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So this instalment of the Oxford Fantasy Literature Summer School is on Susan Cooper,

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perhaps one of the best known children's fantasy authors associated with Oxford. For a short biography of Susan:

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She was born in Buckinghamshire in 1936 and grew up in this rural part of the United

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Kingdom, until her parents moved her yet again to the countryside of Gwynneth in northwest Wales.

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And then in her teenage years, she read English at Somerville College in the mid 1950s, around the same time as Alan Garner,

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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.

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And she was noted as the first female student to edit the still-running Oxford student newspaper, The Cherwell.
 
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And following this, as you might expect, she worked in London as a journalist for the Sunday Times under Ian Fleming.

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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,

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which was eventually published in 1965.

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And Cooper moved to the US in 1963, where she continues to live in the salt marshes of Massachusetts.

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And she published her debut novel there, Mandrake, in 1964,

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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.

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And she's written fiction for both adults and children, as well as scripts for both the stage and screen.

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So an enormously prolific author,

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but she published her magnum opus The Dark is Rising Sequence between 1965 and 1977.

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And the eponymous second instalment was published in 1973 and received the Newberry Honour the following year.

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And this is one of many awards that Cooper has won over her long and illustrious career, including the Welsh Tír na nÓg,

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which is the Land of the Young Award for Children's Literature, which she has won several times.

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She was a Hans Christian Andersen US nominee for the whole sequence,

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won a Margaret Amy Adams Award from the American Library Association and a World Fantasy Award for the sequence as a whole,

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along with various Carnegie Honours. And, beyond this work, for which she is best known, she's written a picture book for children,

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including retellings of British Celtic folklore, a sci fi novel,

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an autobiographical novel set in World War Two, and standalone fantasy and historical novels,

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including her latest novel published in 2013,

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Ghost Talk, about the settlement of Massachusetts and the subsequent slaughter and displacement of Native Americans.

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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,

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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.

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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,

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which is focussed on a kind of binary struggle between the forces of the light and the forces of the dark,

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which is the main unifying thread throughout the books. And indeed, this notion that gives the secrets its name,

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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

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having to head it off before it can overtake the world in some uncertain and threatening way.

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So the sequence begins with Over Sea, Under Stone, published, as I mentioned previously, in 1965,

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and it might seem an innocuous start to a fantasy sequence, having more of the appearance of a mystery or adventure novel,

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perhaps even with heavy inspiration from the likes of Swallows and Amazons,

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perhaps. The Drew children, three of our main characters, Simon,

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Jane and Barney are on holiday in Trewissick in Cornwall, and they visit their great uncle Merriman Lyon,

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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,

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the forces of good within the sequence.

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And in this sleepy Cornish village, the three children and their great-uncle go on a quest to discover the Grail,

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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.

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And then we have the second titular book of the sequence, The Dark is Rising, more of a fantasy in earnest,

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and here we are introduced to arguably the central character of the entire series, Will Stanton,

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the seventh son of a seventh son in his home village of Huntercombe, which is based on Dorney,

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interestingly. And the story narrates Will's coming of age as an Old One, the sort of protectors of the world,

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supernatural entities that stand beyond mere mortals and have gifts of magic and knowledge that allow

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them to fight and suppress the dark and to gather up the Signs and Things of Power. And Will's

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quest is to locate and unite the six Signs into a circle on the winter solstice.

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And ward off the ensuing snow that the doc has sent to cover the village and freeze England.

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Then we come to the third, and in my view, perhaps the most interesting of the sequence, which is called Greenwitch,

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which was published in 1974, and this features all three Drew children and Will,

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in a magical quest set in Cornwall, again back in Trewissick, looking for the Grail which has been stolen.

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But it features a kind of invented ritual, such as the 'Obby 'Oss or Flora Day, which are authentic Cornish

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rituals, but here it's about the construction of a Wicker Man-type effigy which is sacrificed to the sea,

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called Greenwitch, which has become possessed by the sort of animus of the sea within the novel and develops a special relationship with Jane,

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one of the three children. And it explores the wild magic of the natural world alongside the battle between the Light and the Dark.

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And then the fourth of the sequence, we have The Grey King, a more strictly Arthurian fantasy, which incorporates large amounts of

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Welsh folklore, where Will goes to Aberdovey in Wales to recuperate after an illness which has robbed him of some of his memory.

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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.

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And together they must awaken the Sleepers kind of six beings put to sleep by the Dark in the malevolent force of the Mountain,

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which is run by, or kind of overseen by, the titular Grey King,

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who is one of the lords of the Dark, a terrifying and threatening figure you never see.

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He's kind of an ominous presence, always lurking in the backdrop.

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And alongside this, they retrieve the third Thing of Power, a harp of gold, which can dispel the rushing Dark when it's played.

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And finally, we come to the conclusion of the series, Silver on the Tree, published in 1977.

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And here we have the Drew children, along with Will and Bran and Merriman Lyon,

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forming the Six, the six figures who will push back the Dark at the culmination of their quest.

