RIP Lloyd Alexander
Posted By Kathleen David on May 17, 2007
The Chronicles of Prydain was my first fantasy series. I devoured the books one after the other and was quite happy to find out that a new one was coming out about the time I finished the ones that had been published. It was also one of the first box sets I got for Christmas. I would read and re-read the adventures of Taran many times over the years.
I found out this morning through the grapevine that Mr. Alexander had passed away. He was 82 years old. He had been married to his wife Janine for 62 years. She predeceased him by two weeks. I never met the man but those who worked with him always had kind things to say about him and he was apparently very nice to his young fans.
(EDIT: His thoughts on Fantasy. Well worth a read )
I am grateful that I have read many of the books that Mr. Alexander wrote.
Ditto. The Chronicles of Prydain (which I didn’t know was pronounced “Prit-ten”) were a natural step after the Chronicles of Narnia. They respected the readers’ intelligence more and didn’t shy from showing how horrible the violence was. Taran stumbled quite a bit on the road to becoming a hero and definately grew with the series. Morality was more complex than in most stories, with good peope turning evil and vicious people turning heroic, and Gwydion realized how difficult it was to judge.
“The Foundling and other stories” was a welcome revisit after finishing the five books. I still want to visit the Marshes of Morva somtime.
Ditto. The Chronicles of Prydain (which I didn’t know was pronounced “Prit-ten”) were a natural step after the Chronicles of Narnia. They respected the readers’ intelligence more and didn’t shy from showing how horrible the violence was. Taran stumbled quite a bit on the road to becoming a hero and definately grew with the series. Morality was more complex than in most stories, with good peope turning evil and vicious people turning heroic, and Gwydion realized how difficult it was to judge.
“The Foundling and other stories” was a welcome revisit after finishing the five books. I still want to visit the Marshes of Morva somtime.
You must have been young when you hit Prydain, unless the new book comong out as you finished the others was “The Foundling” – i first read them several years before i met you, and all five were out by that time.
For a while i gave the Prydain box set to people as a gift at theslightest excuse. I sent a set home to the daughters of a fellow worker, wholoved it and asked me for further recommendations… those girls were like thirteen and fourteen then; they’d be about forty now.
Outside of Tamora Pierce, there are very few authors who can write a fantasy series for YA-and-younger audiences that both respects the readers’ intelligence and delivers solid story-telling with some thought-provoking moral underpinnings as well as Alexander could.
When my mother was going for hr Phd (she got it at age 79), one of the sources she quoted for a paper she did was an essay by Alexander entitles “The Flat-Heeled Muse”. I think you might enjoy it, if you haven’t already read it.
Quoting from an on-line mention:
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“The Flat-Heeled Muse.” The Horn Book Magazine (April 1965): 141-146. Alexander declares the muse of fantasy to be a very demanding muse who wears sensible brogan shoes.
{/quote}