In today’s Witch Week post, 3 bloggers dive deep into DWJ’s Cart & Cwidder, where music and mayhem play hand-in-hand.
Cart and Cwidder HarperCollins UK edition 2016
When their father, a travelling minstrel is killed, three children involved in rebellion and intrigues inherit a lute-like cwidder with more than musical powers.
— From the first edition of Cart and Cwidder, Macmillan 1975
You’ll by now be aware that Witch Week takes its title from a novel of the same name, ostensibly for children, by Diana Wynne Jones, who died in 2011. So it seemed apt to have as this year’s novel for discussion Cart & Cwidder, the first volume in a fantasy quartet set in a polity called Dalemark. In fact the very first Witch Week featured The Spellcoats, another Dalemark novel in which the principal villain is actually identified.
Three of us have had a detailed online chat about this — an edited version is offered below — but a number of you…
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