Posted
on January 30, 2016
Here
are some of my favorite friends from my childhood: Taran, Eilonwy,
and Gurgi. Here are some of my kids' favorite friends, from their
childhood: Taran, Eilonwy, and Gurgi.
I'm
sure you realize that when I say friends, I really mean
“friends” with quotation marks. Really, they were beloved
characters from oft-read, much-loved books.
And
therein lies the beauty of books – new generations can enjoy
wonderful characters and engaging plots just as much as their parents
and maybe even grandparents before them did!
Getting
back to Taran, Eilonwy, and Gurgi:
Taran was a wanderer; a boy who
had no station in life, no known parents; a boy who really wanted to be a hero.
Eilonwy was a princess with a non-stop tongue, a
handy bauble that serves as a flashlight (among other things), and a stick-up-for-herself attitude.
Gurgi was...well,
nobody really knew what Gurgi was. He wasn't quite human, but he could
talk, after a fashion. He was mussy and hairy and always hungry –
“crunchings and munchings” were big in his life (and in my
family's discussion of snacks as well)!
These
three are some of the characters of the five-book Chronicles of
Prydain. They were written by today's birthday. Lloyd Alexander, in
the 1960s, and two of the five were honored with a Newbery Honor and a Newbery
Medal. An honor that is even harder to get is a Disney movie; in
1985, Disney released a Prydain animated movie that wasn't very like
the books (and wasn't, in my opinion, all that good).
Maybe
I was just disappointed because the Disney Taran, Eilonwy, and Gurgi
were not MY Taran, Eilonwy, or Gurgi!
Lloyd
Alexander wrote more than just Prydain books...
Born
on this date in 1924, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lloyd Alexander
loved to read the books his parents bought at the Salvation Army.
Alexander's childhood was shadowed by the Great Depression, which
hugely affected his stockbroker father (and most Americans) – but
Alexander could get his escape by reading.
By
age 15, Alexander wanted to be a writer. He worked the job that his
parents found for him, as a bank messenger, while finishing high
school by age 16, but he only went to college for one year before he
decided to launch out on his career. He thought that he needed to
have adventures before he began to write about others' adventures, so
he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was lucky not to
be deployed until late in the war; he trained and served in
intelligence and counterintelligence.
Spy
stuff!
One
of the places where he trained was Wales.
After
the war, Alexander went to university in Paris, got married, and
moved back to the U.S. to write.
He
wrote books for seven long years before he got any of his books
published!
His
first hit was fantasy, meant for children: Time Cat. Because of that
success, Alexander decided to stick with children's fantasy. He
revisited his wartime home, Wales, for the settings of the Prydain
books. The books are about Welsh names and were inspired by aspects of
Welsh mythology – although the beloved main characters and the
plots of the Prydain books were entirely Alexander's own!
- If you already know and love the Prydain books, did you know that there is a wiki about Prydain? (Don't check this out if you haven't read the books – loads of spoilers!)
Also
on this date:
Plan ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest pages on:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
No comments:
Post a Comment