Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence and the Arthur of the Welsh

Fimi, Dimitra

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-55282-2_6

Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence and the Arthur of the Welsh

Dimitra Fimi⁴

Chapter
First Online: 04 February 2017

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Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature ((CRACL))

Abstract

Chapter 6 explores Susan Cooper’s reimagining of the (Welsh layer of the) Arthurian legend in The Dark is Rising Sequence (Over Sea, Under Stone, 1965, The Dark is Rising, 1973, Greenwitch, 1974, The Grey King, 1975, and Silver on the Tree, 1977). The chapter focuses on Cooper’s representation of the “Arthur of the Welsh” as a Romano-Celtic hero, and also explores ideas of British vs. Welsh vs. English identity in Cooper’s fantasy novels, and the way those are tied with the entwinement of landscape, folklore, and history.

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Notes

1.
A selection of recent books includes Michael Morpurgo’s Arthur, High King of Britain (1994), T.A. Barron’s The Lost Years of Merlin series (1996–2000), and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy (2000–2003). A wide range of such texts are discussed in Barbara Tepa Lupack, ed., Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 48–72.
2.
The three main cycles of medieval romances are the “matter of Britain” (focusing on King Arthur and his knights), the “matter of France” (concerned with legends associated with Charlemagne), and the “matter of Rome” (tales inspired by Greek and Roman mythology).
3.
See Michael D.C. Drout, “Reading the Signs of Light: Anglo Saxonism, Education and Obedience in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising,” The Lion and the Unicorn 21, no. 2 (1997): 230–50; and Catherine Butler, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Lanham, MD.: Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2006) (especially chapter 4).
4.
Cooper did not intend to write a series at that point, nor for a few years after this book was published, and she has claimed that she never realized that she was writing “about the Arthurian legend as such.” See Susan Cooper, “How I Began,” The New Welsh Review 2, no. 4 (1990): 20; and Raymond H. Thompson, “Interview with Susan Cooper,” in Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 161. However, when the Arthurian legend sneaked in, Cooper realized that she had great material in her hands that could be extended. Logres actually comes from Lloegyr, i.e. “England” in Welsh, and is a name for King Arthur’s land often used in medieval romances.
5.
Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark Is Rising: The Complete Sequence (London: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010), 9.
6.
See L.M. Matheson, “The Chronicle Tradition,” in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, edited by H. Fulton (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 58–69.
7.
The Historia Brittonum is attributed to a “Ninnius” or “Nennius” in the prologue of one of the recensions of the text. However, David N. Dumville, “‘Nennius’ and the Historia Brittonum,” Studia Celtica 10/11 (1975/1976): 78–95, has shown that this prologue is a later forgery and the scholarly consensus is that this work is a compilation and should be treated as anonymous. For a different view see J.C. Field, “Nennius and his History,” Studia Celtica 30 (1996): 159–65.
8.
For an overview see Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London: Continuum, 2003), 39–58; Christopher Snyder, “Arthurian Origins,” in A History of Arthurian Scholarship, edited by Norris J. Lacy (Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 1–18.
9.
Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, eds., Culhwch and Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
10.
The manuscripts are dated c. 1250 and c. 1300 respectively, but at least some of the poems they record may preserve a pre-Galfridian vision of Arthur.
11.
See Rachel Bromwich, ed. and trans., Trioedd ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), liii–xcix for a lengthy discussion of the dating of the Triads and their relationship with other (pre- and post-Galfridian) texts of the Welsh tradition.
12.
Oliver James Padel, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 23.
13.
The fleeting reference to Arthur as a paragon of valour in Y Gododdin, a Welsh heroic poem dated to c. 600, may or may not be a later addition. See T.M. Charles-Edwards, “The Arthur of History,” in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, ed. Rachel Bromwich et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 15 and 29, note 2.
14.
Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 39.
15.
J.A. Giles, ed. and trans., Old English Chronicles: Including Ethelwerd’s Chronicle, Asser’s Life of Alfred, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British History, Gildas, Nennius, Together with the Spurious Chronicle of Richard of Cirencester (London: George Bell, 1908), 409.The Annales Cambriae list only two battles but include the victorious Battle of Badon.
16.
Brynley F. Roberts, “Culhwch ac Olwen, The Triads, Saints’ Lives,” in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, ed. Rachel Bromwich et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 90–1. The “wonder” element is that the tomb is said to change size.
17.
