When I was in elementary school, I read the novel The High King by Lloyd Alexander. I loved it! I remember making a board game based on the story on a big sheet of posterboard. I really hadn’t read anything like it before. It was epic and exciting, with memorable characters and important insights into the nature of being human.

I either didn’t realize or didn’t care when I began reading it that it was the fifth and final book in a series of novels that follow a humble assistant pig-keeper named Taran. I seem to have developed a habit of doing that with book series! For example, I read Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the third (and, at the time, final) installation in the Dragonlance Chronicles before I picked up either the first or second novel. With the Chronicles, it created a heightened sense of mystery and the fantastic that actually improved the reading experience in a way, I think.

Over the next few years, I picked up the other books in the Prydain series (I referred to them as the Taran Wanderer books) as I found them in used bookstores, but I didn’t finish reading any of them while I was still in school.

Much later, as an adult, I decided to revisit the land of Prydain, the setting of these stories. It is a heroic fantasy world based heavily on Welsh mythology. Some of the names of characters and a bit of their personality, such as the villainous Arawn Death-lord, are derived from pre-existing mythological characters that populated early epics (a character named Arawn appears in the 12-13th century Mabinogion, for example).

Reading the series as an adult ended up being really good. I was able to see the character development that happens over the course of the whole story, and I found Alexander’s writing appealing. He uses a semi-detached, neutral narration that reminds me of epic sagas of the past. I enjoyed the life lessons he weaves into the story, and the adventure of it all appealed to the young boy in me that loved The High King so much.