#The Spellcoats

[yonayona]

Long live the king

[namedafterflowerstournament]

Botanic Tournament : Main Bracket !

Round 1 Poll U

Tanaqui means "rushes" in-universe, although it breaks down into "younger sister"

(Rushes and cosmos flowers)

[quietflorilegium]

"He paused again before answering sadly and hesitantly, “I am very devious, Granddaughter. You—you would not be here now if I had.” It came to me that my grandfather was not only bound and sad, and weighted with shame and loneliness, but even uncertain how to talk to an ordinary person like me. I had not thought it was possible to love him until then. I wanted to turn round and look at him, but I did not dare."

Tanaqui, Diana Wynne Jones, "The Spellcoats"

[littlemissinkdrinker]

The Spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones

As a knitter and spinner, I absolutely adored this one. The story itself is the typical Jones's story of magic being found in unknown ways and people stumbling along and into and out of trouble which I will always inherently love (and she writes it so it always seems so organically). Spellcoats as a historical note is very fascinating to read in a more fantastical setting and I just really enjoyed how everything wove together, weaving pun 100% intended.

Read : Dec 26th, 2022 - Jan 6th, 2023

Rating : 5 Stars

[yonayona]

NOOOOOO FUCKING WAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY

for YEARS I've been CRAVING for some good fics about them AND FUCKUNG FINALLY 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 HERE IT IS 🙏🙏🙏🙏

strongly recommend every diana wynne jones enjoyer takes some time to roll around in the best spellcoats fic that ever has been or will be written

[risenwraith]

Some of the badges I sewed and used to decorate the coat of an American Civil War era Necromancer I played in a LARP game. (I ripped apart a replica jacket and replaced all the original insignia with occult symbols and imagery filled with moons, stars, sigils and skulls.)

[eightdaysofdiana]

Welcome to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, a new podcast on the works of our favorite author! Our first season will consist of eight episodes on the DWJ books of the seventies, released weekly:

1. Eight Days of Luke 2. Wilkin's Tooth/The Ogre Downstairs 3. Dogsbody 4. Cart & Cwidder 5. Power of Three 6. Charmed Life 7. Drowned Ammett 8. Spellcoats

Our inaugural episode, on Eight Days of Luke, will be out this Saturday, but you can subscribe now via our RSS feed or by searching anywhere that podcasts are found (unless you can't, in which case please do tell us).

[tanoraqui]

rereading the Dalemark Quartet because of this fantastic podcast series, and a few notes:

I really cannot imagine Duck as looking like anything but my own younger brother. I don’t imagine Tanaqui as looking like myself, despite the many years of having this username and relating intensely to DWJ’s first girl narrator & mythic history-weaver trope. I don’t have any problem imagining Gull, Robin or Hern as they’re described. But Duck, young or grown, looks like my little brother (who, for the record, is currently doing grad school chemistry, which is definitely a sort of magery).

I’d argue that Mitt and Navis have a parallel moment of first-meeting, future-of-the-country-deciding Mutual Vibes Check to Hern & Kars Adon. It’s just that Mitt is 3 years old at the time, so Navis is mostly going “why is there a toddler here. …Hildy-coded, though”, while Mitt has gotten all the way to “he’s a little strange but I can and will trust him with my Dream of a Better World.” (They are both correct.)

I’m having a LOT of thoughts about the fantasy trope of “there used to be magic & gods but now there’s less or none at all”, and all its variations, in comparison to Tolkien and modern works. But I’m having so many that it needs to be a separate post and maybe short essay.