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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,

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a drowned area of Wales that was flooded in the early Middle Ages, supposedly, according to legend.

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And here they enter this forgotten kingdom and retrieve the magical sword that blazes with light. And at last, with a small spoiler alert,

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they can finally triumph over the Dark and banish it outside of time,

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as Cooper phrases it, with all of the Old Ones except for Will, who stays on as a watchman,

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then leaving the world for good, with both the Dark and the Light leaving men to forge their own destinies.

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So with this very brief potted summary of the sequence,

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I think it's interesting to think about some of the themes, some of what Cooper's writing is known for.

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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:

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these are works of high fantasy, taking place in an altogether imagined world, a world distinct in almost every way from our own.

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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,

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but with the supernatural encroaching on, in muted or suppressed ways, the outskirts of a recognisable and realistic world.

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So she's one of the great writers of low fantasy,

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where the fantastic does not come to predominate, but merely exists at the outskirts of a more realistic or mimetic worldview.

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And alongside this,

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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,

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the great force of order and compassion versus chaos and greed and hunger,

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which the dark embodies, for the main characters, there's quite low stakes.

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There's little chance of death or injury to any of the central characters, perhaps befitting children's literature.

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But it's mainly pets or farm animals that are used as proxies and suffer injury in their place.

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And in fact, direct confrontation between the light and Dark outside of the end of the final novel are very rare.

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Much is done with these figures fighting at a distance and winning battles of wits or will rather than direct physical confrontation.

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And it's interesting to think of this in relation to the Cold War paranoia in which Cooper was writing these novels.

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It's about muted forces, tussling and grappling for

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enormous control,

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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

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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.

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This idea that nothing is out in the open, it's a matter of subterfuge and deception in many cases.

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And it's also very hard to know who are your allies and who are your enemies.

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There's an element of Red Scare where no one can be trusted, and your people you consider reliable are revealed to be enemies,

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members of the Dark who will betray you to their shadowy masters. So, then,

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I think it's very much of its time in the 60s and 70s.

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But that being said, it's also hugely grounded in mediaeval myth and history.

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Obviously, Arthuriana most prominently, though, it must be said its take on Arthurian legend is individualised.

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It does not deal with Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table in a kind of universal sense,

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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,

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at some points, Guinevere, and obviously Merlin,

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who features as a character who appears. I even think figures like Lancelot and Galahad are not really made reference to.

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This is very much a utilisation of some elements of Arthuriana to tell a quite markedly different tale,

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but also the history of early mediaeval England is vital to the text, the sequence itself.

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There's a ship burial at one point, a ship burning.

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So the idea of the early mediaeval English and Norse practise of ship burials for their kings features. And it's clear

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Cooper has a profound interest not only in the British Isles but in archaeology. There's an amphitheater excavation, palaeography, and stemmatics;

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she's fascinated by manuscripts and how information is passed from the mediaeval period to our own.

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In fact, it has quite a nice description of the Caroline minuscule hand, without naming it as such.

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But it's clear that's the manuscript hand that she's looked at and tried to describe, which is quite nice.

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So more critically, this is in some senses, however, a fantasy of the British middle class,

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Cooper has an almost uncritical traditionalism, as she views British history as one of repeated invasions by malignant and destabilising forces.

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In her mind, these are primarily the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans.

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And she sees this as some sort of – each group brings a destabilising or ominous presence that lets the Dark in.

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And she sees, therefore,

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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.

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And with that comes perhaps obviously a romanticisation of this period of history.

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And there's also a lack of specificity of what comes after the defeat of the Dark. Cooper

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stresses that men, of course, are capable of evil within themselves.

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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.

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And of course, there is the key issue of Anglo-centrism.

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This is a sequence of books that only occurs really in the United Kingdom and avoids grappling

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with Britain's colonial legacy because it's – despite dealing with a long stretch of the

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country's past – it seems to be pointedly cut off for the mediaeval period, because modern

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British history does not seem to fit perhaps quite as well with Cooper's parochial vision.

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She does stress, to her credit, in later books that modern immigration is not the sort of evil

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incursion that she sees earlier invasions of the of the British Isles to be.

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But her exploration of the past is deeply Anglo-centric and focuses on Britain

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as a special land full of mystery at the centre of a less fully realised world.

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But at its most beautiful, however, this sequence deals in its bewitching depictions of the rural beauty of Cornwall and Wales,

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and I think this is really where it shines. It depicts both as places of slow beauty and deep magic.

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And Cooper has her unique gift for transposing the past and present of these places, which she feels

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have not changed as much as, perhaps, urban areas which she never depicts in the sequence at all.

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It's a profoundly rural depiction of the British Isles.

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But she presents the past and present melding together here in such a deft and slowly beautiful – drily beautiful, in many ways – manner.

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And she places within these landscapes a special and mysterious wonder.

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I think that's where her work is the best.

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So a fascinating sequence, heavily grounded in what you can tell was an Oxford education in mediaeval literature and perhaps,

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you know, some early modern as well. So well worth reading the works of

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Susan Cooper. Thank you.