Elidor

Did You Know?

• 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.
• Garner and Don Webb adapted Elidor into a children's television series for the BBC, starring Damian Zuk as Roland and Suzanne Shaw as Helen.
• Translations have been published in nine languages, including Persian and Chinese in 2005.

Plot

The Watson children—Nicholas, David, Helen, and Roland—set out for a street Roland had picked at random from a Manchester map. This street turned out to be in Newton Heath, an area then being cleared of slums. The only person they encountered there was a fiddler. Roland kicked a ball through a window of a half-demolished church. When his three siblings went inside to get it back and did not come out, Roland followed. The fiddler’s playing opened a doorway to the world of Elidor, and he told Roland to step through. Guided by the music, Roland passed through an empty castle and a barren forest, eventually reaching the Mound of Vandwy, which resembles the man-made Silbury Hill. There he fought a mental battle against a living stone circle. The fiddler, whose name was Malebron, then appeared and explained that the other children were trapped inside the mound. To enter, Roland had to picture the porch of his family’s new house, which made that porch appear on the hillside. Inside the mound, Helen, David, and Nicholas were under the spell of a tree. Roland broke the spell by cutting the tree down with a spear Malebron had given him. The children then found a cauldron, a sword, and a keystone. Together with the spear, these were the Four Treasures of Elidor. Malebron told them they were part of a prophecy: Elidor was being consumed by an unnamed darkness, and only the Song of Findhorn could save it. If Elidor fell, he warned, it would not be without consequences in their own world. The darkness chased the children back to the portal. Malebron instructed them to keep the Treasures safe in England. When they emerged back in the church, no time had passed, and the Treasures had turned into ordinary objects. Later, however, the objects interfered with electronics and emitted static electricity. The children buried them in a Faraday cage in their garden. While digging, Helen uncovered a vase decorated with a unicorn and a cryptic inscription. This was later understood to mean that only a woman could communicate with the unicorn. Over the following year, Nicholas dismissed the whole experience as a shared hallucination. But Roland, who had used the image of their front door to enter Vandwy, believed that strange rattling sounds meant that door was still linked to Elidor. He also saw shadows above the Treasures that cast no real shadow of their own.

Allusions and references

The story opens with a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear, “Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came,” which also points to an older English folktale. In that tale, Rowland kicks a ball over a church, and his sister Burd Ellen vanishes while trying to get it back. His brothers go after her but never return, so Rowland must rescue them. He later commands a door in a hillside to open, finding Burd Ellen enchanted inside. The four castles in Elidor—Findias in the south, Falias in the west, Murias in the north, and Gorias in the east—match the four legendary cities of the Tuatha Dé Danann from Irish lore: Finias, Falias, Murias, and Gorias. The four treasures of Elidor—the Spear of Ildana (held by Malebron), David’s sword, Nicholas’s stone, and Helen’s cauldron—mirror the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann: the Spear of Lugh, Claíomh Solais, Lia Fáil, and the Dagda’s Cauldron. But the connections between treasures and castles are different. In Elidor, the Spear of Ildana is linked to Gorias, while in Irish myth the Spear of Lugh belongs to Finias. However, the treasure tied to Gorias in Irish legend, Claíomh Solais, is sometimes called the Sword of Lugh, which might account for the mix-up. Near the end of the book, a dying unicorn sings a swan song, and this act restores light to Elidor. Medieval tradition says that only a virgin’s calming presence can tame a unicorn’s wild nature, allowing it to be killed.