The Fantasy Worlds of 1968

1968 marked a turning point in my reading habits. It was the year in which I started training as a teacher at Bingley College of Higher Education in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The West Riding was due to move over from an infant/junior/secondary system to one which followed the pattern of lower/middle/higher schools, the difference being where the age breaks came. Consequently, although I had gone to a traditional 7-11 junior school I was trained for 7-13, the upper age for which Middle schools catered.  As you would expect, the College had an extensive library of Children’s Literature for use on teaching practice, including material only recently published.  I had always read vociferously as a child but most of my reading had been of the Enid Blyton, Lorna Hill variety.  Once I got to Secondary school I was weaned onto the classics and so for seven years Children’s Literature had passed me by.  Now I was encouraged to go back to it and go back I did, with such enthusiasm that I eventually ended up running school libraries and lecturering in the subject on both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees for nearly twenty years. The quality of writing for children in that 7-13 age range during the sixties was improving all the time and so, when this reading 1968 project was announced, I thought that I would celebrate it by re-visiting a couple of the outstanding books published in that year.

In 1962 Joan Aiken had published The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, the first of a sequence which was eventually to run to twelve novels, that last of which, The Witch of Clatteringshaws, was published posthumously over forty years later in 2005. 1968, saw the arrival of The Whispering Mountain, a story which chronologically precedes all the others but which fills in the back story of Owen Hughes and his recovery of the Harp of Teirtu.  Like all the novels in the series it is set in a world which bears a passing resemblance to our own but which allows for far more in the way of daring do and acts of duplicitous evil.  Set in the time of the Stuarts (although not the Stuarts as we know them) it introduces Prince Davie Jamie Charlie Neddie Georgie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart who will later become King and be forced to fight off the machinations of the wicked Hanoverians. The Prince is rescued by Owen after a hunting accident and is brought to see that his host, the Marquis of Malyn, is nothing more than an evil schemer who is willing to go to any lengths to keep the Harp of Teirtu from its true owner.  Set in Wales, the story takes the reader through valleys, over mountains and eventually along a series of frightening subterranean passages as Owen, in the company of Arabis, daughter of wandering poet Tom Dando, and Brother Ianto fight to save not only the Harp but also the exiled Children of the Pit, brought as slaves to mine Welsh gold two thousand years before and now longing to return to the beautiful mountains of Sur.

You are not going to get very far with this sequence of novels if you are not someone who is well practised in believing six impossible things before breakfast every morning.  Fortunately, this is a skill I acquired very early in life.  Overall, they provide a picture of an England that is just close enough to our own history to cast a knowing eye over life as it would have been lived in that period.  They make no attempt to hide the squalor, and indeed the danger, that many children would have faced on a daily basis.  But, primarily, they are the most enormous fun.  Although she doesn’t appear in this book, the series is dominated by the character of Dido Twite, an urchin from the back streets of London, who battles through every conceivable peril to bring justice to the land. No child should grow up without having made Dido’s acquaintance.  In fact, having re-read The Whispering Mountain, I am going to have to return to the other eleven novels as well, because a hearty dose of Dido does adult readers no harm either.

If Aiken’s fantasy world is one of adventure, fun and ultimate justice, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea is a different matter altogether.  Centred firmly in Jungian theory, A Wizard of Earthsea is perhaps the most serious example from this period of a type of fantasy, aimed at children and teenagers but intended to promote discussion on critical social issues.

Raised on the island of Gont, from early childhood Ged is marked out as a youth with powers beyond his years.  After a series of mishaps he comes to the attention of Ogion, the island wizard, who takes him into his home and tries to teach him the patience and humility that need to accompany the use of what Ged thinks of as magic.  However, after a near disaster when Ged encounters a shadow that cannot be named, Ogion sends him to Roke where those who show promise in this area can be trained more fully to recognise the responsibility that must be brought to bear in the use of their powers.  Le Guin explores the importance of recognising the true nature of everything around us,

When you know the fourfold in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use.

and of then respecting each element of creation for what it is.  Above all, she emphasises the importance of balance.

To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world.  It can be done.  Indeed it can be done.  It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it.  But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on the act.  The world is in balance, in Equilibrium.  A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world.  It is dangerous, that power.  It is most perilous.  It must follow knowledge, and serve need.  To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

However, Ged does not follow that advice and in a moment of hubris he frees a shadow from the halls of the Dead.  From that moment on he is hunted by a form he cannot clearly see and to which he can give no name.  Only when he recognises that running will do no good, accepts that he must face the darkness he has unleashed and name it as the shadow of his death is he able to make himself whole.

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself a whole man.

Ged has to know all that goes into his own being, the good and the evil and he has then to be able to keep those forces within himself in equilibrium, giving way neither to the light nor the dark so that he might become a man that cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself.  

At eighteen I read this very much as fantasy adventure, without thinking too much about the philosophy that underlies it.  However, I have come back to it many times over the years because it is a text that haunts the mind and unfolds its meaning on different levels as you develop in your own understanding of your place in the world.