Hello, my name is Gabriel Schenk, and this is a short introductory lecture to the fantasy writer, Diana Wynne Jones. Diana Wynne Jones was born in 1934 and she died in 2000 and 11. She was a prolific writer of more than 40 fantasy novels, translated into over 20 languages and primarily wrote for children and young adults. If I were forced to summarise Jones's work in just three words, I would say magical,
inventive and joyful. And the of the focus of this mini lecture is Jones's ability to combine different types of story and different stories sources in order to create an inventive, magical and joyful mixture of all of these and and in order to create something new as well. So let's begin with a brief look at Jones's early life. She was born in London, but was of Welsh heritage. And in an autobiographical essay published
in 1993. Jones wrote, I think I write the kinds of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old. And she is referring to the outbreak of the Second World War, which meant that she had to be evacuated from London and live in the countryside, which she moved to in 1939. She moved around a lot in this period and in the summer of 1940, she ended up at Lakehead in Cumbria, and this is in the north of England.
It's a very beautiful area, as you can see in that photograph, just how stunning it is. It looks like a kind of fantasy world itself. And this is kind of what what Diana and Jones meant when she said, this is why I write the kinds of books I do, is because she was moving around so much in this area. And fantasy was starting to merge with reality. She writes, Here were real mountains, lakes, brooks racing through indescribable greenness. I was amazed, intoxicated with the beauty of
it. And if you look in that photograph, you can see a lake in the background. And Dangerman Jones sailed on this lake as a child in a boat that was part of the inspiration for Arthur Ransome's children's story. Swallows and Amazons and the previous occupants of the house that Diana winchman stayed in were the inspiration for the children in that story. And then later she studied at Oxford University, where she was taught by Jay are
Talking and C.S. Lewis fantasy writers themselves. And she later reflected, looking back, I see both of them had enormous influence on me. So we get the sense of fantasy and reality merging together, different sources, different influences. And this is, I think, why she she ended up writing these these incredible fantasy works that combine different ideas and cross boundaries. So to talk more about that and the idea of crossing genres, let's look at this quotation from
Diana. When Jones and her essay Writing for Children, she says, It doesn't seem to me that genres are, per say, necessary. There's no reason why you shouldn't mix them up a bit and change them around and make something new. This is what I like to do and this is what she does in her series. The Cresta Munsie books is
a seven books, and they're all about magic. And you might be thinking, oh, this sounds like Harry Potter, but it actually isn't anything like Harry Potter because the Harry Potter series is set in the same place and has the same characters and moves through year on year. The crest amongst these series is a bit more like C.S. Lewis as The Chronicles of Narnia in which every book is different. And although some characters cross
over, most of the books are have their own sets of characters. And the early recurring character is the figure of Aslan. Chris Months is a bit like that in that the figure of Cresta Munsie is in each book. But Cresta Munsie isn't just one person. Cresta Mansi actually refers to a job title. Someone in the government in a parallel world
where magic exists. And Chris Muncie's job is to supervise magic in that world as well as in other worlds like our own, such as our own is our own is one example and a location that is vested in this series and make sure that magic is under control and the places where it should be and isn't leaking out into other worlds where it shouldn't exist. The focus of these books changes quite a lot. So are in the first book published in. 1977 Charmed Life. You see Cresta Mansi as an adult.
He is Christopher Chant and the young boy Eric Cat Chant sort of sees him as a as a bit of a villain to begin with. And then as the book progresses, we we get a different perspective on that character in the book, The Lives of Christopher Chance. We see that character as a young boy himself, and he's interacting with the. At the time, the current post holder of the crest dormancy position, who is another character entirely.
So both these books are very much focussed on the crest of Mansi, but different people occupy that position. There are other books, such as The Magicians of Proner, which is a sort of almost a retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It's about these feuding families or her novel, which week, which is set in a world where magic has been banned. And in a boarding school where some of the students are developing
magical abilities to have to hide them. These two novels, Cresta Mansi, comes in at the end as a secondary character in order to tidy things up. So, you know, sometimes Cresta Munsie is the focus, sometimes his side character. Sometimes one person is in the role of Cresta man seen. Sometimes another person is in the role of Crest Mansi. So you can see what Jones was saying when she said, you know, we don't need fixed genres. We can just mix stuff up, we
can be inventive, we can be we can have fun with us. And this is what she does in all her books. So if you think about her novel, Fire and Hemlock, she's drawing on Scottish folk tales, but she's sort of doing different things with them, new things with them, creating something new. In eight days of Luke, she's drawing on Norse mythology in Hex Wood. She's drawing on the legends of King Arthur. And in Castle, in the air, she's drawing on the Arabian Nights.
But even in these stories, she's not just using all stories in a new way, she's also combining other stories together. So Castle in the Air has elements of Grimm's fairy tale, the 12 dancing princesses, as well as the wonderful Wizard of Oz. The fantasy scholar Farrah Mendelsohn describes this as a kind of remixing that Jones does doesn't just repeats other elements of stories, but she
kind of brings them together. She she changes that elements of it to create something new. And the scholar Susan Ang talks about how Jones reenergizes old tropes from mythology to renew them and give them new energy. So I'm going to give an example of this as as my kind of ending point of this little introduction. And this is a quotation from her novel, Howl's Moving Castle, one of my favourite books.
And this book contains the idea of a seven league boots and a seven lead boot is something that's featured in European mythology and folklore. And usually you put on two boots and every stride you take, you go forward seven leagues, which is quite a far distance in Jones's version. They only have one boots and they have two characters. So they both have to share the boots. They both put their feet in one of the boots and they take a step forward. And this is what happens.
Point yourself towards upper folding before you boot. Put the boot down. Michael warned her not tread Zipp. The landscape instantly rushed past them so fast it was only a blur. A grey green blur for the land in a blue grey blur. The sky, the wind of that going tore at Sophie's hair dragged every wrinkle in her face backward until she thought she would arrive with half a face behind each air. The rushing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Everything was calm and sunny. They were knee deep
in buttercups in the middle of upper folding village. Common cow nearby stared at them. Beyond it, thatched cottages drowned under trees. Unfortunately, the bucket late boot was so heavy that Sophie staggered as she landed. Don't put that foot down, Michael yelled to lakes. There was another zipping blow and more rushing wind when it stopped. Sophie found herself down the folding valley almost into marsh folding. Oh, drat! She said, and hopped carefully around on her shoe and tried again.
Zip blur. And she was back on up a folding green again, staggering forward under the weight of the boot. She had a glimpse of Michael diving to catch a zip blur. Oh, bother. Well, Sophie. So that's an example of her of Jones taking an element from folklore. Doing something new with it. Doing something inventive. Something joy for. And most of all. Something magical. So I hope I've inspired you to read to Diana Wynne Jones. If you haven't done so already. And thank you very much for listening.