The structure of the series is so interesting. It’s not chronological at all, which actually makes the gap—15 YEARS—between books 3 and 4 even more agonizing to imagine waiting through. Books 1-3 are all separate tributary rivers pouring into 4, and each one ends on more of, in effect, a cliffhanger: Cart and Cwidder with a fairly normal “this adventure is entirely resolved but there are likely more to come.” Drowned Ammet wraps up the story but is lacking some denouement, they never actually reach the North, it’s just safely in sight, it’s clear that they will reach its relative peace & safety—but we don’t see them do so, and we don’t know what happens to them when they do. And Spellcoats! Has a vision of how the plot will resolve, but very pointedly ends before showing it! All we have to know what happened to any of the characters is a historically uncertain postscript, and the knowledge that (more) modern Dalemark exists as it does! Much less any mention of anyone or anything—except technically the earl and earldom of Hannart—from either of the previous books. And she left the readers like this for fifteen years!

If I’d been a teen in the late 70s reading these books as they came out, when Crown of Dalemark was accounted in the mid-90s, I would’ve screamed aloud. I would love to know if anyone reading this post did have that experience.

[yonayona]

ahh she's so nice!!!! ❤️

👀 please?

so I read the dalemark quartet this year and really loved it, and wish I could finish this, but something about the perspective of the loom just eats me alive any time I try. I do really want to revisit fanart for the series in 2025 though because it's criminally underrated

[yonayona]

the spellcoat family sketches

[airandangels]

I’m rereading the Dalemark Quartet by Diana Wynne Jones and am of course thoroughly enjoying it (a sort of a children’s Song of Ice and Fire, long before GRRM wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, with the key difference that several of the main characters are commoners whose lives intersect with the nobility only by strange twists of fate (and all these main characters are children and teenagers between about ten and fourteen)). As used to be the way for bookish children when I was young, I discovered series of books by reading whichever one I found first at the library or at school or in a friend’s room and then trying to find the others (for example, my first Narnia book was Prince Caspian, although I had seen an animated film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), so in this case I read Drowned Ammet first and because its events take place at around the same time as those of the first book, Cart and Cwidder, just at different locations, I tend to feel as if it’s the real first book for me. The third book, The Spellcoats, has a strikingly different vibe than the others (it’s entirely a flashback to events hundreds of years before those of the first two books, whose significance will become clear in the fourth and final book, The Crown of Dalemark), and I think I actually got to read it last and was left a bit put off by it, though it wasn’t a bad book by any means. I’ve reread the series in the proper order since then, and am doing it again, but I wonder how I would have felt if I’d read them in order originally.

Anyway, the whole reason I started to write this post is that I was just reminded again by the actual text that Ynen Navisson has black hair, when I always imagine him blond. He just has a blond personality. I don’t mean he’s bimboish, just that there’s a softness to him that I associate with fair hair. It’s mildly jarring each time I’m reminded that he’s not. I have no problem remembering his sister Hildy has black hair because her description sounds like she’s pretty much a dead ringer for Wednesday Addams (and she’s a much stronger personality than Ynen).

It’s a pointless observation, but I can write anything I like here, so.

[quietflorilegium]

"What kind of illness is it that has a man in a fever in the morning and out fishing in the afternoon? Hern says it is a very rare and uncommon disease called cowardice."

Tanaqui, Diana Wynne Jones, "The Spellcoats"

[marnanel]

Some others. I'll upload more in a bit.

The coat in the Spellcoats picture is ASCII-encoded text:

I want to tell of our journey down the River.We are 5.The eldest is my sister Robin.Next is my brother Gull,&then my brother Hern. I come 4th,& I am called Tanaqui,which is a name from the scented rushes that line the River.

Diana Wynne Jones readthrough pictures

Emily Seville Lauer has been running a readthrough of all the Diana Wynne Jones books in publication order, throughout the 2025-6 academic year.

I have been making images for each book. Here are the first few.

[iamfitzwilliamdarcy]

thinking about the dad in the spellcoats falling in love with/marrying an Undying and now he’s the single father of some weirdo kids

[thenegoteator]

Finished the dalemark quartet yesterday and I may never recover

[crisdrawsandcries]

Here it is! The comic-style Spellcoats cover no one asked for.

Some elements may probably reveal the fact that I read the Dalemark books completely out of order