Diana Wynne Jones and the Ridgeway

By -

 While I was walking, I kept finding connections to Diana Wynne Jones books.  I was not expecting this, and I didn't get it into my daily journal posts.  But right from the first day, as we hiked up from Avebury along the herepath, I kept thinking of various DWJ stories.  That herepath looked just like the Shield of Oreth, except it wasn't hot -- but the rain was just the same, sweeping up the hillside in curtains.  Not that I managed to take a photo of what it really looked like!

Of course, Dalemark's green roads are the same idea as old paths like the Ridgeway -- and they're often called green roads too.  At some point in the Dalemark books, someone explains that the green roads are out of the way because they are so old, and tend to go places that people don't live any more, which again is very close to the actual case.

(As an aside, I felt a lot of sympathy for Moril too on that trip.  I very frequently felt much too hot indoors!  It was warm, sunny weather, and English buildings are made to keep warmth in, not out.  I usually found indoors to be too stuffy for comfort and preferred sitting outside to catch the breezes.)

The Merlin Conspiracy just goes ahead and hangs a hat on it.  When Nick is staying in Roddy's world of Blest, he is taken to the Ridgeway Downs, where he meets, I'm pretty sure, an analogue of the white dragon of England (at Uffington) and his companion visits a version of Wayland's Smithy.   And I saw Roddy's flowers everywhere, especially speedwell.

Speedwell!

I don't know a lot about woods in England, but I must say at times when we were walking through wooded areas, I was forcibly reminded of the Pinhoe Egg and the woods Cat visits.  

I concluded that DWJ must have known the Ridgeway, and posted about this on the DWJ group I belong to on Facebook.  One of her sons is also in the group and answered that yes, the family had had a house in West Ilsley, and they had walked it regularly.  So I felt quite special, that he'd answered!


Comments

  1. LoryAugust 14, 2024 at 10:50 AM

    Great unexpected side effect of your trip!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousAugust 15, 2024 at 9:10 AM

      Yeah! It was a really nice surprise. (Jean here)

      Delete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

CC Spin #36: Rob Roy

By -
Image
 Success!  I had a little trouble with this one, because I was trying to read it on my phone, and that was just not working very well.  I was less than halfway through and March was looming, but a nice Penguin copy came across the donation table and I took it home.  After that, it was easy to read 50 pages a day and zoom through... Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott When I read The Heart of Mid-Lothian , I was surprised that it wasn't about Jacobites adventuring all over the highlands, but that turns out to be Rob Roy.  Honestly I preferred Jeanie Deans, but this was quite fun.  I can see why stay-at-home English folks of the mid 1800s loved reading this! It's 1715, and our narrator is Frank Osbaldistone, whose father is a London businessman.  Young Frank prefers art and poetry to accounting (and doesn't quite see why he should work hard when his dad has plenty of money), and his exasperated dad sends him off to cousins in Northumberland, pointing out that he who does not work do
Read more