Return to Dalemark

The Crown Of Dalemark
by Diana Wynne Jones
in the Dalemark Quartet.
Oxford University Press, 2003 (1993).

Finale volume
where past and present meet and,
maybe, all’s resolved.

Young Mitt is from South Dalemark, but when he escapes its politics and intrigues he finds that the North is equally dangerous because he is manoeuvred into an assassination attempt on a pretender to the crown of Dalemark.

This novel’s plot also turns on a present-day girl, Maewen, who gets propelled into Dalemark’s past to play a role not of her own choosing, in a narrative that’s reminiscent of the premise in Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper or Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda.

And the Crown (which is more of a circlet than a fancy coronet)? That turns out to be not just a metaphor for gaining a throne but also part of a theme that mingles together motifs from modern Tarot imagery, the medieval quest for the Grail, and the curse of immortality.

Map of Dalemark (detail): David Cuzic

As in the previous titles of the series the reader is here treated to extensive exploration of the troubled realm of Dalemark, particularly the northwestern corner between Adenmouth and Kernsburgh; I loved the chance to further explore the geography of Dalemark and to relate the present-day state of the region with the Late Medieval / Early Modern feel of the chronologically intermediate novels, two centuries before the ‘present day’ – a modern Dalemark which is both familiar and more magical compared to our own world. Above all there is a strong sense of a Northern European milieu, from the mix of Scandinavian- and Celtic-influenced names to the physical features of the polities and emerging industrial innovations.

Characters from The Spellcoats, Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet re-emerge to play crucial parts in the unfolding story. Along with the tying-together of some unresolved threads curiosity grows concerning how characters such as Mitt and Moril, whom we learnt to sympathise with in the intermediate books, will interact with Maewen especially now that they growing from adolescence into adulthood, and whether they will retain our sympathy.

I savoured Jones’ usual little wordgames and puns; typical of these is the entity Kankredin (wonderfully but chillingly conjured up in the novel and reminiscent of a malevolent djinn from The Arabian Nights) whose name has echoes of ‘canker’, a malign growth. Key themes also re-emerge in this novel, such as journeys undertaken with a sense of urgency with danger in pursuit: previously it was on a river in flood, along roads followed by a travelling show, and a desperate journey by sea, but now it’s a quest to find regal objects – ring, cup, sword and crown – where characters’ motivations are always in doubt.

Image generated with wombo.art © C A Lovegrove

As with so many of Jones’ young adult fantasies there at first appear to be a few apparent inconsistencies, blemishes or loose ends perhaps, that mar her superb story-telling skills: her endings are so often confusing, as when the final resolution involves obscure verbal logic that even several re-readings rarely make clear. She also frequently hints at things without being explicit so that you are left to fill in the gaps without ever being sure that your gut feelings ultimately are correct. This comes largely from her using familiar folk- and fairy-tale types and motifs which raise our expectations, only to have them dashed or circumvented when she subverts the conventional tropes.

And yet, on revisiting all the series in close succession, pretty much all that confusion fades away in the final scenes of this volume; Jones ensures that her early teen heroine has a clear relationship with the Undying – the immortals in this series – to look forward to. As the author said before this novel was published, because “the hero, the protagonist, is the story” she’d had for the previous decade difficulties in completing the series quartet since “the end of [each] book is the end of the important things I have to say about the central character.” Until she’d decided on a new character – Maewen – characters in the previous novels who’d had unfinished stories “several thousand years apart” had to wait to put in their appearance.

I must say I really enjoyed The Crown of Dalemark on several levels. I engaged with the main protagonists, Maewen, Mitt and Moril, all three with their very human strengths and failings, as well with most of the rest of the cast of characters, some of whom we have met previously and whose personalities have evolved (not always for the better). The convoluted plot always draws the reader on – providing of course that they play close attention to what they’re being told and don’t blink at inopportune times. As a finale it’s as engaging as each of its predecessors, and you can’t ask for much more than that.

The quotes are from ‘A Whirlwind Tour of Australia’ (1992) included in Reflections (Greenwillow Books 2012). First read July 2011. Repost of review first published here 7th May 2013, now revised and expanded after a reread for Wyrd and Wonder on 24th May 2022, and reposted for #MarchMagics2026.

