Summary: The Castle of Llyr is mostly a story about Taran coming to understand that he has feelings for Eilonwy. The Foundling and Other Tales is a book of short stories, more like Aesop’s Fables, but designed to give context to the Chronicles of Prydain.
Every time my family goes to Disney, my wife paints our magic bands to be personalized. This year, I asked her to paint my band to the theme of Disney’s Black Cauldron. Like most people, my wife had never seen the Black Cauldron movie. When it came out it was the first Disney animated movie to be PG and it is fairly scary. We watched 30 minutes or so together to give her a sense of the art and context for her to paint the band. I went back later and watched the rest of the movie and was yet again disappointed that the movie was not better. It was not awful, but it changed the story too much combining the stories of the Book of Three and The Black Cauldron. And I think that while Taran and Eilonwy were presented well, I was not really a fan of any of the other character’s development.
I decided to go back and read the third book in the series Castle of Llyr because I had not read it for a while and I wanted to see if maybe I could read it aloud to my children. I have not found some good read-aloud for my kids for a while. But the first two books are too scary for my kids at this point and the third one is too dependent on the first two books for context to be able to jump into it directly with my kids.
I don’t know when my kids will be ready to read the Chronicles of Prydain, but I do look forward to it.
I am not sure why, but I have never read The Foundling and Other Tales. I was just unaware of the book until I was an adult. And I am not sure why I did not pick it up when I read the series about a decade ago. But I did pick it up and read it in a sitting. It is less than 100 pages and it is not difficult to read. The style is more like Aesop’s Fables than contextual short stories for Prydain. I am not completely satisfied. I like the story about Dalben being found by the three witches. But when Dalben finds Coll and his pig (Hen-wen) it does not completely make sense of the timeline of the Book of Three. Either Hen-wen is about 20 or so years old at the start of the Book of Three (to make sense of Taran living with Coll and Dalben since before he could remember) or there is something wrong with the timeline of when Taran came to live with them.
The rest of the stories are fine, but nothing that really adds much to the understanding of the rest of the series.
The Castle of Llyr Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook
The Foundling and Other Tales Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook