Guest blog: Claire Fayers on the Lady Charlotte Guest who translated the wonderful Welsh Mabinogi tales

Next week it will be the first of March. Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant Hapus. Happy St David’s Day! All over Wales, people will be celebrating the day with welshcakes (delicious), leeks (not quite so delicious) and daffodils (do not eat these!)

If you go to school in Wales, you may find yourself playing a musical instrument, dancing a traditional dance or writing a story for an eisteddfod competition. If you’re a girl, you may dress in traditional costume.

Claire in traditional Welsh dress

I’ve always been fascinated with myths, legends and fairy tales, and I’m lucky to live in Wales because we have loads of them. They mix together real places with extraordinary characters and happenings. The most famous of these stories come from a collection called the Mabinogi or Mabinogion. You’ll find stories of shape-shifting and magic, of heroes and battles, and you can read them all in English, thanks to this lady.

Lady Charlotte Guest

Lady Charlotte Guest was born in Lincolnshire in 1812. Her home life wasn’t happy. Her father died when she was young, her mother married again and Charlotte did not get on with her stepfather. Growing up, she spent a lot of time outdoors, and she loved learning new things – especially new languages. By the time she was twenty-one, she was fluent in Italian, Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic.

Then, in 1833, her life changed forever. Charlotte met a Welshman: John Guest, the Member of Parliament for Merthyr. Within months, the two were married and Charlotte left her English country home for the ironworks of South Wales.

Her family were horrified, but Charlotte threw herself into her new life, learning to manage the ironworks, visiting schools, and setting up a library. Unsurprisingly given her love of languages, she was soon learning Welsh.

A few years after that, one of Charlotte’s friends loaned her a copy of The Red Book of Hergest.

The Red Book – so-called because of its red cover – is one of the oldest Welsh manuscripts, dating back to medieval times. It contains a collection of historical texts, poetry and stories, and the ancient tales that make up the Mabinogi.

The stories include four sets, or branches, each following the life of a different character. Pwyll, the prince of Dyfed who travels into the magical otherworld and later marries a fairy wife. Branwen, whose mistreatment by her Irish husband leads to a terrible war between Wales and Ireland. The knight, Manawydan, who helps save Wales from a fairy curse. Math the Lord of Gwynedd, who presides over a story full of magic. People changing into animals, flowers turning into a woman and plotting murder.

Along with these four branches, there are other tales, mainly recounting the deeds of King Arthur and his knights.

A few of the stories had been translated into English, but not all of them. Maybe Lady Charlotte liked a challenge, or maybe she loved the strange tales so much that she wanted everyone to read them, but she decided to translate them all.

Over the next seven years, the stories of the Mabinogi were published in seven volumes, with Welsh transcriptions by the poet John Jones and English translations by Lady Charlotte Guest. It was a huge task, especially as Lady Charlotte had to fit it around the demands of the ironworks and her family. She had no idea how many people would read these Welsh stories because of her, or that her translations became the standard version for more than a hundred years.

Her words have inspired many other authors: JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain and Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.

 

And my own book: Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends. It contains several of the stories from the Mabinogion along with other tales collected from all over Wales.

John Josiah Guest died in 1852 and Lady Charlotte caused a social scandal by marrying a much younger man. She left Wales and developed a new passion for collecting. She and her new husband travelled around Europe and she built up a vast collection of porcelain, board games, playing cards and fans. Shortly before her death in 1895, she donated almost 12,000 pieces of china to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Lady Charlotte kept a diary from the age of ten through most of her life. I’m glad that her words, and her stories, live on.

 

Claire Fayers writes fantasy adventures. Her books include The Accidental Pirates, Storm Hound and Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends. 

www.clairefayers.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You had me at hello – Ally Sherrick reveals what it is that makes the opening of a favourite book so special

This tear-jerker of a line spoken by the romantic heroine in the 1996 Hollywood movie Jerry Maguire after her successful sports agent husband makes a last ditch attempt to save their marriage, might not at first glance appear to have too much to do with a roll-call of classic novels that have endured the test of time. But it does if you think about how some of the best of them begin.    

 ‘All children except one, grow up.’

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ 

‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ 

These are all great story openers. Whether for children or older readers, they are lines that draw you in, make you curious, even desperate to find out more.

Every one of us will have our favourites of course.

This is the one which resonates most with me. As with the others, you’ll know which book it comes from, I’m sure:

‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.’

With that line Charlotte Bronte pushes open the door to her story, inviting the reader to step inside. To find out who is speaking and why something as simple as a walk is such an impossiblity. And the person who lies waiting on the other side? Why it’s poor, unloved young orphan, Jane Eyre. She’s hiding behind a thick red curtain in a window seat, doing her best to escape both the rainstorm outside and the harsh treatment by her adoptive family within by burying her head in a book. But it’s not just any old book. It’s one full of shipwrecks, abandoned churchyards and ghosts. Pure catnip for any bookworm, especially if, like me, you enjoy reading stories with a gothic twist.

