Garner was fascinated by the love triangle of Lleu Llaw Gyffes (the man cursed never to have a wife on this earth), Blodeuwedd (the woman who was magically made out of flowers for him) and Gronw Pebyr (her lover). The Owl Service is tightly structured around the last episode of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, one of the earliest tales of the medieval Welsh mythological compilation known as the Mabinogion. And what disrupts them (but also offers the possibility of redeeming them) is a coherent mythological tradition: in this case, Welsh legend. What is at stake is the home and the family. Rather than a quest to save the world from a “Dark Lord”, Garner’s fantasy novel focuses on the angst, loves and rivalries of its teenage protagonists. By the time he wrote The Owl Service, Garner was subverting both the style and the narrative structure of fantasy, creating a distinct voice and a numinous experience.
The narrative was rather Tolkienesque in style and drew upon different mythological traditions. His debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), placed child protagonists in the midst of a great battle between good and evil. Garner had tried his hand at fantasy before. These three, seemingly disparate, sources of inspiration came together in Alan Garner’s mind 50 years ago to create a classic of children’s fantasy literature: The Owl Service. Ī summer holiday in a claustrophobic Welsh valley, a myth about a woman made of flowers and turned into an owl as punishment, and a dinner service with a strange pattern. For a much more detailed discussion of The Owl Service, see chapter 5 of my book, Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology. See also here for the archival research on the exact publication date of the novel. The published version (which appeared on 21 August 2017 to celebrate 50 years from the publication of this novel) is slightly shorter – link here. * This is the original first draft of my Times Literary Supplement article “Alan Garner’s The Owl Service at fifty”.
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