So this instalment of the Oxford Fantasy Literature Summer School is on Susan Cooper, perhaps one of the best known children's fantasy authors associated with Oxford. For a short biography of Susan: She was born in Buckinghamshire in 1936 and grew up in this rural part of the United Kingdom, until her parents moved her yet again to the countryside of Gwynneth in northwest Wales.
And then in her teenage years, she read English at Somerville College in the mid 1950s, around the same time as Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Penelope Lively, the writers of the so-called Oxford School, and attended lectures by the esteemed fantasists Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. And she was noted as the first female student to edit the still-running Oxford student newspaper, The Cherwell.
And following this, as you might expect, she worked in London as a journalist for the Sunday Times under Ian Fleming. During this time in her life, she began to write the first book of what would later become The Dark is Rising sequence, Over Sea, Under Stone, which was eventually published in 1965. And Cooper moved to the US in 1963, where she continues to live in the salt marshes of Massachusetts.
And she published her debut novel there, Mandrake, in 1964, which was a little bit of a different work than perhaps what she's best known for, being a pseudo-Orwellian piece of science fiction. And she's written fiction for both adults and children, as well as scripts for both the stage and screen. So an enormously prolific author, but she published her magnum opus The Dark is Rising Sequence between 1965 and 1977.
And the eponymous second instalment was published in 1973 and received the Newberry Honour the following year. And this is one of many awards that Cooper has won over her long and illustrious career, including the Welsh Tír na nÓg, which is the Land of the Young Award for Children's Literature, which she has won several times.
She was a Hans Christian Andersen US nominee for the whole sequence, won a Margaret Amy Adams Award from the American Library Association and a World Fantasy Award for the sequence as a whole,
along with various Carnegie Honours. And, beyond this work, for which she is best known, she's written a picture book for children, including retellings of British Celtic folklore, a sci fi novel, an autobiographical novel set in World War Two, and standalone fantasy and historical novels, including her latest novel published in 2013, Ghost Talk, about the settlement of Massachusetts and the subsequent slaughter and displacement of Native Americans.
And she's also recently completed her children's Boggart Trilogy, in the first instalment of which a boggart, which is a kind of household spirit, finds its way from a castle keep in Scotland to the family home of the Volniks in Toronto, and it gets up to all sorts of hilarious mischief.
But what Cooper is best known for, and why she would appear perhaps most prominently in a fantasy series is her The Dark is Rising Sequence, which is focussed on a kind of binary struggle between the forces of the light and the forces of the dark, which is the main unifying thread throughout the books. And indeed, this notion that gives the secrets its name,
the idea that the Dark is rising, is the core of the series. The idea of a imperceptible and perhaps undefeatable darkness rising up and the forces of the Light having to head it off before it can overtake the world in some uncertain and threatening way.
So the sequence begins with Over Sea, Under Stone, published, as I mentioned previously, in 1965, and it might seem an innocuous start to a fantasy sequence, having more of the appearance of a mystery or adventure novel, perhaps even with heavy inspiration from the likes of Swallows and Amazons,
perhaps. The Drew children, three of our main characters, Simon, Jane and Barney are on holiday in Trewissick in Cornwall, and they visit their great uncle Merriman Lyon, who is slowly revealed to be Merlin, of Arthurian legend, who has survived into the present time and is a key figure in the Light, the forces of good within the sequence.
And in this sleepy Cornish village, the three children and their great-uncle go on a quest to discover the Grail, which is one of the things of power possessed by the Light which need to be discovered throughout the series to ensure their victory against the Dark.
And then we have the second titular book of the sequence, The Dark is Rising, more of a fantasy in earnest, and here we are introduced to arguably the central character of the entire series, Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son in his home village of Huntercombe, which is based on Dorney,
interestingly. And the story narrates Will's coming of age as an Old One, the sort of protectors of the world, supernatural entities that stand beyond mere mortals and have gifts of magic and knowledge that allow them to fight and suppress the dark and to gather up the Signs and Things of Power. And Will's quest is to locate and unite the six Signs into a circle on the winter solstice. And ward off the ensuing snow that the doc has sent to cover the village and freeze England.
Then we come to the third, and in my view, perhaps the most interesting of the sequence, which is called Greenwitch, which was published in 1974, and this features all three Drew children and Will, in a magical quest set in Cornwall, again back in Trewissick, looking for the Grail which has been stolen.
But it features a kind of invented ritual, such as the 'Obby 'Oss or Flora Day, which are authentic Cornish rituals, but here it's about the construction of a Wicker Man-type effigy which is sacrificed to the sea, called Greenwitch, which has become possessed by the sort of animus of the sea within the novel and develops a special relationship with Jane, one of the three children. And it explores the wild magic of the natural world alongside the battle between the Light and the Dark.
And then the fourth of the sequence, we have The Grey King, a more strictly Arthurian fantasy, which incorporates large amounts of Welsh folklore, where Will goes to Aberdovey in Wales to recuperate after an illness which has robbed him of some of his memory. And here he meets Bran Pendragon, an albino boy initially of a very mysterious past, but he later to be revealed to be a son of King Arthur.
And together they must awaken the Sleepers kind of six beings put to sleep by the Dark in the malevolent force of the Mountain, which is run by, or kind of overseen by, the titular Grey King, who is one of the lords of the Dark, a terrifying and threatening figure you never see. He's kind of an ominous presence, always lurking in the backdrop. And alongside this, they retrieve the third Thing of Power, a harp of gold, which can dispel the rushing Dark when it's played.
And finally, we come to the conclusion of the series, Silver on the Tree, published in 1977. And here we have the Drew children, along with Will and Bran and Merriman Lyon, forming the Six, the six figures who will push back the Dark at the culmination of their quest.
