The Chronicles of Prydain

And you get stuff in return, like access to our Discord community that Craig had mentioned a couple of times.

Um, dusty bookshelves, our newsletter, our current long read series, "The Predanger Zone" about, uh, Lloyd Alexander's "Chronicles of Prydain," and more.

So pa- patreon.com/overduepod.

I already talked about "Butter."

We are going to swing from a foundational classic that safely introduces kids to the realities of war straight into the bleakest, most punishing depths of military grimdark.

Let's start with the lighter end of that spectrum, Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain, starting with The Book of Three.

A true classic.

Yeah.

Not exactly a glamorous title.

No.

He works for a wizard, and his primary job is taking care of a pig named Hen Wen.

But this isn't just livestock.

That's what they're talking about.

One of my favorites is Lloyd Alexander, who wrote The Chronicles of Prydain, and he talked about that very specifically, like I was saying before, that in fantasy you're talking about real aspects of our lives in these situations and resolving them or interact, having them interact with each other and finding places and, you know.

When you're writing, things come to you that are an a, a accumulation of all your experience, right? You don't always s- you know, intellectually decide that this is going to happen.

You write and things just happen in your mind and you put it out there and you go, "Wow, where did that come from? That's really cool." You know, or something like that.

... and all the stuff that we need to make the show happen.

You also get access to our Discord community, to our long read project about the Chronicles of Prydain called The Prydanger Zone, uh, our monthly newsletter, Dusty Bookshelves, and some other things.

Patreon.com/overduepod.

This month on the podcast in Spooktober, we have discussed She Waits Where Shadows Gather.

...

Prydain Chronicles.

Have you guys seen that movie?

I own it.

The Last Unicorn, Black Cauldron, like so many others.

Yeah.

Black Cauldron, like during COVID I sat down and read all the Prydain Chronicles, and turns out the dude who wrote them, I live in, near Philly now, and so he lived near here, and he wrote those books.

And it's basically like the Welsh Lord of the Rings, right? Like taking Welsh mythology with the Lord of the Rings archetype.

I was like, "Could it be the assistant pig keeper-

Oh, it's absolutely Perdain

...

Taran from Perdain?"

That blew my mind.

I was like, "All this time and now I know."

[laughs] Very competent outdoorsy woman.

Yeah.

The other page you should know about is patreon.com/overduepod.

You can get our current long read project, The Prydainjer Zone, about Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain.

You can get our newsletter, Dusty Bookshelves.

You can get access to our Discord community, which remains fairly Garfield-centric, I would say.

And it's delightful.

It's interesting because your foundational fantasy text for you specifically was Chronicles of Prydain.

Which is very derivative of

Lord of the Rings.