Author's Note

(Actually, this is not so much a note as an essay. Don't feel you have to read any or all of it. But do forge ahead if you are, like myself, a die-hard Prydain fan.)

I have wanted to write some version of this fanfic for no fewer than thirty-five years—since I first encountered the incomparable Prydain chronicles by reading the second book in the series, The Black Cauldron, on which the events of my story are based. I adore all five of the books, and, since that February day in 1971 when I stumbled upon The Black Cauldron, have lived in and through them, if I can thus convey what it means to see the world through the eyes of characters one not only loves but yearns to emulate. Like many Prydain fans, I have identified at various points with different characters in the series, but none has had as great an impact on me as Adaon, son of the Chief Bard Taliesin, whom we meet in the first nine chapters of The Black Cauldron.

To explain, indeed, why Adaon means so much to me, let me tell my story of reading The Black Cauldron for the first time. When my eleven-year-old self bore my new-found treasure home from the library, I gobbled the first seven chapters before going to bed. By that time, I had decided that Adaon was my favorite character—or, I should say, I'd pegged him as prime material for a Favorite Character. Now, the Favorite Character of a beloved book was (and remains) a figure of great importance in my life, and is not to be confused with the character one simply likes best. 99 of books have favorite characters, but only 1 contain Favorite Characters. One obsesses over the Favorite Character, going back once one has finished the book to reread—repeatedly—any and all scenes in which he or she appears. If one is fortunate, one tracks down sequels in which this character appears and further cultivates one's obsession. One pretends one is the Favorite Character, who serves the function of what I believe psychologists call the ego-ideal, the guide and model one wants to become. It doesn't hurt, either, if one has a major crush on the Favorite Character, and thinks of him or her as a blueprint for the perfect soul mate. Anyway, here I was all happy when I went to bed that night, eager for the morrow, and even taking the unusual step of getting up early to sneak in a little more reading before school. You can imagine my shock when, two chapters after I resumed, Adaon died.

Actually, shock was only one of the emotions I felt. I was more moved than I had been by anything I had read up to that point. I was sadder than I could remember being, but, at the same time, I was uplifted, if that is the word for an experience that makes one want to howl. But uplifted is exactly what I was, and that is why even at the time I realized I had encountered great literature. I have since become a college English professor, and believe me, it means a lot to say Lloyd Alexander's Prydain chronicles have given me more experiences of the sublime than almost anything I've read. By the sublime (here I morph into the English prof) I mean what the eighteenth-century writer Edmund Burke defines as an aesthetic experience that inspires both terror and awe. There is something terrible about the sublime, something horrifying or heartrending, but sublimity brings us more in contact with our deepest, most vital emotions than anything else. The end of the last book of the Prydain series, The High King, is a gut-wrenching example of the sublime, at once magnificent, inexorably right, and completely unbearable. Coward as I am, I find it nearly impossible to reread, and I have a horrible suspicion I'll soon feel the same about the end of the Harry Potter series, a rare contender with the Prydain chronicles for my Most Marvelous Books of All Time Award.

I guess what this boils down to is that I always wanted to know more about Adaon. Of course I love the other Prydain books, a category which for me includes The Black Cauldron after chapter nine, but I still find myself going back to those first nine chapters and milking the sentences about Adaon for all they're worth. Because Alexander is such a master of spare, poetic prose, there is no extra verbiage about anything, and this includes Adaon. I don't know what I expect—that after all this time I'll discover there's an extra adverb, an adjective or two, I somehow missed? Enter fanfiction, which allows you to pretend you've located a lost piece of Canon.

