the clear crystal fountain,
And on it I will build
All the flowers of the mountain.
Traditional
Possessive parents rarely live long enough
to see the fruits of their selfishness.
Radio Times (15.9.65)
Contents
I am indebted to Betty Greaves, who saw the pattern; to Professor Gwyn Jones and Professor Thomas Jones, for permission to use copyright material in the text; and to Dafydd Rees Cilwern, for his patience.
A. G
When this book was first published, in 1967, I was an undergraduate at Oxford reading English, and I remember the sensation it caused – not among the academics, for whom children’s literature was an area of no interest whatsoever, but among those of us who had arrived at university with our heads already harbouring an unhealthy fascination with hobbits and elves and so on. Tolkien was all the rage, but we weren’t allowed to take an academic interest in that sort of thing because fantasy was as un-literary, as looked down on, as an enthusiasm for books that children read. The fantasy fans had already read and enjoyed the three earlier books by Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963) and Elidor (1965), but The Owl Service was something new, and tougher, and truer than anything we’d yet seen.
Like the earlier books, and unlike The Lord of the Rings, The Owl Service is set in our world, the “real” world as we call it. The fantastical elements irrupt into everyday life: the realistic settings and characters experience and are altered by their encounters with the mythical or the other-worldly. This way of writing a story is sometimes known as “low fantasy”, in contrast to the “high fantasy” of the Tolkien sort, where everything is made up. I think it’s a useful distinction, and I vastly prefer the low to the high.
What distinguishes The Owl Service from its predecessors, and from pretty well anything else published