Caption: From film version of Jane Eyre (2011)

And now you’re in, there’s plenty more the author does to keep you there – to make you want to read on.

At first it seems that Jane has been successful in getting away from the scolding tongue of her Aunt Reed and the cruel taunts of her three cousins. But this is merely the calm before the real storm. All too quickly Jane’s hiding place is discovered by her nemesis, John Reed, the bully-boy of an older cousin who likes nothing better than to taunt and belittle his poor relation.

You’re well and truly hooked now. What is going to happen to poor Jane? Will she manage to slip past him? Escape his clutches and run to her room? But no. The beastly John has trapped her. True to form, he humiliates her, reminding her that if it wasn’t for them, she’d be on the streets begging. Then, after trying unsuccessfully to make her call him ‘Master’, he turns violent. Snatching up the book she’s been reading, he throws it at her, knocking her to the ground.

But Jane isn’t the sort of heroine to take things lying down. She gets to her feet and shouts back at him and when John raises his hand to strike her, she makes to defend herself. We’re well and truly on her side by now – but what will happen next? John is so much bigger than she is ...

It’s then that the author delivers her master-stroke. The door bangs open and in walks Jane’s Aunt Reed, a woman who we know already from what Jane tells us, refuses to blame her beloved son, John for any of his many crimes. Who calls him her ‘own darling’ and believes he can do no wrong. Jane’s troubles have clearly gone from bad to worse. We are compelled to stay with her, to find out what might be in store, though we have a nasty feeling already that it will not end well.

And of course, it doesn’t. Things become worse still. Jane is accused of starting the fight and on her aunt’s orders, the servants cart her away and lock her in for the night in the dreaded ‘Red Room’, a place Jane believes to be haunted by the ghost of her long-dead uncle. She falls down in a faint and ... Well, if you don’t know the story already, the author will surely have done more than enough by now to encourage you to read on.

 

I was lucky enough to have the chance to do my own
retelling of ‘Jane Eyre’ for schools

Jane Eyre was first published in 1847. It is a book of its time – the many credibility-stretching coincidences of plot, the unsympathetic portrayal of Mr Rochester’s mentally-ill wife, Bertha Mason, and the final third of the novel in which Jane comes perilously close to becoming the missionary wife of her devoutly religious cousin, St. John Rivers, are a serious test for our credulity and modern sensibilities. But all that withstanding, it is deservedly a classic, not least because of its brilliant opening pages, which for me, ensured that it did indeed have me at hello ...   

This week's YouTube writing challenge is available to watch here.

Ally Sherrick is the author of books full of history, mystery and adventure including Black Powder, winner of the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2017, The Buried Crown and Tudor-Set adventure, The Queen’s Fool. She is published by Chicken House Books and her books are widely available in bookshops and online. You can find out more about her and her books at www.allysherrick.com and follow her on Twitter: @ally_sherrick

Ally's version of Jane Eyre is available to buy here.

Stories in maps by Catherine Randall

I’ve always loved books with maps in the front, so that you can really picture where the action takes place.

Some books don’t tell you in the text exactly how different places in the story relate to each other, so a map is an extra way into the story. I love the map in the front of the classic Winnie-the-Pooh, so I can see exactly where Pooh and Piglet live, and where Eeyore’s Gloomy Place is (‘rather boggy and sad’, as it says on the map). Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I have always found that maps really help me to visualise the world I am reading about.

The endpapers in my 1970 edition of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A.Milne, published by Methuen

When I was a child, I was a bit obsessed with the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome, about adventurous children having a wonderful time sailing and camping on an island in the middle of a lake, without any adults. The map at the front of Swallows and Amazons shows that the lake where these adventures take place bears a very strong resemblance to two lakes in the English Lake district. As well as showing me the geography of the stories, there was an extra thrill in this map as I tried to work out which bits of the fictional lake were taken from which bits of the real lakes, Coniston and Windermere.

 

The map in the front of my 1974 Puffin Books edition of
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

In the second book of the series, Swallowdale, the map in the front does not just show the setting for the story, it also shows exactly where some of the events in the book take place.

It is not very easy to read, partly because it is drawn as though by one of the characters themselves, but that adds to its charm.

The endpapers from my father’s 1943 copy of Swallowdale, published by Jonathan Cape

When I am writing a book, especially a book based on real events, I like to have a map in front of me so that I can see exactly where my characters are playing out the action of the story. Although the characters are fictional, the setting is not, and it is important to me to get things right.  When I was writing about the Great Fire of London in The White Phoenix, I spent a long time looking at maps showing how fast and how far the fire spread, so that I could work out where my characters needed to be and when, and also how quickly they would have been able to get from one place to another.

 

Part of a famous map drawn by Wencelaus Hollar in 1666,
showing the extent of the fire damage in London after the Great Fire.
You can see the shape of St Paul’s Cathedral just to the left of the centre

Maps can be just as helpful when you are writing about an imaginary place. Creating a map of your own can help you to write the story. Drawing a map – however basic – is a great way of getting to know your setting, and as you do that you might see where somebody needs to be, how the villain escaped, or where the treasure had to be hidden – important plot stuff. You may not be able to work out the whole story in a map, but it can certainly spark ideas, help you to solve plot problems, and put you with your characters right in the middle of the action.