Thompson, “Interview with Susan Cooper,” 164.
18.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 75.
19.
In “Culhwch and Olwen” and some of the Welsh Triads Arthur holds court at Celli Wig in Cornwall.
20.
Leonard S. Marcus, The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2006), 44 (emphasis added).
21.
See Bromwich, Triads, lvii.
22.
See Bromwich, Triads, 90.
23.
Sioned Davies, trans. The Mabinogion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22.
24.
Brynley F. Roberts, “Legendary History: Wales,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. III, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 1139.
25.
The Historia Brittonum presents the eponymous ancestor of the Britons, Britto/Brutus, as the grandson of Aeneas, who fled after the sack of Troy. See Roberts, “Legendary History: Wales,” 1138.
26.
Roberts, “Legendary History: Wales,” 1139.
27.
See R.S. Loomis, “The Legend of Arthur’s Survival,” in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, edited by R.S. Loomis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 64–71; C. Bullock-Davies, “Exspectare Arthurum, Arthur and the Messianic Hope,” Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 29 (1980–1982): 432–40.
28.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 76.
29.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 78.
30.
Bedwin or Bedwini appears as Arthur’s Bishop in the tale of “Culhwch and Olwen” and in “The Dream of Rhonabwy,” see Davies, Mabinogion, 188, 217, 225). In Triad 1 he is “the Chief of Bishops in Celli Wig in Cornwall”; Bromwich, Triads, 1.
31.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 79.
32.
Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree, The Dark Is Rising: The Complete Sequence (London: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010), 833–4.
33.
In later tradition he became Arthur’s father.
34.
Giles, Old English Chronicles, 405.
35.
Giles, Old English Chronicles, 405.
36.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1052.
37.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1052.
38.
Padel, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature, 5.
39.
Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55–54 bc, and from ad 40 to about ad 410 at least southern Britain was a part of the Roman Empire.
40.
Davies, Mabinogion, 249.
41.
For an overview see Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 39–58; and Snyder, “Arthurian Origins.”
42.
Arthur of Britain (1927). She also read the work of R.S. Loomis, who was one of the main proponents of the theory that Arthur was a mythological hero going back to pre-Christian times. See for example R.S. Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927); and R.S. Loomis, Wales and the Arthurian Legend (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1956).
43.
E.K. Chambers, Arthur of Britain (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927), 12.
44.
See Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur, 43.
45.
In Thompson, “Interview with Susan Cooper,” 163, Susan Cooper has confirmed that she read Leslie Alcock, presumably his popular Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology AD 367–634 (London: Allen Lane, 1971) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973). The former was published the same year as the second book in the Sequence, The Dark is Rising, while the latter preceded Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree.
46.
Morris, The Age of Arthur, 141.
47.
David N. Dumville, “Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend,” History 62 (1977): 173–92.
48.
Snyder, “Arthurian Origins,” 9.
49.
For an overview of recent scholarship on the historicity of Arthur see Snyder, “Arthurian Origins.”
50.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 234.
51.
Garrett S. Olmsted, “The Gundestrup Version of Táin Bó Cuailnge,” Antiquity 50 (1976): 95–103.
52.
J. Gricourt, “Sur une Plaque du Chaudron de Gundestrup,” Latomus 13 (1954): 376–83.
53.
For the motif of the “otherworld expedition” see Chapter 4.
54.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 234–5.
55.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 234.
56.
H. Russell Robinson, The Armour of Imperial Rome (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1975), 45–82.
57.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 835.
58.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 835, 836.
59.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1076.
60.
In the Welsh sources it is spelt “Prydwen” and is translated as “fair form,” Davies, Mabinogion, 273.
61.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1072.
62.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 834.
63.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1050 (emphasis added). The image of Arthur’s weatherbeaten face is already there in his very first appearance in The Grey King: “From the central throne rose the lord in the sea-blue robe; stepping forward, he looked down at Will. Behind its grey beard his face seemed oddly young, though its skin was brown and weathered like the skin of a sailor long at sea,” Susan Cooper, The Grey King, The Dark Is Rising: The Complete Sequence (London: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010), 706.
64.
Drout, “Reading the Signs of Light.”
65.
Drout, “Reading the Signs of Light,” 238.
66.
Butler, Four British Fantasists, 143.
67.
Butler, Four British Fantasists, 145.
