Of all the hounds he had seen in the world, he had never seen dogs of this colour — they were a gleaming shining white, and their ears were red. And as the whiteness of the dogs shone so did the redness of their ears […] he could see a rider coming after the pack on a large dapple-grey horse, with a hunting horn round his neck, and wearing hunting clothes of a light grey material.
[…]
Then Gwydion caught up with her and said to her, ‘I will not kill you. I will do worse. Namely, I will release you in the form of a bird,’ he said. ‘And because of the shame you have brought upon Lleu Llaw Gyffes, you will never dare show your face in daylight for fear of all the birds. And all the birds will be hostile towards you … You shall not lose your name, however, but shall always be called Blodeuwedd. Blodeuwedd is ‘owl’ in today’s language.
— From the first and fourth branches of The Mabinogion (trans. Sioned Davies)
Unaware of how its narratives are shaping their lives, characters in The Owl Service (1967) by Alan Garner and Dogsbody (1975) by Diana Wynne Jones read sections from the Welsh Mabinogion. This is the relatively modern name of a collection of eleven medieval myths and folktales, rooted in oral storytelling, compiled mostly from the White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (1382-c.1410).
The stories are an eclectic mix of magic, transformation, grief, love, action and power politics. A giant king lies down over a river in Ireland to act as a bridge for his army; his head will later be buried underneath London facing France. Cei, one of Arthur’s men, can breathe underwater for nine days and nine nights. A beautiful woman in brocaded silks rides her horse by a mound each day but cannot be overtaken, despite appearing to move at a steady pace.
At the beginning of Owl Service, teenagers Gwyn and Alison find a dinner service in the attic of a country house in a Welsh valley after hearing strange scratching sounds. The plates have a floral motif that Alison insists can be traced to create the form of an owl. A copy of the myths lent to Gwyn by his teacher contains the story of Blodeuwedd. Made from broom, meadowsweet and oak blossom to be chieftain Lleu Llaw Gyffes’ wife, she is transformed into an owl as punishment for replacing him with Gronw, a man of her own choice.
In Dogsbody, Kathleen reads the myths to her dog Leo, whose markings are strangely like those of the hunting pack of Arawn, Lord of Annwfn, the Otherworld. Unbeknownst to her, Kathleen’s beloved pet is a powerful luminary of the cosmos, Sirius the Dog Star, condemned to Earth after losing his temper one too many times along with a powerful magical object that he must rediscover in his new creaturely lifespan.
By reworking stories from the Mabinogion in post-war Britain (c. 1945-1979), both novels infuse the real world with enchantment, reflecting ideas of Celticity (‘the quality of being Celtic’ as Fantasy scholar Dimitra Fimi puts it) and the intercultural tensions between nations in the United Kingdom.
Garner and Jones, born in the same year in 1934, are counted amongst a cohort of writers in a ‘golden age’ of children’s fantasy literature who experienced the Second World War during their formative years. Both authors mainly place their stories in present-day settings and describe them as something other than a ‘retelling’ of myth or folklore. Interestingly, given the ubiquity of such books today, they characterise retellings in a rather negative light.
Jones’ books are rarely based off one specific narrative but connect various folkloric, mythic and literary inspirations. Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), for example, turns a John Donne poem into a spell. ‘The […] wonderful thing about myth and folk tale elements,’ she writes in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (2012), ‘is that nearly every story is in segments, which can be taken apart and either recombined or included on their own.’
‘No, I wouldn’t want to do a retelling,’ Jones adds, in conversation with Charlie Butler in 2011, ‘I think that would be very boring. You take it and run with it, basically, whatever it is.’
‘The element common to all the books is my present-day activity within myth,’ Garner says in his lecture ‘Inner Time’, collected in The Voice that Thunders (1997), ‘The difference between that activity and what are usually called “retellings” is that the retellings are stuffed trophies on the wall, whereas I have to bring them back alive.’
Dogsbody does not reproduce any one story in the Mabinogion but appropriates some of its distinguishing features. Animal transfiguration as a punishment is inflicted on several characters throughout the tales, including Blodeuwedd and Gwydion, the magician and trickster hero who helped to create her.
