Do you think that Taran, the hero of the Prydain Chronicles, would qualify as a classical hero?
This is a fascinating question because in some ways he is a classical hero. In other ways, he’s quite the opposite. He does things that classical heroes really aren’t supposed to do. For one thing, he gets scared. For another thing, he makes a lot of errors in judgment. And classical heroes are usually much larger than life. They’re not quite human beings. They’re somehow larger than human scale. Whereas I would like to think that Taran is quite and very recognizably human. I would hope that readers would feel close to him as one fellow human being to another. Is there a Christian theme behind any of your stories? Not on purpose. I think certain elements of Christianity must drift into the stories, because that’s how I was brought up. But I don’t think they are so much Christian as things common to all religions. For example, in The Book of Three, Taran and his friends go to this lovely, peaceful valley, which is a kind of refuge for various animals. They go there and recover from inju