68.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1033. In fact, Barney has Welsh ancestry too. As Jane explains: “Dad’s grandmother was born here. Right in Aberdyfi,” Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 869–70.
69.
Krishan Kumar, The Idea of Englishness: English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought (New York: Routledge, 2015), 140.
70.
See Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, eds, Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Michael A. Faletra, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
71.
Elissa R. Henken, National Redeemer: Owain Glyndŵr in Welsh Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996).
72.
Henken discusses Glyndŵr within the context of at least seven other Welsh “national redeemers”: Hiriell, Cynan, Cadwaladr, Arthur, Owain, Owain Lawgoch, and Henry Tudor, Henken, National Redeemer. In Silver on the Tree, Bran also mentions “Prince Llewellyn,” another “national hero.” Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, also known as Llywelyn Fawr (“Llywelyn the Great”), forged a political alliance of the princes of Wales in the early thirteenth century, in an effort to establish Wales as an autonomous Principality, under the king of England. See J. Beverley Smith, “Llywelyn ab Iorwerth,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. III, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 1185–6.
73.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1027.
74.
See Dafydd Johnston, “Iolo Goch,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. III, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 975.
75.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1029.
76.
Henken, National Redeemer, 107.
77.
Henken, National Redeemer, 15; Elissa R. Henken, “Owain Glyndŵr,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. IV, edited by John T. Koch, 1407–9 (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 1408.
78.
Henken, National Redeemer, 89–99.
79.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1034 (emphasis added).
80.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1033.
81.
John T. Koch, “Arthur, the historical evidence,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. I, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 119.
82.
Thomas Green, Arthuriana: Early Arthurian Tradition and the Origins of the Legend (Lincolnshire: Lindes Press, 2009), 91–115.
83.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 879.
84.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 892–3.
85.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 893.
86.
Cooper, The Grey King, 795 (emphasis added).
87.
Cooper, The Grey King, 790.
88.
Susan Cooper, “Interview,” 2016, http://www.thelostland.com/about/interview.html. The title that appears in this manuscript is Fire on the Mountain, the original title Cooper had in mind for the fourth book of the series, which had to be dismissed because “it has already been used for a collection of Haitian folktales,” Cooper, “How I Began,” 21. The book that Cooper seems to be misremembering here is Harold Courlander and Wolf Leslau, The Fire on the Mountain and Other Ethiopian Stories (New York: Holt, 1950).
89.
Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, trans., The Mabinogion (London: Everyman, 1949), 27–8.
90.
Davies, Mabinogion, 234.
91.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 790.
92.
Henken, National Redeemer, 148.
93.
This is why Will rejects Cader Idris (with a “total finality in his voice,” Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 879) as a possible candidate when along with Bran and the Drew children he is contemplating the location of the Lady’s appearance (see above). He and Bran have already uncovered the Arthurian significance of this landmark and it can be safely ticked off the list.
94.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 848.
95.
Perhaps this is why Will remarks that some Arthurian names mean “other things” when Barney exclaims that Arthur’s “knights” could not have possibly sat “round every hill called King Arthur’s Round Table,” Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 893. Clearly, this “Round Table” was not associated with Arthur but with the six signs.
96.
See Bromwich, Triads, 9.
97.
Susan Cooper, e-mail message to author, 26 February 2016.
98.
Bromwich, Triads, 408.
99.
Sir John Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 148.
100.
Susan Cooper, e-mail message to author, 26 February 2016.
101.
Susan Cooper, Greenwitch, The Dark is Rising: The Complete Sequence (London: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010), 620.
102.
Cooper, The Grey King, 654.
103.
Cooper here uses another element of Welsh folklore. Marie Trevelyan records the belief that: “A wind called the ‘Gwynt-Traed-y-Meirw,’ or ‘wind blowing over the feet of the corpses’, is felt by a relative of a person who is about to die, and by that they say, ‘Death is coming.’” Marie Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales (London: E. Stock, 1909), 283. Similarly, in The Grey King Bran explains that this wind “blows round the feet of the dead. It brings storms. And worse, sometimes.” Cooper, The Grey King, 691. However, the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru translates gwynt traed y meirw as “the east wind (lit. the wind of dead men’s feet, referring to the custom of burying the dead with their feet pointing eastwards),” rather than the north wind, as in Cooper’s novel.
