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.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Finding”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Midwinter's Eve”
Will Stanton is the youngest of nine children. On the day before his 11th birthday, which falls on Midwinter, Will is wishing for snow. He notices that the animals on his family’s farm have become afraid of him and that the radio erupts with static every time he goes near it. When he accompanies his brother James to collect hay from the neighboring farm, the rooks in the nearby wood are disturbed by his passing.
An old tramp in ragged clothes watches the brothers from across the road. At the farm, James mentions the tramp to farmer Dawson, and Dawson murmurs that the “Walker” is abroad. Before they leave, the farmer gives Will an iron ornament—a circle quartered by a cross. He tells Will to wear it on his belt. The farm’s dairy girl, Maggie Barnes, comes from the farmhouse with a crockery jar of mincemeat for Will to take home to his mother. On the way home, Will and James see the tramp again, but the rooks attack the old man, driving him away.
At the family dinner, Will’s father observes that Will is turning 11—“double-ones.” It’s a significant birthday and should be marked by some special ceremony. The family talks about Will seeming old for 11—almost ageless. Will is uneasy about so many people focusing on him, feeling as if it might attract the attention of something unfriendly. Will’s brother Max enters the kitchen, announcing that it has begun to snow, and Will’s father says, “There’s your ceremony, Will” (14).
That night, in the room that used to belong to his oldest brother, Stephen, Will is struck by intense fear of the dark and the cold. He feels something trying to change him from inside. He hears a thud at the skylight. It flies open, admitting a blast of frigid air and a single rook’s feather.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Midwinter Day”
Will wakes to a lilting strain of music coming out of nowhere. The snow has covered everything in a thick blanket. He tries to rouse his family, but they sleep as if they cannot hear him. Will feels drawn outside. He walks down the road to Dawson’s farm and finds the farmhouse is gone, replaced by unfamiliar buildings. A smithy stands by the road, and a man Will recognizes as Old George’s son, John Smith, is shodding a beautiful black horse.
The rider of the black horse emerges from the shadows. The Rider tries to persuade Will to break bread with him and then to mount the black horse with him, but Will is afraid and refuses both offers. The Rider tries to drag Will onto the horse after him, but the smith pulls Will off the road into the smithy, and the Rider rides away. The smith tells Will he was wise to distrust the Rider but must not fear him. If Will trusts his inner knowledge, he will be all right.
A riderless white mare appears—the opposite of the Rider’s black stallion. The smith tells Will that if he mounts the mare, she will take him anywhere he wants to go. All he has to do is take hold of her mane. When Will does, he hears a strain of music and finds himself on her back. He gets down, however, and tells the smith that he must go on foot to find the Walker, realizing only as he says it that it is true. Will departs the smithy and encounters the tramp, whom he now recognizes—again without knowing how—as the Walker. The Walker asks Will to show him the “sign” he wears on his belt, but before Will can do so, the black Rider appears and tries to seize Will.
Will is saved by the appearance of the white mare, who carries him away. They race across the sky. Looking down, Will sees a cross-quartered circle cut into the chalk of the Chiltern Hills. The mare brings him to a pair of ancient doors standing alone on a hill.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Sign-Seeker”
Will passes through the doors and finds himself in a great hall with woven tapestries on the walls. He is met by a white-haired man wearing a cloak and an old lady with a musical voice. The man introduces himself to Will as Merriman Lyon. The lady is merely the Lady.
Merriman informs Will that he is the last of the great “Old Ones”—immortals who must oppose “the Dark.” Some part of Will recognizes this to be true. Another part resists, feeling overwhelmed.
Merriman and the Lady demonstrate some of his powers to him, beginning with the ability to telepathically communicate thoughts and images. Merriman puts an image into Will’s mind and then sees in Will’s mind an image of Will’s father’s shop. Mr. Stanton is handling a ring, and Merriman notices some runic marks on it that he says he would like to study more closely. Next, Merriman teaches Will to command fire. Will tries to fail the test by setting himself a task too big to accomplish, but when he orders the fire in the gigantic hearth to die, to his shock, it does. Likewise, when he commands it to return, it obeys him. He reluctantly admits that what Merriman and the Lady have told him is true.
