Alan Garner has become, through a relatively modest output, one of the most important writers for children since 1960. His work is carefully crafted, economic, and precise. His early works-- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (1960), The M...

When Alan Garner was a child, he almost died three times. A very sickly boy, he suffered variously from spinal and cerebral meningitis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and diphtheria, at times so ill that he could neither speak nor move. It was on these occasions t...

In 1968 Alan Garner, defending his focus on the adolescent audience, asserted in "A Bit More Practice" that "This group of people is the most important of all, and selfishly, it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement." Yet...

[The Weirdstone of Brisingamen] was a remarkable first book by a young writer but hardly a successful one. The narrative is confusing and confused, always whipping itself into a further frenzy of activity. The terms of reference are Norse rather than Celtic, and the Norse gods were always a complicated lot. There are some fine moments, mostly marred by a turgid style. Where the book excels is in the use of an actual landscape whose topography plays an essential part in the action and in relating the nightma...

[In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, Garner] made use of much of the material of earlier attempts at creating contemporary sagas and it seemed likely at first that he was planning a sustained series. These stories of the knights bound in sleep until they can be wakened to fight the forces of evil have moments of strength, but are marred by uncertainty in their organisation, roughness in the writing and a general sense of unsureness of touch…. [They] are clearly prentice work and...

First published nine years ago, [The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderly] wears well and continues to reveal new riches…. The tense and often horrifying episodes of the plot are centered around the attempt, finally successful, to restore the weirdstone to Cadellin. As in Elidor, but perhaps not with the same balance, reality and fantasy are played against each other. The feeling for terrain and dwelling, for Gowther's dialect and humor, are earthy and of this world. But the inrush of ...