 

Example of a map drawn to help work out the characters’ movements in a story

WRITING CHALLENGE

Imagine you are an explorer visiting a distant island, or a mysterious valley, or maybe an ancient forest - anywhere you think you might have an adventure. It could be a place that might really exist or a magical place with extraordinary creatures and strange beings. Using your imagination, draw a map of this place, including all the important features like mountains, rivers and caves and any houses, palaces or creepy castles that you find there.  Then write little labels on the map, showing where things happen in your story – where you first arrived, where you met that mysterious stranger, where you had to stay the night, where you ran away from whatever strange creature you come across in your adventures. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, although it is helpful if you can read the writing! If it grips your imagination, you might want to write it up afterwards as a written story, or maybe a comic strip.

Catherine Randall is the author of The White Phoenix an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London in 1666. The White Phoenix was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. Catherine is currently working on her second novel, an adventure set in Victorian London.

 

 

Magical animals in stories - by Jeannie Waudby

  It’s Lunar New Year, and this February the year of the Tiger begins. 

 

So I’m going to look at some of the ways in which animals can embody our best and most exciting human qualities.

I grew up in Hong Kong, where Chinese New Year was very exciting. We lived on a tiny island and we would visit everybody, dressed in our best clothes. The lion dance called at every house, with cymbals and drums and the dancers capturing the playfulness of the friendly lion. Here's one from my local Chinese supermarket.

Each house had a beautiful table with peach blossom, little orange trees and treats spread out. As children, adults gave us lucky money red packets and lots of sweets. Here are a few things that I remember from my childhood and can still find in London.

Lucky money packet in the middle, for adults to give to children or younger people

Every year, beginning in either January or February, has an animal. There are 12 altogether and each animal represents human characteristics. They all have very positive qualities, even the ones that sometimes get a negative press. Here they are in left-to-right, top-to-bottom order. As you can see, they are all real animals except for the dragon, which here is a benevolent and positive creature.

 

Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig

Stories, myths and legends have always featured animals that embody human qualities, for example Monkey and Pigsy in the Chinese 16^th century novel Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’en. It’s a much-loved story throughout the world. 

 

Tripitaka, Pigsy, Sandy and Sun Wukong, the Monkey king

And in ancient Greece, Aesop’s fables used animals to reveal truths about people. This one shows the town mouse and the country mouse. 

 

Aesop's Fables adapted by Louis Untermeyer illustrated by A and M Provensen

Of course animals have always featured large in fantasy novels, but they find their way into historical fiction too. Often an animal may be semi-magical or act as a messenger or guide. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was published in 1911 and set at the turn of the 20^thcentury. She wrote two books about girls who had had to leave their home in India and while they have also lost family, part of the story is the loss of India and the coldness of England in comparison. The Secret Garden is a realistic story about two abandoned children, but there is a robin who leads Mary into a walled garden. 

 

Cover illustration for A Little Princess by George Smith, and for The Secret Garden by Angelo Rinaldi

In A Little Princess, the lonely and ill-treated Sarah is befriended by a neighbour from India who sends his pet monkey across the roof to make contact. In both these stories, the animals act as a reminder that in spite of loss there are new friends and homes to be found. And crucially, it’s the animals who bring people together.

The Crowfield novels by Pat Walsh are set in a monastery in 14^th century England. 

 

Covers by Steve Wells

The abbey and woods around it are also home to hobs, a magical but very believable furry animal with a long tail. Brother Walter, the hob, makes friends with William and although Will rescues him, his friendship and otherworldly knowledge gives Will the courage he needs.

The Little White Horse is set in Victorian England, when Maria moves to a beautiful but troubled valley.

Cover by Debra McFarlane

In this story, there are very real animals like Maria’s little dog, but also the elusive ‘horse’ of the title – who, with a shaggy dog, is vital in restoring balance to the valley.

In these stories, the animals embody particular qualities: hope in The Secret Garden, courage in The Crowfield Curse and reconciliation in The Little White Horse. Through their presence, the protagonist can grow into the best version of themselves and be able to make the changes they need. To some extent, their animal companion allows them to be fully human.

Writing challenge

Choose an animal. It can be a real one or a magical one or one of the 12 animals of Chinese New Year. It might be very large or tiny, able to swim or fly or run at lightning speed. Can this animal talk? What gifts could this animal bring to help someone in a tricky situation? Imagine your animal as a sidekick to the main character of a story – how would the animal rescue them, or cheer them up or make them laugh? What would bring the human character and their animal companion together in the first place?

One Of Us by Jeannie Waudby is a YA thriller/love story, published by Chicken House. It was shortlisted for the Bolton Children's Fiction Award and the Lancashire Book of the Year 2016 and has been adapted by Mike Kenny as a play in the Oxford Playscripts series.
One Of Us is published by Chicken House
The Oxford Playscripts play is published by Oxford University Press