Merriman tells Will that his task as an Old One is to seek and unite the six “Signs of the Light.” Will already has one—the iron cross and circle on his belt. Merriman recites a rhyme about the others:
When the Dark comes rising, six will turn it back,
Three from the circle, three from the track;
Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
Five will return, and one go alone (43-44).
Merriman takes Will around the hall, showing him the tapestries; a single image on each stands out for a moment. Merriman tells him to remember those images, as they will be important.
Will feels the force of the Dark pressing on the doors of the hall. The Dark tries to lure Will into opening the doors, first causing him to hear the sound of a crying dog and then his mother’s voice calling to him for help. Will starts to go to her, but his wrist brushes the Sign at his belt. It is so cold that it burns him. The Lady heals the burn, leaving a scar in the shape of a cross-quartered circle on the inside of Will’s arm.
The Dark continues trying to deceive Will, but he resists. Merriman, Will, and the Lady form a circle to repel the Dark. As it retreats, the great doors reappear. Deceived into thinking the Dark has been defeated, Will breaks the circle. When he does, the Dark attacks again, and the Lady must oppose them alone. She defeats the forces of the Dark but is weakened and must retreat to recover herself. Merriman returns Will to his own time, telling him his next task is to get the second Sign, the Sign of bronze, from the Walker. When that is accomplished, Merriman will return.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Walker on the Old Way”
A few days later, Will is returning home from Christmas shopping and takes a shortcut along Tramps Alley, also known as Oldway Road. He encounters a branch fallen across the path and is tempted to test his new powers. He commands the branch to burn, and it bursts into a magical white fire that does not consume the branch. Alarmed by the strength of the flames, Will tries to douse the fire, but it continues to blaze.
Someone seizes him from behind and hisses at him to put the fire out; it will attract the Dark, whose spies among the rooks are already flying to report to their masters. Will recognizes his assailant as the Walker. He asks the Walker to give him the Sign of bronze, but the Walker hesitates: He has carried the sign for 600 years, always running from the Dark, and no longer knows who to trust. Unable to reason with the Walker, Will commands him to hand over the Sign, and the Walker does so, relieved to be released from its burden.
As soon as Will has the second Sign in hand, the branch ceases to burn. The Dawsons’ dairy maid, Maggie, comes on the scene. She claims the tramp stole something from her—an ornament that he might have slipped into Will’s pocket—and then casts a spell that freezes Will in place. He is unable to react as she takes the Signs from his pocket and belt.
Merriman appears and conjures Maggie by her true name never to try to take the Signs again. Flames spring up on either side of the road, and Merriman tells Will that he is standing on one of the “Old Ways” used by the Old Ones for millennia; along with Merriman’s knowledge of Maggie’s name, this saved Will from the “witch-girl.” The Walker has been “caught out of Time”—frozen by the Dark—and Merriman explains that the Walker bore the Sign in penance for having betrayed the Old Ones. Merriman releases the Walker and sends him to another time, where he says the Walker will finally be allowed to rest after he has performed one more task. Will returns home with the Sign of bronze strung on his belt beside the Sign of iron.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The Dark Is Rising is set in Huntercombe, a fictional village in the County of Buckinghamshire that Cooper based on the village of Dorney, where she spent much of her childhood. The Stantons’ home is based on the vicarage, where the vicar’s wife tutored Cooper in Latin.
Chapter 1 establishes a mood of foreboding and incipient change. Animals are acting differently around Will, which he finds frightening. The rooks in particular are behaving strangely, and it eventually emerges that they have ties to the Dark; in European mythology, ravens (rooks’ close relatives) are associated with death, war, and underworld gods. However, Will’s trepidation does not simply reflect his instinctive awareness of the forces of evil. Significantly, the novel opens just before Will’s birthday, and Will has mixed feelings about growing up. The theme of Coming-of-Age As a Leap Into the Adult World thus surfaces in the novel’s first pages.
