Secret Ten: Fiddle Me This!

Continuing my meme of the Secret Ten, I realize there's still one more player to be revealed: The Mysterious Number Six. And today -- today is the day the veil of secrecy will be lifted, and oh so many of you will scratch your heads and say..."Who?"

We begin with Ami's question:

1, 6 and 10 get thrown into 5s continuity to help 5 in every way they can, do they prove to be useful?

Well, 5, as you might remember, is the fiddle savant Johnny from Charlie Daniels' song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Which is awesome: He certainly has a problem to solve: He needs to beat the devil in a fiddle-off.* (Good thing Spider-Man didn't show up. He'd cave so fast you could call him Altamira.)


Now if only Daffy Duck, Spider Jerusalem, and the Mysterious Number Six can solve it.

Daffy gives it a valiant effort, backing up Johnny with some cowboy gee-tar. Unfortunately, things don't go so well, sound wise, when the Devil (okay, Chuck Jones) plays a dirty trick on him and turns the volume down. Face it, kids -- that duck can't catch a break.

Spider, meanwhile, looks the Devil and Johnny over, and decides Johnny must be hiding something behind his good-ole-boy facade. Soon he's tapping away at his keyboard, digging into Johnny's past -- particularly his relationship with a girl named Frankie. Fact is, he was her man, and he done her wrong. Given the choice between the Beast and the Smiler, Spider once again backs the Beast, pounding away on his keyboard for the devil.

Which leaves Johnny in bad shape, with only the Mysterious Number Six to turn the tide for him. Luckily, that's truly his ace in the hole. Number six is Fflewddur Flam, from Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain books. (I talked about my love for them in this post last May.) Flam is a bard beyond compare, whose harp strings had the unfortunate habit of breaking whenever he stretched the truth (except for one enchanted string that would never break, no matter the circumstances). And while Daniel Webster might not want him on his side his battle with the devil, he's just the guy for Johnny. Fflewddur's harp brings a heavenly counterpoint to Johnny's down-home fiddle, and the two of them send the devil packing doubly fast.


There are a few images of Fflewddur from Disney's The Black Cauldron, a not-very-good adaptation of the second book in the series. So I'm snubbing them in favor of Patrick Ball, a harpist who performed a one-man show, O'Carolan's Farewell to Music, years ago in Wilmington. And if you go the the reviews on his blog, and scroll down to the one credited to "Arcade Suburban Publications?" That's from my review.

Rob

*And if this sentence is any indicator, he also has a spastic colon.

R.I.P., Lloyd Alexander

I just read on The BEAT that another of my favorite writers has died.

Lloyd Alexander was the first writer I ever met. He’s a Philadelphian, which astounded me. I didn’t know where writers were supposed to be from, but “around the corner” was not anywhere near my range of guesses. (“England” and “California” were probably the top two.) For his Chronicles of Prydain series, he used and transformed Welsh mythology into an engaging – hell, why stop there? enveloping, enrapturing, empowering and exhilarating – series about how a boy who begins so lowly and so hungry for a title that he’s named “Assistant Pig-Keeper” becomes the lynchpin in a grand battle between good and evil. The books were meant for younger readers than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and for that they spoke to me much more clearly and profoundly than Tolkien ever did.

Sometime when I was in my tweens, in a decade before they were called “tweens”, Mr. Alexander made an appearance at Gene’s Books in Broomall. So, from a staging area about a mile or so up the road, my friend Tim and I rode our bikes—no, I take that back, we walked—to the bookstore to meet the man. I don’t remember if he did a reading, or if he made any sort of presentation. I just remember shaking his hand and telling him how much I liked his books, getting a couple of my paperbacks signed, and getting a mimeographed sheet of paper with pronunciation guides for all of the characters in the series. I can’t tell you how much it thrilled me – how much it thrills me even today – to find out for certain that I was pronouncing the main character’s name wrong. I’d been pronouncing Taran “ta-RAHN”, when the sheet told me to say it “TAH-ran.” I’ve stopped reading more than a handful of fantasy and science fiction books simply because there were too many names I couldn’t pronounce, so I appreciated this gesture maybe more than most.

The characters in the books always struck me as the perfect archetypes. Dallben, the wise old sage. Gwydion, the noble warrior, an impossible ideal. Taran, the bullheaded and perhaps a bit whiny kid, who honest-to-god grows up during the course of the series. Eilonwy, the somewhat full-of-herself princess who’s more friend than love interest. Gurgi, a clumsy, foolish, always-hungry animal-man. And Ffleuddur Fflam.

Ffleuddur Fflam was the bard of the series, a spinner of tall tales who was cursed so that his harp strings would always break whenever he told a lie. Anyone who’s ever played D&D with me can probably guess how much this character captured my imagination.

What especially impressed me about the books was that, as they progressed, the characters grew and changed. This was especially evident in Taran, but his friends all revealed new facets to their personalities as well. By the end of the final book, The High King, they feel like friends I’d known a long time—and had even missed, given their absence from a large part of the fourth book, Taran Wanderer.

I hadn’t meant to write so much about Lloyd Alexander and these books. But they thrilled me many times when I was younger, and I remember reading them again during a summer home from college, and being impressed as a near-adult with how wise they were, and in such simple terms. I think it’s probably time to revisit them, and see what I think now.

Rest in peace, Mr. Alexander. Thank you so much.

Rob