With a syncretic approach, Jones connects the Dog Star (linked astronomically and mythologically to classical huntsman Orion) to Arawn, who first appears hunting in the beginning of the first tale in the Mabinogion. It is Arawn who holds the magical object (a Zoi) that Sirius needs to recover. Sirius can only get close to him if he runs with his pack, taking part in their duties. This is another element of the Mabinogion’s first branch, which sees prince Pwyll exchange places with Arawn for a year.
Jones’ Arawn also bears the antlers of Shakespeare’s folkloric Herne the Hunter, and is likened to Actaeon, the huntsman torn apart by his own hounds after the goddess Artemis turned him into a stag for stumbling across her bathing. As Master of the Wild Hunt, Jones’ Arawn rides out with his hounds each full moon as both hunter and quarry in an echo of this myth and James Frazer’s theory of sacrificial kingship in The Golden Bough (1890). The Wild Hunt itself is a phenomenon pieced together from various European sources, including the Mabinogion, from ancient Germanic tribes to Arthurian legend, associated with fairies, spirits of the dead, and the supernatural defence of a threatened realm).
Garner takes Blodeuwedd’s story of unfaithfulness as his inspiration for Owl Service, which struck him as being ‘such a modern story of the damage people do to each other, not through evil, but through the unhappy combination of circumstance that throws otherwise harmless personalities together.’
Blodeuwedd becomes a formidable supernatural force embedded in the valley itself, taking possession of three individuals across successive generations. They are compelled to reenact the myth’s interpersonal struggles. This time it is Alison and Roger, two English step-siblings on holiday, along with Gwyn, whose mother Nancy is the housekeeper for the duration. Usually tragic consequences ensue, although Blodeuwedd does have the potential to be either benign or wrathful: flowers or owls. ‘She wants to be flowers but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting’, gardener Huw Halfbacon says ominously.
As with Jones, Garner also integrates more diffuse aspects of the Mabinogion into his novel. Alison's disapproving mother Margaret, for example, is never directly encountered in the book but looms large over the story's developments. Yet, in her loud silence, she bears traces of Aranrhod in the Mabinogion. The mother of Lleu, her attempts to disavow her illegitimate son by denying him a name, weapons and a wife by turns are countered by the artful Gwydion.
Translator Sioned Davies states in her introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition that dialogue is a key point of characterisation in the medieval tales: ‘characters come alive through their words rather than through any descriptions’. In the same way, Owl Service’s dialogue reveals character. Roger’s affable father Clive speaks almost entirely in received phrases and clichés, a smooth language that mirrors his attempts to smooth over the edges in the narrative.
Like Lady Charlotte Guest (1812-95) — the Victorian aristocrat married to a Welsh engineer who translated the The Mabinogion for a popular readership — the two authors have a kinship or proximity to Wales. Both Jones and Garner profess an affinity with the country and its language.
Jones’ father was Welsh, a minister’s son. She was raised (rather neglectfully) in England except for a brief evacuation to her grandparents’ house during the Second World War. There, as she writes in her autobiographical sketch ‘Something about the author’: ‘We were Aneurin’s English daughters and not quite part of their culture.’ Although she did not learn Welsh, Jones writes of the impact of hearing her grandfather speak at the church pulpit:
[…] the splendour and the rigour of it nevertheless went into the core of my being. Though I never understood one word, I grasped the essence of a dour, exacting and curiously magnificent religion. His voice shot me full of terrors. For years after that, I used to dream regularly that a piece of my bedroom wall slid aside revealing my grandfather declaiming in Welsh, and I knew he was declaiming about my sins. I still sometimes dream in Welsh, without understanding a word. And at the bottom of my mind there is always a flow of spoken language that is not English, rolling in majestic paragraphs and resounding with splendid polysyllables. I listen to it like music when I write.
