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I’ve been thinking about making a post on Diana Wynne Jones’ Hexwood for a while now, and serendipitously, it happens to fit well for Snowflake Challenge #6: In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

It’s clearly long past time for me to write about this—because of my Hexwood-saturated Yuletide experience, but, even more than that, because Hexwood is really the reason I’m here. I don’t mean ‘here’ as in ‘here in the universe,’ obviously, but as in ‘here on DW and AO3.” It’s the book that inspired my first fanfic, at an embarrassingly advanced age. I love it a lot. It’s a very strange, twisty, oddly-structured book that is very difficult to describe without giving away key plot points.

So, what can I say about Hexwood without spoilers? It takes place in… well, that’s kind of a spoiler, if I explain it properly. The main characters are… that’s definitely a spoiler if I explain it properly. It exists somewhere in the borderlands between fantasy and science fiction—I was going to mark that as a spoiler too, but we do after all encounter both a robot and a dragon within the first few pages, so I’ll allow it. It’s definitely not ``hard” science fiction; maybe it would be more accurate to call it fantasy with science fiction trappings.

I’ve seen Hexwood variously listed as a YA or “adult” book. It was originally published in 1993, which means that in some alternate universe I could have read it at age 16, and thus been nominally in the target audience age-wise. I’m pretty sure I would still have liked it then; it pushes a lot of buttons for me that already existed to be pushed at that point in my life. But I also think it hit me differently, and much harder, reading it when I did, in early 2021, working from home and taking care of a toddler. I decided I really needed some comfort reading, and started working my way through every DWJ book I could get my hands on—starting with the ones I already loved, like the Chrestomanci and Howl series, and then branching out to others that I hadn’t yet read, which led me to Hexwood. (It’s unfortunately out of print and doesn’t seem to be available as an ebook, but it’s easy enough to find a used copy or get it from a library.) The edition of that I got featured a quote on its back cover: “All I did was ask you for a role-playing game. You never warned me I’d be pitched into it for real! And I asked you for hobbits on a grail quest, and not one hobbit have I seen!” Now, this is an actual quote from the book, and I can see why someone chose to use it as a teaser here; it does concisely point out (some of) what’s going on in the plot. Nevertheless, it gave me a completely wrong idea of what I was about to read: I was expecting this quote to come from the hero/protagonist, which is definitely not the case. And there is certainly a kind of real-life role-playing game, with a kind of “grail quest,” but our perspective on it by the end of the book is entirely different from what I first assumed. There are in fact no hobbits, which I assume is only because they would have been forbidden for copyright reasons.

So, okay, I started reading the book, and it seemed relatively normal at first—there were several seemingly-disconnected scenes in different settings, but I figured the threads would come together later and the context would emerge. After the initial hints of robot-dragon-space opera stuff, the narrative settled into the POV of Ann Stavely, an apparently ordinary Earth teenager who observes some increasingly strange events in the woods near her house. And then all of a sudden, there was a scene that just made me go… WHAT? Did I skip some pages? Did I somehow black out for a moment and then misremember the previous scene? Well… I kept going. Somewhere along the way, puzzle pieces began to slot into place. There’s an amazing moment midway through the book when our perspective on everything that’s happened turns inside-out. From that point on, everything is building toward the most DWJ of DWJ endings, where all the strands come together, almost everyone is revealed to be someone different than you thought they were, there’s a triumphant resolution… and then, bam! It just ends. I wanted to reread the book almost immediately after finishing it—something I very rarely do—both because I wanted to watch all the pieces fitting together from the beginning now that I knew what was coming, and because I really cared about these characters and didn’t want to leave them behind. The ending was so abrupt, and had so many interesting implications, that I couldn’t stop thinking about how the story might continue. That’s eventually what led me to write my first fic… and here I am.


Hexwood is a book about stories and storytelling. Like many other DWJ books, it’s chock-full of references to other books, poetry, legends, and folklore. Something else I encountered during my DWJ reading binge was her memoir/essay collection Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, which, among other interesting things, included the essay “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey,” about the writing of Fire and Hemlock. I found it fascinating because it went into detail about the many sources and influences that left their marks on that book—most obviously the ballads “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer,” but also the Odyssey, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and other stories from Greek mythology, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I’m bringing this up here because I would love to see a similar essay about the sources/inspirations for Hexwood, but as far as I know, DWJ never wrote one. (If I’m wrong about this, please tell me!) So instead, I’m going to list a few of the sources that I know of here, with (sometimes spoilery) rambling for each one. When I was preparing to write fic for Hexwood, I found myself wanting to dig into all the layers of background, and ended up doing a lot of other reading/rereading as a result.

