The Seeker — Susan Cooper and the Geography of Fantasy

Meet Newbery Medal and Honor winner, author Susan Cooper. Discover how landscapes from Susan Cooper’s life are transformed into the geography of her fantasy sequence The Dark is Rising.

“The first time I remember being afraid was during an air raid.” - Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England, in May 1935. She was four years old when World War II broke out. “We lived very close to the main railway line and the Germans were always trying to bomb it,” she says. “My father worked in an office in London…and some nights he wouldn’t come home because he was fire-watching on the roof of Paddington Station. The Germans dropped incendiary bombs [bombs designed to make things catch fire] and so he and others would be up on the roof dousing the bombs with sand before they could burn the place down. Going to school, we had a school bag on one shoulder and a gas mask on the other. I think the whole Light and Dark thing in The Dark is Rising books goes back to my being a child during the war. We thought in terms of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’ My generation, especially in Britain and Europe, was given a strong image of good and bad at an impressionable age. We were the children of World War II.”

The Sequence

Over Sea, Under Stone

Cooper’s first book – in what would later become known as The Dark is Rising Sequence – is titled Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), written originally as an entry into a contest for “a family adventure story.” Cooper invented three children named Simon, Jane and Barney Drew, who travel from London to Cornwall for a summer holiday. And while Over Sea, Under Stone may start out as a family adventure, it soon becomes something else. When the Drew children find a map in the attic where they are staying and the strange character Merriman makes his first appearance, the Drews soon realize that they are in for the adventure, and quest, of a lifetime.

The Dark is Rising

In the Newbery Honor book The Dark is Rising (1973) the character Merriman from Over Sea, Under Stone, reappears. Here he is a teacher, guide and protector to Will Stanton. Will finds his own life and the natural world itself unsettled and ominous. Merriman will teach Will that he is the last of the Old Ones and the long-awaited Sign-Seeker. Merriman will send Will on a quest to save the world when “The Dark itself comes rising.”

Greenwitch

Greenwitch (1974) is the shortest of the five books in The Dark is Rising Sequence. In this crucial adventure, we once again meet Simon, Jane and Barney Drew, as well as Will Stanton and Merriman as they are all brought back together. They come to Trewissick in search of the Trewissick Grail (a goblet or chalice) that has disappeared from the British Museum. Here we learn what the Greenwitch is and why it is important to all involved, as well as the very future of the world.

The Grey King

In the Newbery medal award-winning The Grey King (1975), Will Stanton goes to Wales from England to recover from being sick. But when Will arrives, he soon realizes the real reason he is there: to recover a lost golden harp. Joined in the search by Bran, the albino “raven-boy,” and a dog named Cafall, who has “silver eyes that see the wind,” Will learns that the recovery of the harp is crucial in the battle that leads to his final adventures.

Silver on the Tree

Silver on the Tree (1977) brings together everyone and everything from the previous four books. Susan Cooper once again combines ordinary life with myth and legend as the battle between the Dark and the Light reaches its inevitable climax, testing every one of the characters the reader has come to know and love in The Sequence.

Joining Landscape and Legend

When Cooper began writing the second book in her sequence, The Dark is Rising, she had left England and was living “rather nervously” in the USA.Homesick, she surrounded her characters by rich settings from her native England and Wales, filled with layers of history, magic and possibility. Of the setting for the books, “Every stick is real,” Cooper says. “It doesn’t look that way now, a lot of it, but some of it does. The little church is still exactly the same. Huntercombe is based upon the village of Dorney and the Great Hall is Dorney Court.”

Of the setting of the books, Susan Cooper says, “My mother’s family came from Wales, my father’s from the West of England— places which have the same early history, the same echoes. So there are these blood ties. And if there were such a thing as Old Magic, these are the places where it would be.” Over Sea, Under Stone is set in Trewissick, which is based on a village in southern Cornwall called Mevagissey, where Cooper and her brother spent holidays when they were children.

The Welsh setting in The Grey King and Silver on the Tree is in and around Aberdyfi. This village, Cooper says, “is where my grandmother was born and where my parents lived their last twenty years. I know it so well that my imagination is tied there forever. For me, the Dyfi valley is probably the most beautiful and haunted place in the whole world.” Cooper says she has always been obsessed by the place partly because the earliest people of Britain went west to Wales, driven back by invaders from the continent of Europe. “I think the Welsh part of me is very powerful, and to this day, when I go to Wales, I feel I’m going home,” Cooper says.

This page is excerpted from Walden Media’s Activity Poster for The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. Click here for a complete copy of the poster in PDF format.

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