Elidor
First edition
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| Author | Alan Garner |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Charles Keeping |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's fantasy novel |
| Publisher | William Collins, Sons |
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Publication date
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1965 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 159 pp (first edition) |
| OCLC | 8060803 |
| LC Class | PZ7.G18417 El |
Elidor is a children's fantasy novel by the British author Alan Garner, published by Collins in 1965. Set primarily in modern Manchester, it features four English children who enter a fantasy world, fulfill a quest there, and return to find that the enemy has followed them into our world. Translations have been published in nine languages and it has been adapted for television.
The story concerns the adventures of a group of children as they struggle to hold back a terrible darkness by fulfilling a prophecy from another world. The plot moves to and from the world of Elidor, and the city of Manchester and parts of northern Cheshire in the real world.
Like many of Garner's books, the emphasis of the narrative is on the hardships, cost and practicalities of the choices and responsibilities that the protagonists face.
The name Elidor originates in a Welsh folktale whose title is commonly translated as Elidor and the Golden Ball, described by Giraldus Cambrensis in Itinerarium Cambriae, a record of his 1188 journey across the country. Elidor was a priest who as a boy was led by dwarves to a castle of gold in a land that, while beautiful, was not illuminated by the full light of the sun. This compares with Garner's description of the golden walls of Gorias contrasting with the dull sky of the land of Elidor.
Elidor begins with an epigraph quoting from William Shakespeare's King Lear: "Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came" (Act III, sc. 4). This is also an allusion to the English folktale of "Childe Rowland", from which several elements of the plot of Elidor are drawn. Childe Rowland features the eponymous Rowland, his two brothers, and his sister Burd Ellen. Rowland kicks a ball over a church and when Burd Ellen attempts to retrieve it she disappears. Rowland's brothers then leave to find her but they do not return, leaving Rowland to rescue his siblings. Later Rowland must command a door to open in a hillside, wherein he finds Burd Ellen under a spell.
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