Snowflake Challenge 2017: Day 2

[lebateleur]

Day 2

In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

There's a lot I could list here, from the obvious (The Lord of the Rings) to the niche (Oucho Romanse), but I'm going to go with the Prydain Chronicles. I read Tolkien first, but it was Alexander that gave me my fascination with Celtic languages, cosmology, and history; which led to my learning Latin, which gave me the linguistic grounding I needed to succeed at multiple modern languages, which gave me the opportunity to spend a large percentage of my life abroad and my current career in the bargain. So, there you go: the course of an entire adult life out of a Mabinogion mash-up.

And while not everything came up roses for Tolkien's characters, it was Alexander's books that made the lesson stick, precisely because the good guys didn't always get the grand prize in the end (I can still easily recall how viscerally furious I was about certain events in The Black Cauldron and Taran Wanderer). Bad things happened in Tolkien, but Tolkien was for grown-ups; things always worked out in books that looked like the Prydain Chronicles that were shelved in the part of the bookstore where the Prydain Chronicles were shelved. The fact that they didn't in this case made me realize life was probably like that too.

これで以上です。

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I've forgotten almost everything about the Taran series except that the last book (was it?) seemed to kill all the characters I'd got to know in the previous ones.

[lebateleur.livejournal.com]

I think you're thinking of one particular death in the last book that I at least did not see coming (and that would have gutted me if I hadn't been so worked up over the previous volume).

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

i think i've had one random book out of prydain chronicles in our town library - i don't even remember which book, the only thing i remember is taran (?) burning his hand badly in the end - and it didn't make a lot of sense for me, but it was... intriguing, weird in a very nice sense, like a smell of something new and unusual.

[lebateleur.livejournal.com]

Definitely read the whole series if you have the chance. Having gone back through it as an adult, it isn't as massive as it was when it took me weeks to do one volume (versus hours), but I still think they hold up excellently.

weird in a very nice sense, like a smell of something new and unusual.
I really like this expression! That is what that sort of weirdness is like. ^^