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.
Literary Devices
The Children's Fantasy Genre
Although children’s fantasy existed in the United States in the late 19th century—The Wizard of Oz being a case in point—American authors were primarily occupied with realistic fiction for children. The genre truly developed in Cooper’s native England. Cooper was influenced by Tolkien and Lewis, but even before those giants of the genre, there was a flourishing tradition of English children’s fantasy. Major writers included George McDonald, Kenneth Graham, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Edith Nesbitt, whose Phoenix and the Carpet Miss Greythorne reads to the children at Huntercombe Manor.
England’s rich and blended mythological background may partially explain why fantasy flourished there. Though immigrants to America came from a variety of cultural backgrounds, the early Puritan influence probably didn’t encourage the transplantation of other gods. However, Cooper was living in the United States at the time she wrote the Dark Is Rising series, and its publication sparked a surge of American writers—Ursula Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Andre Norton, and Madeleine L’Engle, among others—penning fantasy for young readers.
Foreshadowing
Cooper uses foreshadowing to set up events that will take place later in the novel or in the following books. For example, Merriman remarks that he would like to look more closely at the runes on Will’s mother’s ring: Those markings will be significant in a later book in the series. The images from the tapestries in the great hall show Will things that will appear either later in The Dark Is Rising, like the Huntsman, or later in the series. The uneasiness of the animals in Chapter 1 foreshadows the change overtaking Will, and farmer Dawson’s remark about tonight being bad and tomorrow unimaginable warns the reader of coming danger.
The rhyme that Merriman recites for Will foreshadows each step that Will must take in his quest; each time he concludes one step, the rhyme grows longer, telling him more about his quest and about future adventures slated for other books. The implication is that his actions were laid out for him millennia before his birth.
The novel’s final moments of foreshadowing occur when Merriman departs, telling Will that he will return when he is needed, and when Will finds the carnival head, suggesting that the Hunter will need it again sometime in the future.
Allegory
The war between the Light and the Dark is as an allegory for the author’s experience as a small child during World War II. Like the mortals in The Dark is Rising, Susan could only cower with her family as mighty forces did battle overhead. To a child, the attackers and the defenders might not seem very different. Bombs fell from above while guns roared from below. The guns might be protecting small and mortal children, but they had no interest in any one individual child.
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