In particular, I wanted to know more about Adaon's relationships with the two central figures in his life, his father and his fiancée, neither of whom appears in The Black Cauldron. We are fortunate to meet Taliesin in The High King, although there is only one brief reference to the death of his son. Here, I have placed Taliesin in the role, not so much of Chief Bard, as of a father who suffers an incalculable loss. As for Arianllyn, we never meet her in the series at all, and I was intrigued to read in Michael O. Tunnell's The Prydain Companion that she was an afterthought on Alexander's part, apparently an addition suggested by his editor. As Tunnell says:

"Originally, Arianllyn was not to be included in The Black Cauldron. Though she never appears in the story, Alexander feels the mention of Arianllyn is a perfect story element. To his editor, Ann Durell, he writes, Your suggestion about Adaon's betrothed worked perfectly and made things even more heartbreaking.' However, her inclusion caused a problem. When Adaon dies, wouldn't he be more apt to leave the brooch to Arianllyn than to Taran? . . . In the same letter to Ann Durell, Alexander . . . says, In the passage where he Adaon, in effect, makes his will, I was stumped for a while, figuring he should leave her something valuable (he obviously wouldn't leave her his horse, etc.). But I think this does it—by making his betrothed the one who gave him the brooch in the first place!'" (Tunnell 17-18)

In this fic I have tried to flesh out the missing woman and explain how she came to give Adaon the brooch. Amazingly, it only recently struck me how Alexander's solution to the problem of Adaon's bequest creates a ghastly irony for Arianllyn: she provides Adaon with the magic that foretells his own death, and thus enables him to choose to submit to a destiny which aborts their life together. In my fic I have tried to suggest the psychological repercussions this cruel twist of fate would cause for Arianllyn.

I have also tried to imagine what kind of woman Adaon would consider a worthy partner. You will, I trust, applaud my restraint in nobly refusing to make Arianllyn merely a grown-up version of my eleven-year-old self. Perhaps, however, the heroine of this fic and I do have something in common. A feminist critic in my academic incarnation, I wanted to make Adaon's betrothed his intellectual equal, not just the Girl He Left Behind. And making Arianllyn a wise woman in her own right seems only fitting to a forward-minded series that features the gloriously strong-minded Princess Eilonwy and includes, in Taran Wanderer, Dwyvach the weaver-woman's reminder that "I've heard men complain of doing woman's work, and women complain of doing man's work . . . but I've never heard the work complain of who did it, so long as it got done!"

I have, however, taken probable liberties with the setting of my fic. When first informing Taran that he is betrothed, Adaon says that Arianllyn waits for him "in the northern domains." While we know that Caer Dathyl lies to the north of Prydain, that Adaon doesn't identify the castle as Arianllyn's home implies she lives in some other northern kingdom. For my purposes—mainly, creating a bond of shared grief between Taliesin and Arianllyn—I have moved her to Caer Dathyl itself, which presumably was Adaon's home since we see Taliesin living there in The High King. Somehow, I have always imagined Taliesin and Arianllyn learning about Adaon's death together, but I must also acknowledge the influence of "Fading Summer," a brief but lovely Prydain fic which appeared several years ago on and which imagines Adaon and Arianllyn as having been childhood companions at Caer Dathyl. Juxtaposing vignettes of Taliesin's and Arianllyn's anxiety as Adaon prepares for his final quest, this story, which depicts Arianllyn as a learned woman adept at both needlework and music, gave me some good ideas for my heroine's professional activities. I have tried to contact the author of this fic to urge him to write more, but, alas, with no success. So, if you are reading this, Mr. Oboe-Wan, please accept my heartfelt thanks for inspiring me to try a similar plotline. Given my history, I had to take up the slack.

While I am handing out acknowledgments, let me not neglect my greatest debt of all, to Lloyd Alexander, who in creating the character of Adaon gave me a priceless gift of knowledge, truth, and love. Through the years Adaon's counsel has continued to influence the way I see the world. Currently on my office door I have pinned his magnificent indictment of war—"I have learned there is greater honor in a field well-plowed than in a field steeped in blood"—a message, alas, as timely now as it was when The Black Cauldron was published. And, since I first read it, the passage I use as the epigraph for this fic, in which Adaon urges Taran to cherish the beauty of the world and our capacity to love, has been the credo by which I have tried, to the best of my humble abilities, to live my life. I thank you, Mr. Alexander, more than I can say.