92 pages • 3 hours read
Susan CooperThe Dark Is Rising
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Authorial Context: Susan Cooper’s Upbringing and Influences
Susan Cooper was born in 1935 in Buckinghamshire, England. She attributes much of her fascinating with writing, especially fantasy, to her earliest years during the Blitz; her family spent many nights in their backyard air-raid shelter while anti-aircraft guns fired at German planes that passed overhead and dropped bombs on the countryside. Homes were blacked out at night to make it harder for the bombers to target villages, so Susan read by candlelight. Cooper’s experience of huddling in the dark with her family while a cataclysmic war went on over her head inspired in her a strong sense of good and evil as concrete powers rather than abstract ideas. This would shape the mythology she created in the Dark Is Rising series, where good and evil are material agents.
Susan read and wrote almost constantly as a child—plays, stories, and an attempted autobiography. She turned to editing her school magazine, and after graduating from high school, she studied English at Oxford University from 1953-1955. Both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were dons of the college and dictated that the English department syllabus focus on Middle English works or romances like those of Mallory and Spencer. Cooper never met either fantasy writer in person, but she spoke fondly of their lectures, and at the time she was attending the university, she and her fellow students were waiting eagerly for the third book of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Cooper was the first woman to edit the Oxford University newspaper, and after graduation she wrote for the London Sunday Times. She worked mostly as a reporter and feature-writer, interviewing presidents and the Archbishop of Canterbury. She also contributed to a column written by Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. Her first published book was an end-of-the-world fantasy called Mandrake set in England 20 years into the future (1980). She contributed occasionally to a weekly children’s feature until she saw a notice from a children’s book publisher asking for family adventure stories. The novel she penned in response became the first book of the Dark is Rising series: Over Sea, Under Stone. The remainder of the series came about as a reaction to her homesickness after moving to the United States.
Literary Context: The Connection to Myth and Archetype
Critics of The Dark is Rising sometimes note that the story contains little to no character growth. However, Cooper’s novel is not principally concerned with character development but rather with the creation of an English mythology including archetypal figures.
J. R. R. Tolkien, who taught at Oxford when Cooper was there, laid out a set of rules for what is now called “high fantasy” in his 1947 “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien argues that such stories require evidence of supernatural powers at work in the ordinary world (Cooper’s Light and Dark). Additionally, they need to be set in a substantial fantasy world, created in sufficient detail to be believable and immersive to the reader and suitable to a clash between good and evil. One way to accomplish that is to employ elements of mythology recognizable to the reader, which Cooper does, drawing figures from a variety of English myths and folktales, such as Merlin, the Hunter, Wayland-Smith, and the Rider.
According to Tolkien, the story should also take the form of a quest, and the protagonist should be “ordinary”—someone with whom the reader can identify (like Will Stanton). Over the course of the story, the protagonist must grow into the role of hero, becoming an equal to his companions in the quest—usually extraordinary people with powers inaccessible to the reader, like the Old Ones. Finally, the special world of the story must be entirely real, not a dream or illusion.
Many people regard The Dark is Rising as their favorite book of the series, possibly because more than many of the others, it fulfills Tolkien’s requirements, which are less rules than they are observations of the qualities that make for lasting stories.
Socio-Cultural Context: The Religious, the Secular, and the Pagan
Prior to approximately 300 CE, European midwinter holidays were largely pagan. For the pre-Christian Romans, the god of midwinter was Saturn, and his celebration was Saturnalia. By 300 CE, Mithraism and Christianity contended for dominance in the Roman world. The Persian sun god Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25, and as Christianity gradually absorbed Mithraism, that date began to be associated with the birth of Jesus.
As Rome carried Christianity throughout the Germanic and Celtic world, the holiday blended with other celebrations. In Nordic countries, people honored Odin, who flew over the earth, noting who was naughty and nice. The Norse also celebrated Yule from December 21 through January, feasting and celebrating until the Yule Log burned out. The decorating of an evergreen also came from northern European tradition; the evergreen kept its foliage through the winter, promising the eventual return of the sun.
In the early 1600s, the Puritans in England banned the midwinter festival and turned it into a day of fasting and contemplation of sin. Since many of the Puritans would go on to settle in the Americas, Christmas was not a major holiday in the United States until the 1800s, when it was re-imported from England.
Meanwhile, Christmas in England had become a largely commercial holiday more devoted to food and frivolity than spirituality. Charles Dickens criticized this trend via A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge, who derided Christmas as a time for spending money that one didn’t have. Dickens’s novella was, among other things, an attempt to show how the sacred and the secular could be harmoniously integrated. Susan Cooper takes that integration further, foregrounding the pagan rather than Christian elements of the midwinter holiday and reintroducing readers to traditions like the hunting of the wren and the Yule Log.
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