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.
Themes
Coming-Of-Age As a Leap Into the Adult World
Coming-of-age stories can occur at any stage of a character’s life: The unifying quality is the protagonist making a leap of understanding into the adult world. However, coming-of-age stories often place the protagonist on the cusp of their teens. This is the case with The Dark Is Rising. At the age of 11, Will learns his true nature as an Old One—a symbolic adulthood, carrying with it responsibilities beyond the experience of a child his age. Over the course of the story, Will tests boundaries, meets challenges, and learns the ramifications and expectations of his new role, gradually finding that he is able to bear those responsibilities. Will initially resists his new role partly because he does not want to take on the great and terrible burdens of adulthood. Yet like his nature as an Old One, adulthood is inescapable.
Will also faces a problem that more typically appears in young adult fiction than in stories for middle grade readers: the question of who he is, what his role is, where he fits, and what his destiny is (or whether he must make his own). However, where young adult fiction tends to linger on such issues, Will very rapidly accepts his role, spending very little of the story questioning his identity and sense of self.
The cosmology of the world in which Will lives complicates the coming-of-age narrative in some ways. As an Old One, Will has few choices; his actions are preordained and dictated by forces outside himself, so he does not have the chance to flex his agency in the same way that many young protagonists do (though he does make mistakes). However, that too is the nature of adulthood: The child is swept up in an irresistible tide that will force them out of the shelter of their family and into a world where they must take on responsibilities they do not feel prepared for.
Adults like Merriman, Wayland-Smith, and the Lady repeatedly tell Will that his inner knowledge will guide him successfully through his challenges. The message to the reader is to trust their power and their inner knowing to guide them through the transition from child to adult. These forces push Will implacably toward his ultimate role, giving him little or no time to grow into it. Will ultimately establishes a balance between his life as a child and as an adult; he returns home while Merriman, his mentor and guide, departs temporarily, promising to return in time for Will’s next challenge.
Dark May Be Evil but Good Is Not Nice
In The Dark Is Rising, the conflict between Light and Dark goes on over the heads of humankind, a war of cosmic powers with the Earth as the prize. It is less a war of good and evil than one of creation and destruction. Good and evil describe the motives and actions of mortals, who have the ability to choose one or the other as the agents of the Light do not. The Old Ones exist only to fight the Dark. In service of that end, they can be ruthless, willing to sacrifice one life for many as Will does when he refuses to bargain with the Rider for Mary’s life. He wrestles briefly with his love for her, but the outcome is inevitable.
Thus, while the Dark’s use of power seems unequivocally evil—dedicated to destruction—the Light’s use of power doesn’t always seem perfectly “good.” The Old Ones frequently allow ends to justify means. For example, Merriman puts Hawkin’s life at risk twice over, using him as a key to open the clock and also setting him up to be murdered by the other Old Ones if the Dark should compromise Merriman; when Hawkin grasps what Merriman has done, he turns to the Dark. Merriman views his actions as a “mistake” in the sense that he did not anticipate that Hawkin would “love[] as a man, requiring proof of love in return” (112), but neither he nor the novel suggests that they were wrong in a moral sense. From Merriman’s perspective, the issue is the divergent nature of mortal and immortal lives; it is regrettable but unavoidable that this leads to differences in priority.
The Old Ones also presume to know what is best for mortals, erasing their memories “for their own good” because their minds are too weak and limited to bear the truth. When the Dark does something similar to Mary, it is seen as evil. The agents of the Light fight to preserve, among other things, mortals’ free will, but by erasing their memories, the Old Ones control the information on which mortals base their choices.
With the final defeat of the Dark in Book 5, the Old Ones will depart the world, leaving Will to stand watch alone against the return of the Dark. This returns questions of good and evil squarely to the realm of human choice. The arc of the series, like the work of the Old Ones, clears the way for a more ordinary (i.e., human) morality to reign supreme.
The Reality and Timelessness of Myth
The Dark Is Rising draws from traditions of Germanic and Scandinavian mythology imported to England by wave after wave of invaders. As each new conquering group settled down and assimilated with the existing culture, their mythological figures merged into the Celtic mythology and folklore of England. Cooper’s use of this blended mythology aids in her worldbuilding, but it also reflects the archetypal nature of the war between the Light and the Dark, which pits primal forces of creation and destruction against one another. This battle is at the heart of reality, but it isn’t bounded by human history, as Will tells the rector: “Everything that matters is outside Time” (149). The legendary figures that populate the book belong to this deeper level of reality.
For example, Cooper grew up in Dorsetshire near the Chilton hills, where huge figures have been cut out of the grass and turf of the hillsides, exposing the underlying white chalk. The Sign that Will saw from the back of the white mare is purely an invention of the author, but among the actual shapes Cooper would have seen as a child were several white horses and the Dorset Giant, also called Cerne Abbas. The name Cerne is thought to be a variation on Herne the Huntsman in the same way that Corn (as in “unicorn”) is a variation on Horn. Cerne/Herne may be a derivation of the Celtic Cernunnos, a horned god. Herne the Huntsman may also be associated with the Norse god Odin or with Richard Horne, a poacher who supposedly hung himself from an oak near the Windsor Great Park and now haunts the forest. The ambiguity of Herne’s origins is in some sense the point. In The Dark Is Rising, he is likely all of these figures (and more) because he is not really a person at all; rather, he is the embodiment of nature’s wildness and abundance, manifesting throughout the ages.
Similarly, the character of the Lady recalls several figures from myth and legend. Cooper’s depiction of her might have been influenced by Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess, which proposed that the pre-Christian Druids worshiped a single goddess with many names. The white mare is believed to have been a manifestation of this goddess. In the final book in the series, the Lady is also associated with King Arthur, linking her to Arthurian legend and to the Lady of the Lake or the Lady of Avalon. “Lady of the Lake” is a title used by a few women in the Arthurian legend: Nimue, Ninianne and Viviane. The women may be a single figure, but they act in the story as three separate individuals, possibly representing the three faces of the goddess—the maiden, mother, and crone. Lastly, as the wren, the Lady is linked to a witch or enchantress, possibly a survival of the older White Goddess. The Lady herself draws attention to her archetypal nature when she remarks that she is “very old” and has been called by many names.
By weaving together many cultural influences, Cooper underscores the role that myth plays in the novel’s world. The Dark Is Rising suggests that English mythology is not a hodgepodge of different traditions; rather, its layers reflect its timelessness, as the same ideas surface in various times and places.
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