History Literature / TheWeirdstoneOfBrisingamen

** Alderley Edge, Macclesfield, Mobberly, Lindow and Wilmslow are all real places in Cheshire. Most of the places mentioned in the book along the Edge; The Wizard's Well, Golden Stone, the Beacon and so on are also real. Although Garner is describing the Alderley Edge of fifty years ago, before it became a village for people with lots of money and no taste. South Manchester has also encroached vastly in the fifty years since this book was written. The 2013 successor novel ''Boneyard'' is in part a TakeThat against the modern Alderley, an entity whose current incarnation is deeply loathed by the author.

* ResetButton: the final battle leaves a lot of non-human corpses lying around in a field in a well-populated area of Britain. These would be of some interest if they were found later. Fortunately the Great Wolf of Nastrond arrives to hoover up the evidence of other sentient species sharing our world, and leaves the snowfield pristine white with no trace or evidence that the human world would find interesting and unsettling. The continuing blizzard keeping everyone else indoors ensures the event passes unseen and unremarked.[[note]]This unseasonal freeze, RetConned into the later TheSixties, also has further-reaching consequences for the later lives of Colin and Susan, which are embedded into ''Literature/{{Boneland}}'' as a never-explicitly-explained strand of the plot[[/note]]

* ResetButton: the final battle leaves a lot of non-human corpses lying around in a field in a well-populated area of Britain. These would be of some interest if they were found later. Fortunately the Great Wolf of Nastrond arrives to hoover up the evidence of other sentient species sharing our world, and leaves the snowfield pristine white with no trace or evidence that the human world would find interesting and unsettling. The continuing blizzard keeping everyone else indoors ensures the event passes unseen and unremarked.

* AllTrollsAreDifferent: The Mara.

* BiggerBad: Nastrond, the Spirit of Darkness.

''The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'' is a 1960 fantasy novel by Creator/AlanGarner. Published originally by Collins, whose head at the time was looking for more fantasy novels in order to cash in on the success of ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'',[[note]] It isn't by accident that Cadellin looks suspiciously like Gandalf and the children are hobbit-sized in the cover art to thr right/top (on mobile)[[/note]] ''The Weirdstone'' went on to critical and commercial success at the time and has remained popular ever since (though not so much with its author). There's even a musical adaptation made in the 70s, which was recently re-arranged by goth band Music/InkubusSukkubus, though for copyright reasons their version is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

Weirdstone starts out with a retelling of a local tale of the Wizard Under The Hill, who needed a white mare to complete his set of horses for the Sleepers. He buys one from a local farmer at market, and in the process, the farmer is taken to Fundindelve, the Cave of The Sleepers. Being an avaricious man, he steals away the Weirdstone from the cave, compromising the spells that keep the Sleepers from aging and dying.

''The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'' is a 1960 fantasy novel by Creator/AlanGarner. Published originally by Collins, whose head at the time was looking for more fantasy novels in order to cash in on the success of ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'',[[note]] It isn't by accident that Cadellin looks suspiciously like Gandalf and the children are hobbit-sized in the cover art to right[[/note]] ''The Weirdstone'' went on to critical and commercial success at the time and has remained popular ever since (though not so much with its author). There's even a musical adaptation made in the 70s, which was recently re-arranged by goth band Music/InkubusSukkubus, though for copyright reasons their version is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

* NoCommunitiesWereHarmed: Alderley Edge, Macclesfield, Mobberly, Lindow and Wilmslow are all real places in Cheshire. Most of the places mentioned in the book along the Edge; The Wizard's Well, Golden Stone, the Beacon and so on are also real. Although Garner is describing the Alderley Edge of fifty years ago, before it became a village for people with lots of money and no taste. South Manchester has also encroached vastly in the fifty years since this book was written. The 2013 successor novel ''Boneyard'' is in part a TakeThat against the modern Alderley, an entity whose current incarnation is deeply loathed by the author.

* OurElvesAreBetter: The Lios-Alfar.

''The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'' is a 1960 fantasy novel by Creator/AlanGarner. Published originally by Collins, whose head at the time was looking for more fantasy novels in order to cash in on the success of ''TheLordOfTheRings'',[[note]] It isn't by accident that Cadellin looks suspiciously like Gandalf and the children are hobbit-sized in the cover art to right[[/note]] ''The Weirdstone'' went on to critical and commercial success at the time and has remained popular ever since (though not so much with its author). There's even a musical adaptation made in the 70s, which was recently re-arranged by goth band Music/InkubusSukkubus, though for copyright reasons their version is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

* WeirdWeather: The climactic action takes place in a world where "normal" rural Cheshire in England overlaps with the older Faerie world. Even though it is early spring, the Mara, a sort of ice troll, bring the "fimbulwinter" with them, seeking to trap the heroes in the open: the world is beset with a magically-generated blizzard and seasonally unrealistic snow, ice and subzero temperature. [[note]]Garner originally set the books in the very early 1960's, when Britain had a series of incredibly foul, cold, icy, winters. For ''Literature/{{Boneland}}'', the final book in the Alderley trilogy, he appears to have RetConned the action of ''Brisingamen'' to the spring of 1969 when a very late unseasonal winter surge gripped Northern Europe right into early April. [[/note]]
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