The call-sign for the aircraft in which Colin and Susan's parents died was SPLTF.
It was also Flight 165.
A Polish Airlines Flight 165 went down in April 1969 in the Carpathian Mountains in heavy snow; it is noted four British and American people were on board. EDIT: The registration number of this aircraft was.... SP-LTF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOT_Polish_Airlines_Flight_165
A lot about the crash remains controversial and unclear owing to Cold War era excessive security and what looks like sloppy record-keeping. But four people on the flight were known to be British or American.
A search of online weather records reveals that March 1969 was the coldest on record in Northern England, among other things the Emsley Moor TV mast (forty or so miles away from Alderley) collapsed though weight of ice and because the wind singing in the wires caused resonance the structure couldn’t deal with. The cold persisted into early April.
This unseasonal March of snow, ice and blizzards extended right across Europe and into Poland.
Reflections: The culminating action of Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a battle, fought in an utterly unseasonal blizzard in early spring, when the forces of Evil pull out all the stops to grab the Weirdstone. The party of adventurers – including Gowther Mossock – treks through the snow, taking refuge at Redesmere, trying to reach safety in Fundindelve. Susan is given her moon-avatar-bracelet in exchange for the Stone by Angharad, and thus has protection conferred on her from things of Evil.
Now unseasonal weather – called into being by the snow-trolls, the Mara – would drive all other humans into shelter. Not many people would notice weird things abroad and those who do would think in terms of local mythology – “the boggarts are walking” and half-accept it anyway, disinclined to investigate further. But more people would remark on the unlikeliness of a blizzard in March/early April. Unless that blizzard was part of unseasonal weather – freakish but not impossible for the time of year and experienced over a far wider geographical area, ie not local to Cheshire. In fact, all the way across Europe and back into Siberia, as weather records accessible from the Internet indicate.
We are told at the climax, when the sky-wolf Fenris walks and conveniently clears up the battlefield of all that is evil, (leaving only pristine snow and no strange unhuman corpses that would make human authorities very curious indeed), that Cadellin calls down protection to save the immediate party: they are safe inside a magical shield.
But the Fenris-wolf stalks off to the east, presumably back to whichever eastern fastness his master Nastrond dwells in.
By appalling coincidence, on April 2nd 1969, a local flight took off from an airport in Poland, towards the Carpathian mountains (symbolic of dark evil – Slavonic legends of vampires, werewolves et c). It has British and American people aboard. The official story is that the pilot and crew of Sierra Papa Lima Tango Foxtrot, Flight one-six-five , were disorientated in a massive snowstorm and crashed into a mountain. SP-LTF, Flight 165. There were no survivors.
What if. On its way back to the lair of Nastrond, the Fenris-wolf, sensing the parents of Colin and Susan, who were not protected by Cadellin, chose to kill them, or was ordered to do so, as an act of vengeance and gratuitous malice? This would fit with the “magic is dangerous” quality of the story, its darker side. And the Mossocks would also have remembered their involvement with Faerie. Independent witnesses.
This ties into Colin and Susan then being formally adopted by the Mossocks. With no hint of further trouble and malice to come.
This one piece of solid, objective, evidence in the time-line then becomes the datum-point – the midpoint of mensuration, as Colin might say – into establishing the relative degree of “objective truth” in the rest of the story. Garner is too good an author not to have inserted this at random.
And – who knows? The collapse of that TV mast might have been down to the Mara, too!
Edited by AgProv
So when do events in the book take place?
If we accept that events in Weirdstone and Gomrath took place in the time period 1958-63, which feels right going by inferential clues such as the (then) size of Alderley Edge and neighbouring areas on the map in the endplates, Colin and Susan were then 12 getting on for 13. Call this 1962 as a datum. Colin's birth-year now becomes 1949-1950.
He has to go to school and then university, not normally started before age 18. He feels "tied" to the Edge and is working at Jodrell Bank (est 1957) which is part of the University of Manchester. Uo M teaches all the variant degrees Colin holds, including theology. The main campus is within daily commuting distance (easily) from Alderley Edge and the commute time would be about an hour by direct train. So he was able to get all his degrees locally without leaving home. Accumulating a first degree is three years. A Masters' degree is usually one year. A postgrad Doctorate is at least six. A Professorate requires additional credits and professional kudos and is usually bestowed. So we can add at least another ten years. Colin also has an F, as opposed to the lesser M distinction, with Britain's two premier scientific societies. Becoming a Friend of a Royal Society, as opposed to a Member, is a high distinction.
We must be talking about a Colin who is at least twenty-five, possibly thirty, years on from childhood? This would age him to late thirties, early forties, possibly a litle older.
From other clues in the text - MRI scans, or CAT-scans, did not become commonplace in British hospitals until the 1990's - the earliest the action in this book could occur is around 1994.