But first they have to retrieve the fourth Thing of Power, a crystal sword, an Excalibur-type crystal sword, that is to be found in the Lost Land, a drowned area of Wales that was flooded in the early Middle Ages, supposedly, according to legend.
And here they enter this forgotten kingdom and retrieve the magical sword that blazes with light. And at last, with a small spoiler alert, they can finally triumph over the Dark and banish it outside of time, as Cooper phrases it, with all of the Old Ones except for Will, who stays on as a watchman, then leaving the world for good, with both the Dark and the Light leaving men to forge their own destinies.
So with this very brief potted summary of the sequence, I think it's interesting to think about some of the themes, some of what Cooper's writing is known for. And it may be of interest to you, having read other fantasy and thinking more perhaps of the Tolkienian type, or of Lewis's fantasy: these are works of high fantasy, taking place in an altogether imagined world, a world distinct in almost every way from our own.
But Cooper writes low fantasy, a world that is recognisably much like our own, or in this case, much like the world of mid 20th century Britain, but with the supernatural encroaching on, in muted or suppressed ways, the outskirts of a recognisable and realistic world. So she's one of the great writers of low fantasy, where the fantastic does not come to predominate, but merely exists at the outskirts of a more realistic or mimetic worldview.
And alongside this, it's interesting when you're thinking about the cosmic stakes which we're presented here, of this battle between the Light and the Dark, the great force of order and compassion versus chaos and greed and hunger, which the dark embodies, for the main characters, there's quite low stakes. There's little chance of death or injury to any of the central characters, perhaps befitting children's literature.
But it's mainly pets or farm animals that are used as proxies and suffer injury in their place. And in fact, direct confrontation between the light and Dark outside of the end of the final novel are very rare. Much is done with these figures fighting at a distance and winning battles of wits or will rather than direct physical confrontation. And it's interesting to think of this in relation to the Cold War paranoia in which Cooper was writing these novels.
It's about muted forces, tussling and grappling for enormous control, power, and influence, behind the often genteel fabric of the everyday life. And this sense of overhanging threat and doom that goes on behind a seemingly normal British landscape; it seems to me to be heavily inflected by a sort of Cold War era view of what combat and conflict would look like. This idea that nothing is out in the open, it's a matter of subterfuge and deception in many cases.
And it's also very hard to know who are your allies and who are your enemies. There's an element of Red Scare where no one can be trusted, and your people you consider reliable are revealed to be enemies, members of the Dark who will betray you to their shadowy masters. So, then, I think it's very much of its time in the 60s and 70s. But that being said, it's also hugely grounded in mediaeval myth and history.
Obviously, Arthuriana most prominently, though, it must be said its take on Arthurian legend is individualised. It does not deal with Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table in a kind of universal sense, as we might expect from someone riffing off Geoffrey of Monmouth's work or Chrétien de Troyes. It's really only Arthur as a figure and to a lesser extent, at some points, Guinevere, and obviously Merlin,
who features as a character who appears. I even think figures like Lancelot and Galahad are not really made reference to. This is very much a utilisation of some elements of Arthuriana to tell a quite markedly different tale, but also the history of early mediaeval England is vital to the text, the sequence itself. There's a ship burial at one point, a ship burning. So the idea of the early mediaeval English and Norse practise of ship burials for their kings features. And it's clear
Cooper has a profound interest not only in the British Isles but in archaeology. There's an amphitheater excavation, palaeography, and stemmatics; she's fascinated by manuscripts and how information is passed from the mediaeval period to our own. In fact, it has quite a nice description of the Caroline minuscule hand, without naming it as such. But it's clear that's the manuscript hand that she's looked at and tried to describe, which is quite nice.
So more critically, this is in some senses, however, a fantasy of the British middle class, Cooper has an almost uncritical traditionalism, as she views British history as one of repeated invasions by malignant and destabilising forces. In her mind, these are primarily the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans. And she sees this as some sort of – each group brings a destabilising or ominous presence that lets the Dark in.
And she sees, therefore, the original Britons as a time of order and Light and good in some way that later invaders were less capable of emulating, at least immediately. And with that comes perhaps obviously a romanticisation of this period of history. And there's also a lack of specificity of what comes after the defeat of the Dark. Cooper stresses that men, of course, are capable of evil within themselves.
So the dark is an unusual force whose allegorical potential as the evil in men's hearts is perhaps not explored as fully as it could be. And of course, there is the key issue of Anglo-centrism.
This is a sequence of books that only occurs really in the United Kingdom and avoids grappling with Britain's colonial legacy because it's – despite dealing with a long stretch of the country's past – it seems to be pointedly cut off for the mediaeval period, because modern British history does not seem to fit perhaps quite as well with Cooper's parochial vision.
She does stress, to her credit, in later books that modern immigration is not the sort of evil incursion that she sees earlier invasions of the of the British Isles to be. But her exploration of the past is deeply Anglo-centric and focuses on Britain as a special land full of mystery at the centre of a less fully realised world. But at its most beautiful, however, this sequence deals in its bewitching depictions of the rural beauty of Cornwall and Wales,
and I think this is really where it shines. It depicts both as places of slow beauty and deep magic. And Cooper has her unique gift for transposing the past and present of these places, which she feels have not changed as much as, perhaps, urban areas which she never depicts in the sequence at all. It's a profoundly rural depiction of the British Isles. But she presents the past and present melding together here in such a deft and slowly beautiful – drily beautiful, in many ways – manner.
And she places within these landscapes a special and mysterious wonder. I think that's where her work is the best. So a fascinating sequence, heavily grounded in what you can tell was an Oxford education in mediaeval literature and perhaps, you know, some early modern as well. So well worth reading the works of Susan Cooper. Thank you.