The Garners have dwelt in or near Alderley Edge in Cheshire for centuries, a county that borders modern Wales. Before writing Owl Service, Garner learned Welsh and was inspired by a trip to the Mawddwy valley in the early 60s, and the friendship he struck up with Dafydd Rees Clocydd, steward of Bryn Hall in Llanymawddwy. Garner feels a profound connection to Welsh literature, seen as a kind of inheritance denied him by his grammar school and university education, which elevated Latin and Ancient Greek as the exemplary languages of world literature:
Why had I been kept from a language that not only sounded to be ‘mine’, but also told its stories as I dreamed my dreams? I read that the material was obscure. But, even in translation, it was not obscure to me. Why should something be called ‘obscure’ because it spoke fact as poetry, history as legend, sound as sense? […] What I owe to the Celtic mind is the realisation that language is music, and it is that which I must write.
This idea of a lost inheritance draws on what Davies calls the ‘basic concept of medieval Welsh historiography’: that the Welsh were ‘the rightful heirs to the sovereignty of Britain, focused on the notion of Britain as a single entity.’ Jones and Garner’s occasional use of Celtic and Welsh as interchangeable reflects contemporary historical thinking that the Welsh were the descendants of the (partly Romanised) Celtic Britons pushed westwards by Saxon invasions. In her book Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy (2017), Fimi argues that this, and later English conquest, created ‘a narrative of loss, oppression, and melancholy’ that pervades fantasy children’s literature inspired by Welsh stories.
Both authors express attachment to Welsh and Celticity in the same way — music and dreams — transcendent of speech and the bedrock of their creativity. There is, nevertheless, an element of incomprehension or separation which evokes hiraeth. This is an untranslatable Welsh word akin to a longing for something that feels like home but perhaps never really existed in that form (although some have expressed impatience with its’ romanticisation —especially by non-Welsh writers).
The medieval narrative of Welsh or Celtic marginalisation resonates in the unequal power dynamics of the post-war United Kingdom. ‘Celtic’ is a descriptor with a complex history. While used to champion religious, national, cultural, or linguistic distinction (e.g. Celtic Christianity, the Irish Literary Revival or the Celtic Revival), it was also racialised to justify England’s emergent dominance over neighbouring countries, coerced or gradually drawn into political union. A ‘Celtic nature’ — artistic, mercurial, emotional, fatalistic, useful in battle — was opposed to a steady stodgy stoical Englishness (itself a flattening selection of traits). Such a ‘character’ is appealingly romantic but conveniently doomed.
An absentee English family now owns the house in Owl Service, staying for summer holidays. Nancy disapproves of her son speaking Welsh ‘like a labourer’ instead of English. Gwyn believes he must leave Wales and change his accent as a condition of any prospect of social mobility. These opinions partly stem from the legacy of the Treachery of the Blue Books, a notorious 1847 educational report that denigrated the Welsh language and associated progress only with English learning.
At the beginning of the nineteenth-century, about eighty percent of the population was Welsh-speaking but by 1891 this had fallen to just over fifty percent. By the 2021 census it was 17.8 per cent. This change is reflected in my family on my mum’s side. My great-great-grandma spoke Welsh as her first language, my great-granddad was bilingual and moved to England, and my granddad knew only a few Welsh phrases (He told my mum that his oft-bedridden grandma eagerly awaited the annual visit of the Breton onion man). The 1960s were a crucial decade for protest, direct action, and the advocacy of Welsh (the Welsh Language Society Cymdeithas yr Iaith was formed in 1962).
With Gwyn taking the part of the conspired-against Lleu, Garner translates the Mabinogion’s tale of a ruler abandoned by his wife and robbed of his territories into a wider sense of Welsh dispossession. There is a split in the novel between different types of ownership: Alison’s family are the current landowners but Huw, a descendant of Gwydion or perhaps even Gwydion himself, claims precedence:
Oh, their name is on the books of the law, but I own the ground, the mountain, the valley; I own the song of the cuckoo, the brambles, the berries: the dark cave is mine!