Will’s coming-of-story closely corresponds with the novel’s quest narrative, which the appearance of the tramp (i.e., the Walker) heralds. Farmer Dawson links the Walker with the special world—the eternal, fantastical world of the hero’s journey—when he says that “The Walker is abroad, and this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining” (7). Unlike the journey’s archetypal herald, the Walker does not issue a call to adventure, but his arrival foreshadows the call that comes from Merriman in Chapter 2. Farmer Dawson giving the Sign of iron to Will likewise foreshadows the special world. The fact that Will, the Sign Seeker, doesn’t have to struggle to find the first Sign underscores its role as a link binding him to the Old Ones—even before he knows he is one of them. It could be seen as a symbol of initiation. Will is going to go through several such initiations, each time growing more fully into his role as an Old One.
The remainder of Chapter 1 continues to foreshadow Will’s coming transformation; for example, his family’s discussion of Will as an old soul anticipates his nature as an Old One. His sense that it is unsafe for so many people to be looking at and thinking about him is the first stirring of the innate knowledge that comes with this nature. All this foreshadowing culminates in Will’s sleepless night, during which he feels that something is trying to change him—a hint that his second nature is emerging.
Will wakes to an outer world transformed by snow (just as his inner self has been and will be transformed) and goes out to explore his changed reality. He encounters the first of several mythological figures; as Will realizes during his meeting with Merriman, John Smith is Wayland-Smith, a reference to a mythological figure originating in Norse mythology and adopted into English folklore. The Dark Rider is the second mythological figure, though less specific in origin. Black-cloaked riders on black horses are generally associated with fear and dread. This Rider’s hair is an unusual shade of red, which suggests a connection with the Norse trickster god Loki, which would be consistent with the other Germanic and Scandinavian figures who appear throughout the story.
The white mare appears next. She recalls the shapes of white horses cut into hillsides in Dorsetshire, near where Cooper grew up. The shapes are thought to represent one manifestation of the White Goddess, the mother goddess of the druidic religion in England.
Finally, in Chapter 3, Will meets Merriman and the Lady. Merriman Lyon is Merlin, the first of the immortal Old Ones and a well-known figure from Arthurian legend. He is the true herald of the story, announcing the beginning of the quest and Will’s entry into the magical world. True to his role in (some versions of) Arthurian legend, he also acts as the mentor, teaching Will how to use his newly-awakened power and explaining his origin and his destiny. In the final book of the series, the Lady is revealed to be the Lady of the Lake—another figure from Arthurian legend, best known for giving King Arthur the sword Excalibur. She also appears to be a manifestation of the White Goddess—an ally of the Light and a power in her own right. The archetypal nature of these characters establishes the theme of The Reality and Timelessness of Myth.
Will resists accepting the new identity that he knows on some level is his. In the archetypal hero journey, this is the “refusal of the call”—a signal to the reader that the hero is not acting out of shallow motives such as desire for adventure or acclaim. However, Will is not infallible. His first test is to resist the Dark’s efforts to trick him into opening the doors of the hall, and he nearly succumbs to the temptation to protect his loved ones—specifically, his mother. As Merriman explains to Will, the Dark tries to turn the better nature of the agents of the Light against them. The Dark’s attempt to lure Will with sympathy demonstrates the ruthlessness required of the Light—i.e., that Dark May Be Evil but Good Is Not Nice. The episode also foreshadows Will’s final test, in which he must refuse to trade the Signs of the Light to the Rider in exchange for Mary’s life.
Another misstep comes in Chapter 4, when Will is tempted to test his power. He is motivated by vanity, and his impulse exposes him to the Dark. He is also testing his limits as a child does when approaching adulthood—finding the boundaries of a new world. Will intuitively knows that he is transgressing, but part of growth is probing to test consequences. His wrongly-motivated use of power almost leads to disaster before his quest really begins.
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By Susan Cooper
