Time to read again?
Lloyd Alexander died earlier this month at 83. He wrote the Prydain Chronicles, the stories of pigkeeper-with-a-destiny Taran the Wanderer and some of my first favorite books.
When I heard the death news, I didn't remember much of the them, but reading what others wrote helped jog my memory some. A blog post from Timothy Burke, a Swarthmore history professor, made a point that especially surprised me. He defined the series in a way I've — in recent, better memory — put Ender's Game, and the closeness left me wondering if I'd tapped into the same feelings both times, seven or eight crucial development years apart.
To me, the books were valuable not just as a story of swords and sorcery or even of the journey from childhood to adulthood, but also as an exploration of what it means to make moral choices….
The Prydain books explored morality as it is lived, even for children, in difficult choices, in painfully-won wisdom, from the inside of consciousness rather than the outside infrastructure of social life. There isn't much doubt about who the bad guys and the good guys are in any of the books, but the main characters are not noble by fiat, either, particularly Taran. One of the incidents that made the biggest impact on me as a boy was when Taran is compelled to accept the possibility that his lost father is not of noble birth, but a shepherd, and the shameful feelings he struggles with as a result. Characters die, characters suffer. When they come to a moral decision, you're taken along with them inside the process of experience and reason that brings them to that moment.
I think you could probably go farther still along that road: I think small children are just as attuned as adults to the possibility of the no-win moral scenario, those moments in life that can't be resolved cleanly in favor of a right and wrong choice. This is the kind of argument that gets lazily, casually dismissed by some as favoring moral relativism. Far from it….