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Holand to Holy Island

‘Seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer’ by Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

Drowned Ammet (1977)
by Diana Wynne Jones,
in The Dalemark Quartet, Vol 1.
Greenwillow / Eos 2005.

‘People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end.’

Chapter 1.

With this dramatic opening paragraph Diana Wynne Jones began the second book of what became known as the Dalemark Quartet – even though the last book wasn’t published till 1993 and, appearing fourteen years after The Spellcoats, evidently an afterthought.

As with many of her series – Chrestomanci, Howl, or Fantasyland for example – she steadfastly avoided repeating herself, studiously refusing to conform to expectations that a sequel would merely be more of the same.

Here the events of the first Dalemark novel, Cart and Cwidder, are merely distant rumours, with none of those protagonists referred to by name even though the action is more or less contemporaneous in both. This means that Drowned Ammet can be treated on its own merits even though set in the same world – and that’s how I propose to deal with it now, almost as if it’s a standalone novel.

Map of Dalemark (credit: David Cuzic)

As Cart and Cwidder is structured round a journey (by cart, of course) from the south of the subcontinent of Dalemark to the north, so Drowned Ammet finds young Mitt also travelling in the same general direction, but this time by sea. He has had dreamlike inklings of a land somewhere northwards from a young age, and feels drawn towards it though he has no knowledge of it. That dream land is in stark contrast to his life in South Dalemark where warring earls and crippling taxes force his parents, one after another, to travel to Holand [sic] to eke out a living.

When his father is presumed dead following a failed revolutionary coup and his mother marries a gunsmith, Mitt determines to become a revolutionary himself and thus avenging his father’s death on whoever betrayed him. Instead he finds himself on the run with two siblings from one of the hated noble families, sailing into the unknown after his own failed attempt at assassination. And what begins as a familiar tale of realism becomes touched with intimations of divine influences.

In a similar way to Moril’s experience in Cart and Cwidder, Mitt’s long and dangerous physical voyage is shadowed by an inner journey as he comes to terms with who he is, what he stands for, where he is coming from and how he stands in relationship to friends, family, acquaintances, enemies and the demiurges that shape his world. Though we hear distant news of Moril’s achievements and wonder if the paths of both Mitt and Moril may be destined to cross in a future book, the author will disdain to stoop to predictable outcomes; as with many of her fantasies Jones is concerned with realistic human relationships and individual dilemmas, and that often leads to the kinds of messy outcomes we find in daily life.

When I first read the first two Dalemark tales it was certainly delightful to read them back to back and to live the experiences of these two protagonists through their eyes, as it were. While the geography and physics of this world may seem strange to us, and the technology veer from high medieval to early modern, there is no doubting that they are about real human beings recognisable from our own world, and with and for whom we can feel affinity and affection, and occasionally antagonism. I also think that Mitt’s parents – along with Hildy and Ynen, the two companion runaways he frequently squabbles with – owe much to the author’s own emotionally distant parents and her two lively sisters: it may be significant that Drowned Ammet was dedicated to her mother.

And this being fantasy, there is of course an element of magic and the supernatural: the title refers to a corn dolly figure which, along with another composed of fruits, is ritually consigned to the sea at Holand but which manifests differently the closer the young protagonists get to the Holy Islands. I constantly marvel at how the author was able to render the fantastic believable and immanent in certain of her characters, whether in epic fantasies like this or more domestic situations.

Here may be a good place to mention the useful map prepared by David Cuzic that appeared in the Greenwillow omnibus edition and which provides a rudimentary but indispensible counterpart to the clues contained in the text.

Revised and expanded from a review of Drowned Ammet with Cart and Cwidder in Volume One of The Dalemark Quartet, published by Eos / Greenwillow Books (1995), and first posted 30th April 2013. Posted as part of Wyrd and Wonder’s annual celebration of the fantastic, 17th May 2022, and reposted for #MarchMagics2026.

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Music, magic, maturity

(c) C A Lovegrove.

Cart and Cwidder (1975)
by Diana Wynne Jones,
in The Dalemark Quartet, Vol 1.
Greenwillow / Eos 2005.

