#The Spellcoats

[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

[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"

[thenugking]

Can't believe the revisionist historians in Dalemark who had the official translation of the Spellcoats claim Kars Adon died, when what really happened is that he united the land by marrying Hern.

This is a hill I will die on, they're gay as fuck for each other and Kars Adon absolutely did Not need to die and use his dying breath to name Hern his heir for the plot to work. So mad DWJ killed him but also so delighted that the story we actually read is a translation the glossary says is not entirely accurate.

[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

[deborahocarroll]

Wrapup: #MarchMagics 2022!

Recapping my recent #DianaWynneJones and #TerryPratchett adventures!

Time got away from me (clearly! XD), but it’s time to look back at the Diana Wynne Jones and Pratchett related goodness I got up to in March — and, actually, April as well! I didn’t manage to finish up my March Magics goals during the month since I got crazy busy, so I carried on a bit of the reading in April, which was rather nice, actually. And now that I’m trying to ease back into blogging, I…

[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.)

[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.

[thenegoteator]

Finished the dalemark quartet yesterday and I may never recover

[yonayona]

Long live the king

[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"

[thenugking]

also if i had a dollar for every piece of media I've been into were weaving is magical and integral to the plot, and the protagonist has been seperated from their mother since their childhood but she is capable of appearing to them as a swan, I'd have two dollars, which isn't a lot but it is weird that it's happened twice

[tanoraqui]

Trick or treat! Queen's Thief series or Spellcoats please?

This is a great combination because one of my favorite pet headcanons is that these series take place on different continents in the same world. The vibes just match, you know? The themes of real people becoming history and legends, the amount of fantasy in the fantasy settings (very little, really, and both ambling toward industrial revolutions). The way the gods do and do not interact with and relate to humans; how the older gods are more nature-based and the younger more human. Eugenides the god could so be an Undying of Dalemark, as could Immakuk and Ennikar.

[Tanaqui voice] “Go to bed, Duck.”