The Snow Spider Trilogy by Jenny Nimmo, Part 3: The Chestnut Soldier

Magic and influence

I’ve been reading the Snow Spider trilogy, by Jenny Nimmo, to my eldest, and we have finished the final book, The Chestnut Soldier. It concerns the young magician Gwyn Griffiths, on the edge of his thirteenth birthday, his friend Nia, and his cousin Emlyn, (who appears in the second book, Emlyn’s Moon) as they grapple with mysterious supernatural and otherworldly forces.

Written in a sophisticated, slow-moving style, The Chestnut Soldier retains a luminous power. A scene, for example, in which Nia visits the seaside with the ‘chestnut soldier’ of the title is magnificently handled: nothing much happens, but the eerie, tense significance of it all is almost tangible. The book’s major arc is about freedom, and growing up. Gwyn thinks his magic is stunting him; Nia feels overwhelmed by her many siblings. Both need escape. The ‘chestnut soldier’ refers to many things: to Evan Lyr, a handsome, troubled soldier who has survived a fire in Northern Ireland, who comes to visit Nia’s family; to an ancient, wicked prince called Efnisien; and to a soldier made from chestnut wood.

I didn’t read it as a child: although I was given The Snow Spider for my 9th birthday, I never read the second two parts. I know that we had the book, or that it was in one of my schools, as I remember seeing the cover - the same as the second hand copy I bought from the internet - and, thinking that it would be about war, not magic, discarding it.

Which made the following all the more surprising and interesting. In The Snow Spider, Gwyn Griffiths is given a mutilated wooden horse by his witchy grandmother, Nain, in which is trapped Efnisien. In The Chestnut Soldier, this spirit is liberated, and it inhabits the body of Evan Lyr. The possession takes time, and results in some spectacularly eerie moments: the spirit can’t stand horses, so they run from him; Efnisien, through Evan, breaks all the toy horses in Nia’s house. Evan begins to take on the physical attributes of Efnisien, dressing in scarlet and gold, and his hair changes colour. He also develops an attachment to the most beautiful of Nia’s sisters, who represents, in the Welsh legend, Bronwen. There are remarkably adult undercurrents in this final volume.

I digress. The thing that I found fascinating was this. In my most recent novel, Ghostlord, the heroine, Meg, moves to a cottage in the countryside. She is older than Nia, being sixteen years old, on the verge of the sixth form.

Answering a child’s call, she digs up a box in the garden, in which lies an old wooden horse, a child’s toy from the 16th century. Its single eye is an obdsidian mirror, through which she can communicate with the child’s spirit, a little boy called Jankin, who has been trapped there by an evil wizard.

There were three conscious reasons for this decision: the first was that I wanted to use something that an actual child would have played with, and since I’ve always liked horses, settled on one; the second was the symbolic connotations of the object: the Trojan horse, giving birth to death. The third reason was that I had reviewed a biography of C S Lewis, which related that he and his brother had buried their toys in the garden when they’d moved house. (Both the cover of The Chestnut Soldier and Ghostlord highlight the toy horses.)

In Ghostlord, the spirit of Jankin seeks to inhabit someone, and has been manipulating a character in order to arrange this possibility: the spirit of the prince Efnisien in The Chestnut Soldier does the same, honing in on Evan as a suitable vessel.

The two books are markedly different, and their plot points and settings couldn’t be further apart. Meg is very much a 21st century heroine, with her purple-painted nails and her mobile phone, and her adventures take her into another dimension; Ghostlord picks up, too, on elements in its predecessor, Wildlord.

But I did wonder if some long buried memory of the mutilated horse in The Snow Spider had surfaced as I wrote Ghostlord. The other thing, of course, is that writers in the supernatural deal broadly with the same subject matter. The Matter of Britain; the Welsh tales; fairy tale and Greek myth, all retain certain morphological elements, and there are similarities in theme, particularly to do with liberation and growing up. I suppose, in some sense, all children’s books are cut from the same cloth.

Nimmo’s tales are fully anchored in the Welsh myths: Efnisien is an evil hero, and Gwyn’s ancestor, a magician (whom he meets) is also a figure from the same stories. Efnisien wants to recreate his narrative, to impose his past on the future (like the Welsh spirits in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service). Gwyn must learn to accept his ancestral powers. The spirit in Ghostlord has a different purpose: he seeks knowledge and power; Meg discovers she has an ability (also inherited) to push tunnels through space; this is something she must learn to control.

The Chestnut Soldier is a fitting end to the Snow Spider trilogy. There is a beautiful scene where the spirit of Efnisien is met by his followers, who appear, glittering and shadowy, through the trees. He rides proudly, free at last, into the Otherworld. Both Nia and Gwyn have grown up: Gwyn into an acceptance of his powers, and Nia into a new position amongst her family and friends.

At the end of both Wildlord and Ghostlord, I left my characters with their newly discovered and controlled magical powers, on the cusp of adulthood. In Wildlord, inheritance had been acknowledged, challenged and accepted; in Ghostlord, corruption and evil have been defeated.

Magic is, in a way, a way of talking about growing up, and understanding how to deal with mysterious new feelings and opportunities. We are all thinking, responding, and shaping, using the same archetypes and images in new and different ways.

One final thing: my writing students often ask me about originality. I always reply in the following way:

A boy discovers he has magic powers and is invited to go to a school for wizards. What’s the book?

There is usually a fast answer to this question. And it is, naturally, wrong.

The answer, of course, is A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin.

As I write my next book, I wonder what influences and shadows will lie behind it, and which will come up in unexpected ways.

Ghostlord and Wildlord can be found here on the Waterstones website.