There is sometimes an assumption that if a novel’s protagonists are youngsters then the novel can only be for other youngsters to read. This is not always the case, and for me many of Diana Wynne Jones’ ‘young adult’ stories can and ought to be enjoyed by youngsters of all ages.

It is also sometimes assumed that fantasy is a lesser genre than more mainstream novels. I don’t accept that needs to be so, and the author herself has made clear that to dismiss fantasy as escapist is a mistaken attitude. The best fantasy has as much to say about the human condition as more literary examples, and Jones’ fantasy mostly falls into this category. Add to that the fact that Jones attended lectures by Tolkien at Oxford (he mumbled a lot, apparently) as well as C S Lewis and then this series of four related fantasy novels deserves to be given more consideration.

The first three of the Dalemark Quartet were published in the 1970s, with the first two published in North America as Volume 1 nearly thirty years later. As Cart and Cwidder happens more or less contemporaneously with Drowned Ammet it made sense to have the two titles combined in one, as the publishers Greenwillow did back in 2005 (though just the former title is considered here). The action takes place in a land wracked by civil war between north and south, in which Jones’ young heroes and heroines must make their precarious way.

In a lecture on ‘Heroes’ delivered in Australia in 1992, Diana Wynne Jones makes it quite clear that she sees her heroes (and heroines) as flawed beings in whom we, the spectators, seek to invest our sympathy. And so it is with the young travelling musician Moril in this tale, an apparent dreamer who inherits a stringed instrument called a cwidder. He is expected to shoulder a lot of responsibility, despite his age, and how he responds is the mainspring of the story. And his response involves exactly that dreaminess that many other creative people have, in concert with the latent magical powers of the cwidder.

Cwidder by the way seems to be a made-up word. It’s based on a family of stringed instruments, from Ancient Greek kithara and zither, through the crwth or bowed lyre of medieval Wales to the modern guitar and sitar, though cover illustrations seem to show a cross between a Renaissance lute and a mandolin. A great many stories of magic, both old and new, involve the power of sound, from Orpheus’ singing to his lyre to the necromantic bells of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series, from the musical instruments in Alison Croggon’s Pellinor tales to the traditional use of terms like ‘spell’, ‘enchantment’ (from French chanter), ‘grimoire’ and ‘glamour’ (from ‘grammar’). These refer to both spoken and sung words as well as sounds notated and played, and this Dalemark story follows in the same tradition.

The thirteen chapters mostly seem to settle on towns and villages visited by Moril’s family — Derwent, Crady, Fledden, Markind, Cindow, Neathdale — and average around sixteen pages each in my edition, suggesting Jones knew how to structure and pace her story. The general air of suspicion — between North and South, from wary villagers to shuttered houses — helps to keep the reader on guard so that any stranger, or indeed acquaintance or family member, is a possible suspect.

Yet I liked the way there are no absolute goodies or baddies for most of the time. Moral ambiguity within the family is matched by the attitude of court officials at Neathdale, the reluctant recruits to the tyrant Tholian’s army and the “murmuring gentleman” who gently accosts Moril’s mother Lenina at the family’s various stops. I liked that this character, Ganner, turns out to be neither black nor white: as someone who makes compromises because he’s aware that his position and power may be in jeopardy if he crosses Tholian, he’s still clearly sweet on Lenina and will do his best by her.

Incidentally, I’m quite clear on the difference between a villain and an antagonist: a villain is someone with corrupt morals, while an antagonist is simply someone who opposes the protagonist (agon is Greek for contest or conflict). With the antagonist (and protagonist) there may be moral ambiguity — neither being wholly right or wrong — they may question themselves, lack a sense of self-esteem, or simply be confused. A villain however could be a sociopath, psychopath, narcissist, liar, manipulator, abuser, a power-hungry CEO or politician with few or no redeeming features despite surface charm or other dissembling habits.

As we see pretty much everything through Moril’s eyes perhaps it’s unsurprising that Tholian is two-dimensional, with Moril seeing him responsible for all the South’s ills. Mind you, Tholian deserves all the opprobrium he gets; and as this is a kind of bildungsroman (albeit over a very short period) Moril is going to have to develop a more mature attitude, and it will be a painful process with loss of family members and unexpected responsibilities.

For an epic fantasy this has precious little magic for most of the time, though hints of that grow throughout. It fits different moulds at various times — alternative world or paracosm, even steampunk towards the end with the giant musical organ. And the historical setting is confusing, medieval at times, Thirty Years War at others (the armour and the guns suggest that). 17th-century Europe seems to me to be Jones’s main inspiration here: not only the murderous Thirty Years War and the English Civil War but also the obsession with spying, political intrigue and, crucially, mysticism (along the lines of Rosicrucianism) with suspicions of witchcraft. The lute (the equivalent of the cwidder) reached its height of popularity at this time; also this century saw a fashion for automata and similar mechanical toys, especially in France. I see Cart and Cwidder being set in this kind of period.

Yet there is certainly magic, and there are magicians. My first instinct was to think of magic-users as thaumaturges, but that term suggests a seasoned practitioner of the art. Even ‘charmer’ (as in ‘someone using a charm or magical object’) implies someone who knows what they’re doing. Perhaps ‘a sensitive’ might be be the best description of people like Moril. Even animals, such as the troupe’s horse Olob, are an aspect of this world’s magic; he reminds me of Falada, the talking horse in the Grimm fairytale The Goose Girl.

The names used here also intrigue me, many of them modelled on Northern European exemplars: Mendakersson and Thornsdaughter reminiscent of Icelandic patronymic and matronymic customs, Konian and Kialan very Medieval Welsh, Fledden and Medmore almost Scottish. There are also Tolkienian echoes: Lenina’s father Thorn (for Thorin?), Markwood (Mirkwood?). There are distinctions between Northerners and Southerners, as when Kialan is dubbed ‘Collen’ at some stage to disguise the fact he’s from the North. Collen was not just an ancient Welsh name meaning “hazel” but also, I suspect, a closet reference to the author’s son, Professor Colin Burrow, who has complained that she’d ‘borrowed’ him for characters in her novels, such as in Fire and Hemlock.

I kept being reminded of the phrase in Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” except here it’s the state of Dalemark. That sense of malaise and malevolence which is present here is all-pervasive in Drowned Ammet too. Does it match up with what Jones observed in 1974, the year she would have been writing this novel? It was a year of unrest in Britain, certainly: a compulsory three-day working week, minority governments, two general elections, a state of emergency in Northern Ireland, an IRA bombing campaign on ‘mainland’ Britain, a politician sacked for an inflammatory anti-immigration speech predicting “rivers of blood”, and much more. And that was just the UK. That sense of a malevolent ruling spirit is only resolved in the final novel, The Crown of Dalemark, completed many years later. Reflecting the prevailing zeitgeist is not uncommon in fiction.

Closely related to fictional reflections on zeitgeist are foreshadowings. These foreshadowings, and also closet remarks, seem typical of Jones’s writing, a technique she will have come across in Tolkien’s fiction. In fact, Clennen’s gnomic utterances remind me a lot of Gandalf’s advice to the hobbits, and looks forward to Albus Dumbledore’s sage sayings to Harry Potter.

I’ve said more than enough to indicate how complex and rich this novel is, and yet I’ve given precious little attention to a synopsis of the novel, to its characters and to the atmosphere created. The best way to appreciate these is of course to read the novel itself; but I hope that armed with the foregoing remarks the reader may approach a first or subsequent read with deeper insights into the powerful storytelling that makes this so effective a fantasy.

This now expanded review was first published 30th April 2013, and was originally dusted off in anticipation of Witch Week 2019, in which the readalong was Cart and Cwidder. The other two titles in the Dalemark series are The Spellcoats and The Crown of Dalemark (the links are to my reviews). It re-appeared 28th March 2022, and is now reposted for #MarchMagics2026.

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Deserving more fantasy fans

© C A Lovegrove

The Spellcoats
in the Dalemark Quartet
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Oxford University Press, 2005 (1979).

