The Work
Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising is the second volume of her five-book sequence The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), and the book that gives the sequence its name and establishes its central mythos. It was published by Chatto & Windus in London in 1973 and won the Newbery Honor in 1974. The five books of the sequence are: Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975, Newbery Medal), and Silver on the Tree (1977). Together they form one of the most ambitious and theologically rich works of children's fantasy literature in the twentieth century.
The Dark Is Rising specifically introduces the character of Will Stanton - an eleven-year-old English boy who discovers on his birthday (Midwinter's Day, December 21) that he is the last of the Old Ones: immortal beings who have existed since time began to defend the Light against the Dark. The novel is set during a ferocious winter, with the Dark attempting to acquire the six Signs of the Light before Will can complete his quest to find them. The signs are great circles of metal (iron, bronze, wood, stone, fire, and water), and Will must travel through time - into medieval England, ancient Britain, the far future - to gather them.
Biblical Engagement
John 1:5 ('And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not') is the foundational text of the entire sequence. The Johannine identification of the divine with light and the opposition of darkness that cannot overcome it provides Cooper with her central metaphor: the eternal conflict between the Light and the Dark is the conflict described in John 1, set in the mythological world of Arthurian Britain and twentieth-century England. The Light is not explicitly Christian - Cooper draws on Celtic, Norse, and Arthurian mythology as well as on the biblical tradition - but its identification with John 1's light gives it a theological depth that distinguishes it from purely secular fantasy.
Jeremiah 1:5 ('Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations') is the Old Testament parallel to Will's calling before his birth. Will does not choose to be an Old One; he discovers that he has always been one, that his calling preceded his consciousness of it. This is the theology of election: not the Calvinist election to salvation but the prophetic election to a particular task within the divine economy. Like Jeremiah, Will is called before he knows it, formed for his purpose before his awareness of it, and the discovery of his identity is simultaneously the discovery of his vocation.
Revelation 12:7 ('And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels') provides the cosmic warfare framework within which the sequence's earthly conflicts are understood. Cooper's Dark and Light are not dualistic principles in the Manichaean sense - the Light is presented as genuinely opposed to the Dark and as ultimately superior to it - but they are both ancient and cosmic forces that operate in the human world through human choices and human instruments.
Matthew 5:14 ('Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid') is the dominical identification of Jesus's followers with light that provides the implicit vocation behind Will's calling. Will is not a Christian in any explicit sense, but his role as a guardian and instrument of the Light participates in the Matthean vocation: to be the light of the world in the face of darkness.
Author and Context
Susan Cooper was born on May 23, 1935, in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England. She was educated at Oxford (Somerville College), where she was one of the first women to read English at Oxford in the post-war years and where she was taught by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The debt to Lewis (the cosmic warfare between Aslan and the White Witch, the ordinary children called into supernatural significance) and to Tolkien (the depth of historical and mythological background, the sense that the contemporary world is the surface of an ancient conflict) is clear throughout her work, though Cooper insists that she was influenced by them as a reader rather than as a student.
Cooper emigrated to the United States in 1963 after her marriage to an American scientist, and has lived in the United States since. The Dark Is Rising sequence was written across the first fifteen years of her American residence and draws on her homesickness for England - its landscape, its medieval history, its mythological heritage - with the intensity of someone looking at a beloved place from a distance.
The sequence draws on the Matter of Britain - the Arthurian legend cycle - as its primary mythological substrate, combining it with the Welsh Mabinogion and Norse mythology to create a syncretic mythological framework that has roots in the pre-Christian religious imagination of the British Isles. Arthur, Merlin, and the Round Table appear in the sequence as cosmic figures in the conflict between Light and Dark; the six Signs of the Light and the Grail-quest elements suggest a deep engagement with the medieval Grail tradition (which is itself a synthesis of Christian theology with pre-Christian Celtic mythology).