Colin also acts as an Author Avatar for Garner in talking pejoratively about the gentrification of Alderley Edge, in the way only a long-term native of the area could. Alderley has seen an influx of people whose taste and discernment is in inverse proportion to their income - ie, people with far more money than they have good taste. Like any inhabitant of a previously rural community who is seeing "natives" (people who have lived there for generations down the centuries) priced out by brash and boorish incomers, Garner is angry about the loss of his town's unique charm and character. The sense of place and unique identity is being strangled, and Alderley has become a mere commodity for the rootless rich to consume. So how can any sort of magic flourish? This began with the polarisation of income created by Thatcherism in the 1980's, and really took off in the 1990's. Colin describes near-misses betwen his bike and people driving SUV's - a badge of the new monied class. So again we're looking at late 1990's and early 2000's. There's a reference somewhere to Colin being a refusenik who only uses a landline phone with reluctance and has neither inclination, time or need for a mobile phone. Computer technology used by the University also sounds a little behind what we have available now in 2015. So - 2000's at the very latest, I think. Turn of the millenium?
EDIT: the air crash that killed Colin's parents is possibly the only precise absolute datable event in the book. I do not think this is accidental or random; Garner is not the sort of author to select an otherwise obscure air disaster at random for use as incidental detail. That information was inserted to be used as a datum point. (And possibly for other purposes). It can be precisely dated to 16:08 (central European time) on Wednesday the 2nd April 1969. This suggests the "action" of Wo B and T Mo G has been retconned to the middle-late 1960's.
Weirdstone - December 1968 -April 1969. Here Colin and Susan are merely staying with the Mossocks as family friends age around 11. 2nd April 1969: death of parents in plane crash. The Mossocks move to formally adopting the orphans. Gomrath: late summer-autumn 1969, (perhaps even 1970?) Colin and Susan have been warned never to get into a car with Selina Place as she is known locally as a "bad lot". Gomrath Eve may coincide with Samhain, Haloween? Susan's posession by the Brollochan. Colin abducted by Pelis. Taken to the witch. (He remembers this in flashback and his terror and involuntary wetting himself.A fiction to mask sexual abuse?) The final battle, on the night of an old moon. november, in the following year - 1970 or 1971 - Susan apparently dies. Colin may go to Fundindelve begging for help. Does he take The Horn For When All Is Lost with him? This would explain the scene seeming to be Cadellin's real merciless anger with him - Cadellin's job - the prime directive, his sole reason for being alive in the world - is to tend the sleepers and deal with any threat to them. Colin became a threat. If he caught Colin trying to blow the horn over them... explains his being cursed/blessed with forgetting. Was this dramatised as the lightning strike? Which incidentally scars Colin's neck. The hikers. The Morthbrood (in W oB were masquerading as hikers and walkers), also, in their way, playing their part, watching over the Edge? Who in the temporary absence of Selina Place play safe, and take pity on a boy who is no longer a threat. They're human too: Gowther Mossock recognised one of the Morthbrood as being his bank manager. how more mundane can you get than that? Of course they'd have rescued a young boy injured in the hills. Out of a walker-hiker's obligation to help, which I suspect trumps membership of a black magic coven!
Gowther Mossock is now the only human who has memory of involvement with Faerie.
Colin leaves school age 18 in or around 1976-7. He goes to uni, locally, in Manchester. first degree in 1979-80 age 21. Masters degree by 1980-81 age 22. Ph D 6 years later, by 1986-7, age 28. in the next ten years he accumulates published works, distinctions and secondary degrees. Professor and double F within 10-12 years, by 2000 at latest. He will be 38-40.
"Boneland" therefore takes place in or shortly after 2000, or anytime in the following decade, when Colin could be any age between 41-55.
Edited by AgProv
Got to dump this here or I'll forget it.
M45. The Pleiades. The constellation known as the Seven Sisters. They appear as the Daughters of the Moon in Gomrath. They collect the soul of Albanac as in keeping with their job as Greek Valkyries. Susan first rides with them when the Brollochan evicts her soul/spirit into the Otherworld. Cadellin recites the lines from the Mabinogion "three times the fullness of Prydwen we went into it, but, save us, only seven returned from Caer Annwn" and reflects that had they waited longer on the Mothan, Susan would not have come back at all.
She has a second opportunity to ride with Celemon and the sisters at the end of the battle at Errwood Hall, but Angharad restrains her telling her the moment is not yet - but one day she might. She is distraught but lets them go. "Gomrath" practically ends here.
but in witchcraft and magic, third time pays for all. when in "Bonelands" Susan takes the horse Prince and rides to Redesmere by night and is never seen again...
Colin grows up with a doctorate in astronomy. And access to a radio telescope. He is particularly interested in M45. Which when you look it up in a stellar directory is the Pleiades.
Celtic mythology identifies the seven sisters with death, loss, mourning and transition. They are a sort of psychopomp who guide people into the Otherworld. Colin explicitly says, in his "madness" that Susan rode into the Pleiades.
The M45 star Alcyone. Also known as Aethra - Ether. Familarly known to astronomers as "Ethel", hence the joke in an early page of "Bonelands". (Ethel: old English: Exalted to Nobility).
Not just a sly reference to a Genesis song, then.... "There's always been Ethel..."
Edited by AgProv