A young girl, who has little idea that she has a talent for weaving magical spells into garments, has to abandon home along with her orphan siblings when they are all suspected of colluding with invaders with whom they happen to share physical characteristics. Thus begins a journey down a river in flood to the sea and then back again up to its source before the causes of the conflict can start to be addressed.

The Spellcoats has a markedly different feel compared to the middle two Dalemark tales. As well as being set in an earlier period, this story is recounted by the young weaver Tanaqui (an approach unlike that in the other three books which are third-person narratives). We also find that the story is being told through her weaving of the tale into the titular Spellcoats, a wonderful metaphor for how stories are often described as being told.

We finally discover (in both an epilogue and in the helpful glossary that is supplied at the end of the book) that the boundaries between myth and factual truth are not as clear-cut as at first seems, a fascinating exercise in the layering of meaning and reality. It’s what might be called metafiction — which, as you all know, is defined as fiction about fiction, or ‘fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself’ — a term which had only been coined in 1970, nine years before The Spellcoats was first published.

(c) C A Lovegrove.

Some of the threads are picked up in Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet (published before The Spellcoats) as well as apparently resolved in the concluding The Crown of Dalemark; but don’t take that for granted. It’s typical of the author that the climax of the story is all smoke-and-mirrors: does it happen the way Tanaqui’s narrative implies, or is it all an illusion, a trick of the light flashing across the material of the Spellcoat? This is not a cop-out, as some might see it, but rather the mark of a writer who knows that magic should be experienced instead of explained away rationally.

This book comes satisfyingly close to the feeling of a good fable, and stands comparison with some of Ursula Le Guin’s similar fantasy writing. In large measure this is down to a general vagueness in geography, with the River running from the mountains in the south to the sea in the north, in contrast with the detailed map that can be (and has been) drawn for the other three titles set in later historical times.

Nevertheless, all four novels involve travel for the protagonists in the lands of Dalemark — another metaphor, this time for the personal journeys they are all called on to make. Also there is a well thought-through (if at times confusing) theogony of the Undying and their relationships with humankind, matched by an attention to the etymology of names in the author’s created world of Dalemark; in this The Spellcoats shares the almost anthropological approach that Ursula Le Guin brings to her created worlds.

For me The Spellcoats is very much a tale that works on different levels, potentially appealing to both a young adult and an older readership. This, as much as other three titles, deserves to be better known by fantasy fans, especially those who love epic fantasy: Dalemark is as clearly imagined as, say, Middle Earth is, yet with characters perhaps more rounded than Tolkien’s and a chronology that, beginning in the mists of mythical time, stretches out to end in the last of the quartet with a modern Dalemark not too unlike our own world.

A few additional thoughts occurred to me after a recent reread. One is the realistic sibling squabbling that goes on between the five youngsters named variously for birds or, in Tanaqui’s case, after the scented rushes that can be woven like wool or plaited into utilitarian objects; as The Spellcoats was dedicated to one of the author’s sisters, Ursula — herself a storyteller — no doubt the bickering echoed the relationships the three real-life sisters had at times while growing up.

A second point concerns how, even in this fiction set in a fantasy world in mythical times, Jones was wont to include aspects of her final home in the West Country city of Bristol. The muddy silt-laden River Avon that flowed through Bristol does seem to be echoed in the Aden river that dominates much of the story; and the tidal effects such as the surge wave or tidal ‘bore’ that affects the lower reaches of the book’s River is reminiscent of the equivalent phenomenon of the bore on the estuary of River Severn into which the Avon flows. Ebb and flow thus parallel how so many narratives, including this one, are offered for our inspection.

Finally, epic or high fantasy is sometimes derided as too often presenting a polarised and perhaps simplistic narrative of Good versus Evil, such as with the siblings here in conflict with the malign power that is Kankredin. Because, some critics would argue, the real world is never simply about some Dark Lord trying to attain self-aggrandisement through inhumanity and conquest: such a black-and-white situation would never happen in modern times, would it now? I’m not so sure that’s the case, though.

Review first published May 2013, slightly revised 8th August 2013, and now, after rereading the novel, expanded and reposted for March Magics for the eleventh anniversary of the author’s death on 26th March 2011. Reposted for #MarchMagics2026.

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