In Dogsbody, Kathleen is staying with her uncle, his wife Duffie and her cousins Robin and Basil in either England or Wales during The Troubles (c. late 1960s-1998) while her father is imprisoned in Northern Ireland. She is subjected to anti-Irish prejudice from adults and other children, including family. Jones does not explicitly state whether Kathleen’s father is a nationalist or unionist. But with her Gaelic-derived name and the statistical imbalance of the government’s policy of internment in the 1970s, she heavily implies that Kathleen’s family is from a Catholic, nationalist background.
Jones writes in her essay ‘The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey’ that the archetypal hero ‘starts out with some accident of birth, parentage or person which sets him apart from the rest and often, indeed, causes him to be held in contempt.’ When conventional publishing wisdom pushed that children’s book protagonists should be boys to attract wider readership, Jones ‘sneaked a female hero past in Dogsbody by telling the story from the dog’s point of view’.
Kathleen’s position as an Irish girl living in an environment of hostility was Jones’ way of reworking the predicament at the beginning of the hero’s journey. She connects childhood to traditional heroism in her account of visiting a school in uproar, where a ‘tomboy’ had just beaten up The Bully:
[…] children do, by nature, status and instinct, live more in the heroic mode than the rest of humanity […] And in every playground there are actual giants to be overcome and the moral issues are usually clearer than they are, say, in politics […]
She was blazing with her deed, as if she had actually been touched by a god. And I thought that this confirmed all my theories: a child in her position is open to any heroic myth I care to use; she is inward with folktales; she would feel the force of any magical or divine intervention.
As the central character in Owl Service who discovers his ‘birthright’ of the power of the valley, Garner may have personally identified with Gwyn as a working class grammar school boy deemed particularly promising by his teachers.
Gwyn has a mystical connection to his heritage while ambitious to pursue higher education and leave Wales because ‘you can’t eat a feeling.’ In Fimi’s phrasing, he possesses ‘a blend of the “educated” and the “folk” mind’, a position that Garner presents as foundational to his own selfhood.
Describing himself as a beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, Garner presents his entry into elite education as a wrench from his roots. When he passed the eleven plus exam for a place at Manchester Grammar School, his friend’s mother remarked that he wouldn’t want to speak to them anymore. Garner perceives a split between his family’s rural craftsmanship and his initial trajectory to become a classics scholar at Oxford, a need to reconcile his ‘divided selves’ through his vocation as a writer. Irish poet Seamus Heaney demonstrates the same preoccupation in ‘Digging’, published a year before Owl Service in 1966, which considers his poetry in relation to his farming father and grandfather:
But I've no spade to follow men like them Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests I'll dig with it
In what he deems a savage irony, Garner’s education relayed his Cheshire heritage back to him as difficult and antiquated, requiring scholarly interpretation. In his lecture ‘Achilles in Altjira’ (1983), Garner recalls reading the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to his family, who understood it as ‘talking broad’ in their dialect. ‘And that’s what all our clothing coupons went on, to get you your school uniform?’ his mother says. Owl Service has a similar, though harsher, moment when Gwyn protests to Nancy that he has to practice speaking Welsh for his exams. She replies that she never would have sent him to grammar school had she known they taught it.
Garner writes: ‘I had to unite my divided spiritual self. I felt an anger, at once personal, social, political, philosophical and linguistic’. He characterises his writing as ‘prompted by a feeling of outrage […] Yet if any of it were to show overtly on the page, it would defeat itself. My way is to tell stories.’
This connection between anger and post-war working class disillusionment, the fraught relationship between education and social mobility, is reminiscent of the ‘Angry Young Men’ of kitchen sink drama, epitomised by John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956). ‘Kitchen sink’ realism — post-war art concerned with quotidian experience — was initially coined in 1954 to describe an exhibition of four artists at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts gallery in London. It soon broadened to include other media like theatre, film and fiction. Focusing on the unglamorous detritus of domesticity, critic David Sylvester wrote that the artists’ work ‘takes us back from the studio to the kitchen’, an understandable interest given that war-induced food rationing would only end that same year:
An inventory which includes every kind of food and drink, every utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture and even the babies’ nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchen sink – the kitchen sink too.
