The Owl Service

The Owl Service is a low fantasy novel for young adults by Alan Garner, published by Collins in 1967. Set in modern Wales, it is an adaptation of the story of the mythical Welsh woman Blodeuwedd, an "expression of the myth" in the author's words.

Garner won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British author. It was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works for the 70th anniversary celebration in 2007, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite. Garner also won the second annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice. Only six books have won both awards in the 45 years from 1966 to 2011.

The mythical Blodeuwedd is featured in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. She is a woman created from flowers by the king of Gwynedd, Math, and the magician and trickster Gwydion, for a man who was cursed to take no human wife. She betrays her husband Lleu in favour of another man, Gronw, and is turned into an owl as punishment for inducing Gronw to kill Lleu. In Garner's tale three teenagers find themselves re-enacting the story. They awaken the legend by finding plates from a dinner service with an owl pattern, which gives the novel its title.

Henry Z. Walck published the first US edition in 1968. He learned Welsh "in order not to use it" in the dialogue—nor to use dialect, as in what he calls the "Come you here, bach" school of writing—because he believed that doing so would only superficially express what it is to be Welsh.

Another fellow reteller of Welsh material in English, Susan Cooper said that the novel can be called "true fantasy", "subtle and overwhelming". Penelope Farmer wrote, "I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner's The Owl Service."

Gillian Polack notes that although “Alan Garner doesn’t explore the Middle Ages deeply in The Owl Service”, he deftly utilises “one small legend to build a modern study of class and personality” which indicates that “where you come from and what opportunities your life gives you can open and close life choices”.

Inspiration

thumb|A plate from the Old Hall dinner service which served as inspiration to Alan Garner

According to his Postscript included in the 2017 HarperCollins (London) edition, pp216–219, Garner had "The sensation of finding, not inventing, a story .... It was all there, waiting, and I was the archaeologist picking away the earth to reveal the bones". He described 4 key inspirations leading to, and directly providing key elements of, the story, in both book and video forms.

First, (p216)

::It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd who was made for him out of flowers.

Second, (p217)

::The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day my mother-in-law showed me an old dinner service. She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edge of the plates could be seen as the body, wings, and head of an owl. My wife, Griselda, traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, folded the pattern together and there it was, a model paper owl, which she perched on the back of a chair.

Third, (p217)

::But even so, for a long time nothing else would come. Then, by chance, we went to stay at a house in a remote valley in North Wales. Within hours of arriving I knew that I had found the setting for the story, or the setting had found me. Its atmosphere fitted both the original legend and the nature of the dinner service. Ideas began to grow. [...] The story took shape. I looked around for more ideas. The lie of the land fitted the descriptions in the legend. Everything was where it ought to be. The legend could have happened here. As I stood on the doorstep at night, thinking these things, an owl brushed its wings in my face.

Fourth, he cited a local's key contribution: (pp217–218)

::Dafydd Rees was eighty-one years old. He was known in the valley as Clocydd, "bell-ringer", because he had rung the church bell for sixty-five years, after his uncle retired from the same job after seventy years. Dafydd had worked as the caretaker and gardener of the house since 1898. He was the greatest help to me, since he let me in to his knowledge of the valley, its history, its traditions, its folklore. Everything that Gwyn, in the book, tells Alison about the valley, is what Dafydd told me. [...]

In its re-telling in video form, Garner described (p219) the later making of the television series, filmed in the valley itself, as "a kind of magical madness", saying it "had made the story...more real than reality".

::I found the experience hard to bear, because characters —who had lived in my head for so many years— were now really in the valley and really speaking the words that I had written. What had been a thought was now happening in front of me.

The abrupt and entire removing of crew, kit, and actors left him with mixed emotions and he closed with:

::For me, in the valley where I had set the story, it was a sense of loss. The valley had not changed. It was as it had been before I ever knew it. For a few hectic weeks my thoughts had taken on shapes, and moved as people in the landscape where I had imagined them. But now they had gone, and all was as it had always been.

::"It was a good time," Dafydd wrote in a letter afterwards. "I have been to the stone. She is lonely now."

The dinner service

The pattern of the dinner service, a floral design in which some "flowers" can be read as "owls" when upside down, was designed for Old Hall by Christopher Dresser (died 1904). Garner sought to identify the designer for more than forty years.

Peter Plummer, the producer and director of the television adaptation, described in 1979 a nationwide search for surviving dinner services with the same owl/flower pattern, conducted in association with TV Times during 1969:

::"I only know now that there are precious few of these sets in circulation ... (we) only managed to turn up three other copies, one of which, curiously enough, had been accompanied by very unpleasant associations of disaster in the family which had owned it (and one of the other families suddenly woke up to what it was they were eating their tea off while watching the transmission of the first episode)."

In 2012 Garner mentioned that he had only ever seen five plates with the design.

Television adaptation

The Owl Service was made into a Granada Television television serial of the same name in 1969. It was dramatised first by ABC-FM Australia in circa 1987 then for BBC Radio 4 in 2000.

Notes

References

External links

—immediately, first US edition
Images of the original plate, recreations, and a similar design discovered in Shikoku, Japan, April 2006