Arthurian legend: Well, obviously, given the “grail quest” already mentioned. Besides that, there are references to The Lady of Shalott and the Fisher King myth, as well as some important characters who pop up where you’re not expecting them. This caused me to reread The Once and Future King,, as well as reading The Lady of Shalott for the first time.
The “grail” is something very different from the original version, but we do get the literal Merlin and the literal King Arthur. Merlin, not Arthur, pulls the magic sword from the stone, which is thematically significant since Martellian/Merlin/Hume needs to learn to fight his own battles rather than passing them on to his descendants. (Arthur is called Artegal here, which is a name from The Faerie Queene,, but I won’t say any more about that since I’ve never read The Faerie Queene,.) We get two versions of the Fisher King’s wound that will not heal: a comic one for Reigner Two, and a serious one for Mordion.

The Lady of Shalott is specifically mentioned as something Ann Stavely supposedly read at school. It’s plot-important because Ann uses a mirror to watch people passing by outside her window, which the Lady of Shalott also did. The river and boat from the poem show up in the river that passes by Mordion and Hume’s campsite, and their journey to the castle in Hume’s boat. Thematically, the Lady of Shalott died of unrequited love for Lancelot, and obviously Mordion is Lancelot, but Ann/Vierran gets a much better deal than the Lady, because a) not unrequited, and b) not dead. This is definitely some pushback by DWJ against the raw deal female characters get in much of the original source material. (Not that I don’t think Hexwood could do better by its female characters—but that’s another essay.) Also, when I read The Lady of Shalott, there were a few lines where I just imagined DWJ snickering when interpreting them in a space-opera context. Example: “The gemmy bridle glitter'd free,/Like to some branch of stars we see/Hung in the golden Galaxy.”


Norse Mythology and Beowulf This caused me to read Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and to reread “Beowulf”—I read the Seamus Heaney translation and also the Maria Dahvana Headley translation, which was new to me and a lot of fun. Tangentially, I don’t think I had previously noticed (or maybe had forgotten) just how much Smaug in The Hobbit is a ripoff of an homage to the dragon in “Beowulf.” There’s a thief/burglar who sneaks in through a side door and steals one goblet—it’s all there! The Norse mythology part also sent me down a rabbit hole (wormhole?) about lindworms, which I already talked about in my Yuletide post.
Martellian/Merlin/Hume is also Odin, because of course he is. I saw something online that made me think Fitela is a character from “Beowulf.” This turned out to be a little misleading: he’s not in the story per se, but a bard sings about him, so he was legendary even in Beowulf’s time. Regarding lindworms: the Wikipedia page mentions that “Legend tells of two kinds of lindworm, good and bad,” with the good one often being an enchanted prince.  So that has a clear connection to Mordion and Reigner One in their dragon forms.


Shakespeare, The Tempest: Caused me to reread the play.
I didn’t think of this myself, but when I was Googling around looking for more about Hexwood, I found a review saying that the section in the wood is a retelling of The Tempest, with Mordion = Prospero, Hume = Miranda, and Yam = Ariel. And… yeah, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. There’s no direct counterpart to Ann/Vierran in the play, unless she’s Prospero’s dead wife (ick), so maybe we can take this as additional pushback in the “justice for female characters!” vein.


Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books: Dragons are very important in Hexwood—I’ve already mentioned them multiple times here, so that in itself is not a spoiler. And obviously there are many literary sources for them. But Earthsea in particular is definitely referenced in the name Orm Pender, because Orm was a dragon name and Pendor was a dragon-infested island. (Pender also makes me think of Pendragon, which I assume is deliberate as well.) I again didn’t catch this on the first read, but it’s a big clue about what form Reigner One will take in the Bannus field.

That’s far from an exhaustive list—there are things I know I’ve left out, and probably other things that should be included that I’ve missed entirely. But this is already long enough, so I’ll leave it there for now. I'll just say I'm happy that this book led me down a rabbit hole/into a wardrobe/through a portal that eventually brought me here.