Kitchen sink culture in Britain is connected to the legacy of World War Two — often dubbed the ‘People’s War’ — and the ‘post-war consensus’ of the 1945 Labour government that consolidated the Welfare State. It foregrounded working and lower-middle class lives, commenting on class, gender, and changing social mores, often with a sense of disappointment in continuing inequalities and privations. Amidst this cultural context came a milestone for the fantasy genre: the three volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, published between 1954 and 1955.
Look Back in Anger became a media sensation when it opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre. In classic kitchen sink style, it opens in a grotty flat with two men sharing the newspapers and a woman ironing. Jimmy Porter — an older, jaded and misogynistic character compared to Garner’s Gwyn — is a university-educated son of a working class man who fought in the Spanish Civil War, currently working at a sweet-stall in the midlands.
Jimmy is in a stormy co-dependent marriage to another upper-middle class Alison. The play became (in)famous for his vituperative ‘arias’ against societal hypocrisies in general and his wife in particular. Despite his degree, Jimmy is not in a ‘graduate job’ and considered inherently unworthy of Alison by her family and friends, who tried to prevent their marriage. He objects to Alison’s reserve and what he perceives as the protection privilege provides from suffering (the irony being that she is currently suffering him). With the Tories back in power, about to mishandle the Suez Crisis, the play captures a mid-50s stalemate between progressive and conservative forces. As Alison tells her retired Raj-military father: ‘You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same.’
Charged class boundaries are also crucial to the narrative of Owl Service. At the beginning of the story, Roger, Alison and Gwyn appear to socialise freely, although Gwyn has chores and must serve food at mealtimes. It is the 60s after all, and the house is past its scores of servants in starched aprons. Yet, as Gwyn and Alison grow closer, this friendliness disintegrates and the upstairs-downstairs boundary rapidly reaffirms itself. Roger goes from teaching Gwyn billiards to declaring: ‘he’s not one of us and he never will be. He’s a yob. An intelligent yob. That’s all there is to it.’
Owl Service contains numerous instances of affluent sensitivity to ‘insolent servants’, often intersecting with English paranoia about Welsh people exaggerating their Welshness. Subtle hierarchies are expressed through the characters evaluations of each other. Nancy, who can remember the pre-war days of domestic service, dismisses Clive because he fails her ‘gentleman test’ by failing to eat a pear correctly. As ‘new money’, Clive and Roger lack pedigree in relation to Alison and her mother. There is even a divide between town and country, when, in a moment of temper, Aberystwyth-raised Gwyn tells valley-born Huw to drop his ‘wizened retainer’ act.
Class difference is not as explicit in Dogsbody but still acts as a significant undertow of tension. Catholics in Northern Ireland faced discrimination in housing, public service employment and elections, leading to the rise of the 60s Civil Rights Movement against a backdrop of increasing economic precarity, sectarianism and paramilitary activity. Kathleen is viewed by her stepmother as a disruption to the comfortable domesticity of the Duffield family. It has a traditional patriarchal set-up: a prosperous but indifferent marriage, two children, pet cats, a small ceramics business; the father goes out to work, comes home, reads the newspaper, and always has the last word.
Kathleen has an obvious Cinderella role within the household, demonstrated through a lack of material means in comparison to her cousins, who attend private school in uniform while Kathleen goes ‘in her usual shabby clothes … to the ordinary school nearby’. Her uncle is erratically generous but neglectful, enabling his wife’s abuse. Kathleen struggles to get enough money to buy Leo/Sirius food. She makes a bargain with Duffie to cook and clean so that she can keep him. Soon she takes on these duties in their entirety:
Kathleen did all the cooking and most of the housework and dozens of odd jobs as well. But because she was not much older than Robin, she did not always do these things well.
A perennial charge against fantasy as a genre is ‘escapism’. Tolkien famously pointed out that this criticism conflates ‘the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter’ in his lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (1939, revised and published in the 1940s):
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls.
