Alan Garner as a schoolboy in 1941

Alan Garner
1934–

Alan Garner was born in Cheshire in 1934, where, apart from a brief foray to Oxford as an undergraduate and an enforced stay in London during his National Service, he has always lived; in a timber frame medieval hall, within seven miles of his birthplace and of his family cottage at the foot of Alderley Edge.

Alan Garner is the acknowledged grandfather of modern children’s literature and the intellectual godfather of many writers, academics, publishers, theatre directors, actors, musicians and film-makers. He has been, and continues to be, a subterranean influence on contemporary culture. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, is the first of his novels celebrating his spiritual inheritance; the land and the people who made him. All Alan Garner’s stories, films and television programmes are set in the landscape of his childhood; the woods and fields of Alderley in Cheshire, or on the hills that can be seen from the slopes of the Edge.

His affinity with place is at the core of his work. His landscape is sentient, numinous. It influences the outcome of his stories as strongly as any of the characters, whether it is the copper mines under the Edge in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, the ruined mansion of Erwood Hall in The Moon of Gomrath, the sinister suburban street in Elidor, the claustrophobic Welsh valley of The Owl Service, Barthomley church on its mound in Red Shift or the intimate knowledge of the rhythm of the road from the Garner cottage to the village of Alderley Edge in The Stone Book Quartet. The symbiotic relationship between man and his spiritual place is at its most poignant in his adult novels, Strandloper and Thursbitch.

The Malverns are associated with Elgar’s music, as Wenlock Edge and Shropshire are imbued with Houseman’s poetry. Just as Wessex is Hardy Country, the Lakes Wordsworth Country, East Anglia Turner Country, this small piece of Cheshire is now known as Garner Country. Devotees visit the Edge, book in hand, looking for the sites of incidents in the stories, but, any place revered and revealed by one of its sons or daughters pays a price, an irony not lost on Alan Garner. So, the main road of Alderley Edge housed a children’s bookshop, The Legend, its name acknowledging the local version of the sleeping hero legend on which The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is based; but across the road from St Philip’s church, whose steeple Mary climbs in The Stone Book Quartet, is a wine bar, Brasingamens. ‘The Braz’ is a place notorious for the high–jinks of its patrons; rich and famous young footballers and their decorative wives.

In the pre-electronic days of the 1960s, when the first portable tape-recorders were becoming commercially available, Ted Hughes and Alan Garner were at a conference, exposing their souls to a particularly belligerent group of teachers. Excited by the potential for the spoken word that the new technology offered, Ted Hughes foresaw a wonderful future for storytelling. He said that every child would be able to have a personal bard in the bedroom. Here, on this CD, is a master bard telling a legendary story: it is The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

Griselda Greaves, February 2006