, his birthplace, the place his ancestors had inhabited for as long as any one of them could remember. And he set about finding – with all the discipline of the western academic intellectual tradition at his disposal – a language and a narrative form that could be true to the deep culture of his place.

Grammar began to meet song, thought began to meet dream, on that path (familiar to Lancelot) ‘difficult to tread, narrow as the edge of a razor’3.

And it is a sharp path, beset with thorns and briars. The ‘deep narrow’ culture of Alderley, as he had discovered during his school years, fought shy of ‘education’. Even now, as I try to make a list of what seem to me to be the consuming questions that lie ‘aback of behind’4 in Garner’s books I can hear those voices, withering and canny in equal measure, cutting me down to size. They are voices that must have haunted him from the outset.

Question: How does an oral culture apply the breadth and depth of its knowledge to its own locality?

Answer: That’s for thee to see and me to know.

Question: Given that an oral culture is unbroken and bound to place, what ancient traces might it still carry?

Answer: What indeed, quoth Kettle to his mare.

Question: Given that exceptional individuals can be born anywhere, how might they have been accommodated and understood in a small community?

Answer: Ay, there’s always one . . . that has his arse hanging out of his britches.

Question: How might traditional narrative: myth, legend and folk tale, be made to speak to us today?

Answer: You’re a right ’un, soft as me pocket. You’ve flewen high and let in a cow clap at the last.

Question: In what

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.