Nevertheless, by Tolkien’s formulation, a secondary world (a fairy story or fantasy) is fashioned out of our primary world (reality). ‘Fantasy is made out of the Primary World,’ he said, ‘but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood that only the art of making can give.’ Any fantasy that successfully enchants the reader does in some way ‘partake of reality’. Perhaps Garner was thinking of this when he stated: ‘Myth is […] the crystallisation of experience, and […] fantasy is an intensification of reality.’
Jones and Garner engaged with the intercultural conflicts of the United Kingdom and the dominance of English norms perpetrated by history, violence, and state infrastructure. Owl Service came out a year after Plaid Cymru won its first seat in Westminster and the same year as the first Welsh Language Act in 1967, which reinstated the right to use Welsh in law courts since it was removed by the 1536 Acts of Union. Dogsbody was published in 1975, the year that the Birmingham Six were wrongfully convicted amidst a wave of anti-Irish sentiment for the pub bombings that killed twenty-one people in the city centre in 1974.
Garner did write that Owl Service is ‘only incidentally [my emphasis] concerned with the plight of first-generation educated illegitimate Welsh males’. Yet considering his desire to avoid creating one of those retellings he so derides, the texture of post-war Welsh-English relations as felt by his characters are integral to Garner’s ‘expression’ of the old story.
I’ve begun to think of Owl Service and Dogsbody as kitchen sink myths, integrating social commentary with their reimaginings. That this is never belaboured is perhaps another effect of the Mabinogion’s influence. Of the texts that inspired Jones and Garner, Davies notes that they convey a ‘scale of values […] to contemporary society […] by implication rather than by any direct commentary. The listeners are left to draw their own conclusions’.
The kitchen acts as a significant site of difference in both books, its duties separating Gwyn and Kathleen from the others. In an early moment, Gwyn is told off by Clive and snubbed by Alison. He returns to the kitchen sink and begins ‘slowly, methodically, to wash up’, using the task as a form of emotional regulation. At Christmastime, Kathleen ‘had never cooked a turkey before. In her anxiety she overcooked it and it was dry. Sirius and the cats ate dry turkey until they nearly burst. Duffie expressed herself savagely.’
When I first read these books in primary school, most of the political elements went over my head. Yet, alongside the magic of their fantasy, the presence of such conflicts served to interrogate power disparities, something that the best children’s literature has always done. Like any child, I could respond intuitively to the themes of bullying, arbitrary authority, and the (perceived or real) unreason of fallible adults pulling rank. Rereading now, I notice how both novels draw attention to the ways in which children can absorb, mimic, and perpetuate prejudices without fully understanding them.
Kitchen sink culture asks: who does the cooking? Who washes the dishes? Who rinses the cabbages and scrubs the potatoes? What effect does this have on their lives? Who struggles most under society’s hypocrisy and inequality? These fantasy novels do not neglect to ground us in the lives of the people who perform those labours.
Appropriately, in his lecture Tolkien used the culinary metaphor of a ‘Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story,' [that] has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.’ Reworking the Mabinogion’s myths in their singular ways, Jones and Garner don aprons and take up their ladles, two cooks selecting ingredients for the ever ‘simmering stew’.
Direct quotations from Garner and Jones are from collections The Voice That Thunders (1997) and Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (2012) respectively.
some recommendations
The TV adaptation of Owl Service (1970) is available to watch on YouTube.
An appreciation of Diana Wynne Jones, broadcast in 2021, also on YouTube.
Academic Simon Rodway’s scathing review of The Celts: A Sceptical History (2022) by Simon Jenkins provides some insight into how academic ‘Celtoscepticism’ is (mis)used in contemporary UK political commentary.
I’m so pleased to have an article published on Art UK’s site: ‘Drawn to drawing: artists and self-portraits’.
Art UK’s online database of works from across Britain’s public art collections is one of my most-used resources (as you might tell from the images I include) and I highly recommend a perusal. Owl Service gets a brief mention in a recent feature by Eleanor Affleck: ‘Sites of ancient power: the enduring magic of standing stones in British art.’