The Castle of Llyr

The Castle of Llyr is a high fantasy novel by the American writer Lloyd Alexander, published in 1966 and the third of the five books of The Chronicles of Prydain.

The series follows Taran, whose title of Assistant Pig-Keeper is a joke he has learned to live with, and his companions, and this volume gives most of its attention to Eilonwy and to her family's history. The Isle of Mona is the island where her ancestral home stood, and the adventure takes the group to Caer Colur, the castle of the title, where more is revealed about what she has inherited and what it obliges her to do. Alexander built Prydain out of Welsh material rather than inventing a northern Europe from scratch: the Isle of Mona is a version of Ynys Môn, the Welsh name for Anglesey, and most of the names in the books are historical or mythological, though the stories are not retellings of particular legends. He had trained in Wales as an army intelligence officer during the war, and he said afterwards that the chronicles were meant to convey the feeling of the land and its stories rather than the facts of them.