The Mythos and Its Sources
The mythological framework of The Dark Is Rising is one of the most complex and carefully constructed in twentieth-century children's fantasy. Cooper draws on: the Arthurian tradition (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur); the Welsh Mabinogion (particularly the Four Branches and the Arthurian tales); Norse mythology (the Wild Hunt, which appears as a force of the Dark in the sequence); Celtic mythology (the Wild Hunt in its Celtic forms, the goddess-figures); the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition (the elegiac tone of exile and loss); and the biblical tradition of cosmic warfare, prophetic calling, and eschatological hope.
The result is a mythological synthesis that is distinctively British in its cultural sources but universal in its theological imagination: the conflict between Light and Dark, the calling of ordinary human beings into a cosmic drama, the cost of carrying truth in a world that cannot fully comprehend it - these are themes that resonate across cultures and traditions.
Structure of the Sequence
Over Sea, Under Stone establishes the Drew children (Simon, Jane, and Barney) as the first protagonists and introduces the Arthurian background through a quest for the Holy Grail in Cornwall. The Dark Is Rising shifts to Will Stanton and introduces the Old Ones mythology. Greenwitch combines the two storylines. The Grey King is set in Wales and introduces Bran Davies - revealed to be the son of King Arthur. Silver on the Tree brings all the characters together for the final confrontation between Light and Dark.
The sequence's ending is theologically significant: the forces of the Dark are defeated, but the victory requires the Old Ones and the great lords of the Light to withdraw from the world, leaving ordinary human beings to their own devices. This is not a triumphalist ending: the withdrawal of supernatural light from the world is a melancholy recognition that human history must be lived in a post-enchanted world, without the visible intervention of cosmic powers. This is, in theological terms, the condition of faith in the New Testament: the age of signs and wonders is followed by the age of faith and witness.
Critical Reception
The sequence received immediate critical acclaim. The Dark Is Rising won the Newbery Honor in 1974; The Grey King won the Newbery Medal in 1976. Cooper is consistently ranked among the two or three most important children's fantasy authors of the twentieth century, alongside Lewis and Tolkien. The sequence's mythological richness, its theological depth, and its emotional power have made it a touchstone for readers who grew up with it and a discovery for new readers across generations.
Academic study of the sequence has focused on its mythological sources (Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero; Graham Mayfield, various essays) and on its theology of light and darkness (Paul Doyle, Susan Cooper). The film adaptation (The Seeker, 2007) was widely considered a failure that stripped the novel of most of its mythological and theological depth.
Theological Significance
The sequence's theological significance lies in its embodiment of the Johannine theology of light against darkness in a fully realized mythological world. Cooper does not simply illustrate the biblical theme but develops it: her Light is not merely absence of evil but a positive creative force; her Dark is not merely absence of good but an active destructive will; and the human beings caught in the conflict between them must make genuine choices about which side they will serve.
The Old Ones' withdrawal at the end of the sequence raises a profound theological question about the nature of supernatural aid in human history: is the world better served by the ongoing visible presence of cosmic forces, or by their withdrawal and the development of human responsibility? The sequence's answer - that the withdrawal is necessary and even good - resonates with the kenotic theology of Philippians 2: the God who empties himself and withdraws to allow human beings the space for genuine freedom and genuine faith.
Legacy
Cooper's influence on subsequent children's fantasy literature has been considerable. The sequence's synthesis of Arthurian mythology with contemporary realistic setting and Christian cosmic warfare theology was an important precursor to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (which inverts many of its theological assumptions), J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter (which shares its boarding-school-boy-discovers-he-is-chosen structure), and Garth Nix's Sabriel (which shares its use of ancient magical orders operating in a contemporary world).
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with John 1:1-18 (light and darkness, the Word and its opposition), Jeremiah 1:4-10 (calling before birth), Revelation 12:7-12 (war in heaven), Matthew 5:14-16 (being the light of the world), Ephesians 6:10-18 (armor of light against spiritual darkness), and Daniel 10:13-21 (the cosmic warfare behind earthly events).
Further Reading
- Margaret K. McElderry, The Dark Is Rising companion volumes - editorial notes and interviews with Cooper. - Neil Philip, A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner (1981) - useful for comparative context with the British mythopoeic tradition Cooper belongs to. - C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) - the primary precursors to Cooper's mythopoeic vision.