Clutter and Claustrophobia: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

There is a special horror to being trapped underground in narrow passages. I was steered to Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by way of Robert MacFarlane’s Underland (which is a very interesting read). MacFarlane writes of, as a ten-year-old:

 “…reading the account… of two children escaping danger by descending the mining tunnels that riddle the sandstone outcrop of Alderley Edge in Cheshire. Deep inside the Edge, the embrace of the stone becomes so tight that it threatens to trap them… those passages took cold grip of my heart, emptied my lungs of air.”

Inspired by this and by MacFarlane’s accounts of his own underground explorations, I found a copy of the 1978 edition of Weirdstone (it was originally published in 1960). Coming a year after the success of the first Star Wars film, it looks like ACE tried to drum up sales with cover art depicting a Darth Vader knock-off in the foreground and an Obi-Wan imitator sneaking up behind him.

There are no far-away galaxies here, though. Garner uses as his inspiration a local legend of the Wizard of Alderley, and especially the geography of the area. The plot follows two rather featureless children, Colin and Susan, as they are sent to live with rustics in Cheshire while their parents go abroad. They are soon enmeshed in a supernatural struggle for the titular Weirdstone, allying with the wizard Cadellin and some dwarves against the evil Grimnir (who does not, in fact, have much in common with Darth Vader) and his army of orcs svarts.

This was Garner’s first novel, and it is not polished. The influence of Tolkien shows strongly. Garner uses a hodge-podge of fantastic names, from Durathror and Gaberlunzie to Ragnarok (used as a place-name). A host of fantastic beings come and go, not always essential to the plot (which essentially involves Colin and Susan being chased from place to place). It is altogether too cluttered.

Garner was a Cheshire native, and it’s the descriptions of real-world settings that provide the only real interest in the book, especially the vividly written, claustrophobia-triggering explorations into the abandoned copper mines of Alderley Edge:

“They lay full length, walls, floor and roof fitting them like a second skin. Their head were turned to one side, for in any other position the roof pressed their mouths into the sand and they could not breath. The only way to advance was to pull with the fingertips and push with the toes, since it was impossible to flex their legs at all, and any bending of the elbows threatened to jam the arms helplessly under the body.”

Although the fantasy may be generic, the descriptions of place are anything but.

Weirdstone apparently was well-received and stuck in the minds of many young readers. It was faintly reminiscent of Susan Cooper’s excellent The Dark is Rising series, with wicked ravens, threatened children, and ordinary villagers who are actually part of the evil forces. Cooper’s books, however, are much, much better.

You can see the mines of Alderley Edge, including some of the very places Garner wrote about, thanks to my new favorite YouTuber, Martin Zero, here and here.