104.
Cooper, The Grey King, 714.
105.
Cooper, The Grey King, 658.
106.
See Roberts, “Culhwch ac Olwen, The Triads, Saints’ Lives,” 90.
107.
Patrick Sims-Williams, “The Early Welsh Arthurian Poems,” in Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, edited by Rachel Bromwich, A.O.H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts, 33–71 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 68–69.
108.
Cooper, The Grey King, 653 (emphasis added).
109.
Cooper, The Grey King, 694 (emphasis added).
110.
Cooper, The Grey King, 703 (emphasis added).
111.
Bromwich, Triads, 5; Cooper, The Grey King, 706.
112.
Bromwich, Triads, 235. Both Triads are seemingly used straight from Bromwich (as noted above, Cooper has confirmed she read Bromwich).
113.
Cooper, The Grey King, 705 (emphasis added).
114.
Incidentally, Will already knows the answer to the first riddle from the Book of Gramarye. In The Dark is Rising, instead of reading the book Will seems to “experience” it and Cooper brings in quotations from a variety of sources, including the Mabinogion and the Welsh Triads: “He read:…you come to the place where is the oldest creature that is in this world, and he that has fared furthest afield, the Eagle of Gwernabwy…” Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 347–8 (emphasis added). Though in Triad 92 the three animals are not ranked in terms of age, in “Culhwch and Olwen” they are, and there are also five animals listed (the Stag of Rhedynfre and the Salmon of Llyn Lliw are the ones that do not appear in the Triad; see Davies, Mabinogion, 203–5). Other sources that contribute to the intertextual nature of the Book of Gramarye include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English poetry and an Anglo-Saxon riddle, see Butler, Four British Fantasists, 227.
115.
Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, The Dark Is Rising: The Complete Sequence (London: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010), 467.
116.
Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 468.
117.
Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 468.
118.
Butler, Four British Fantasists, 189.
119.
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 74.
120.
Jeremy Harte, “Herne the Hunter: A Case of Mistaken Identity?”, At The Edge 3 (1996): 27–33.
121.
For an overview see Hilda Ellis Davidson, “The Wild Hunt,” in Supernatural Enemies, edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001), 163–76.
122.
Idris Foster, “Gwynn ap Nudd,” in Duanaire Finn: The Book of the Lays of Fionn, Vol. 3: Introduction, Notes, Appendices and Glossary, Irish Texts Society 43, edited by Gerard Murphy (London: Irish Texts Society, 1953), 198–204, and Angelika H. Rüdiger, “Gwyn ap Nudd: Transfigurations of a Character on the Way from Medieval Literature to Neo-Pagan Beliefs,” Gramarye 2 (2012), 29–47.
123.
Rhŷs’s similar interpretation of other Mabinogion characters was influential for Lloyd Alexander’s portrayal of Arawn and Gwydion – see Chapter 4.
124.
For the later development of Annwn from an Otherworld location to the Christian hell, see Chapter 4.
125.
Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore, 216.
126.
Davies, Mabinogion, 3.
127.
Rhiannon Ifans, “Arawn,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. I, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 79.
128.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Third Edition, amended and enlarged (London: Faber and Faber), 89, 111, 151, 179.
129.
See Chapter 4.
130.
Thompson, “Interview with Susan Cooper,” 164–5.
131.
Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 287.
132.
Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 466.
133.
Cooper, The Grey King, 655.
134.
Interestingly, at that point Herne is described as having “the head of a stag, with shining antlers curving out in seven tines,” Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1068 (emphasis added), a deliberate echo of the first line of Graves’s quite liberal rendition of the Irish “Song of Amergin” (“I am a stag: of seven tines”), which he saw as parallel to the poems of Taliesin in preserving a pagan, Druidic philosophy. See Graves, The White Goddess, 13; see also Chapter 4. For Cooper’s use of the “Song of Amergin” in a clearer way in the Sequence see below.
135.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1071–2.
136.
See Butler, Four British Fantasists, 194.
137.
Susan Cooper, Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children (New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1996), 47.
138.
Thompson, “Interview with Susan Cooper,” 166.
139.
Cooper, The Grey King, 648.
140.
Cooper, The Grey King, 640, 654.
141.
The Grey King seems to literally come out of the landscape. He is not quite corporeal and he appears to be able to affect the weather and the elements. He can sneak up on people and has tremendous power. Marie Trevelyan describes him in this way: “Stories about the Brenin Llwyd, the Grey King, or Monarch of the Mist, were told in most of the mountainous districts. In the North he was described as being very mighty and powerful. He was represented as sitting among the mountains, robed in grey clouds and mist, and woe to anybody who was caught in his clutches! Snowdon and the ranges of it, Cader Idris, Plinlimmon, and other lofty places, were his favourite haunts. In the South he was regarded as ‘hungering’ for victims, and children were warned not to venture too high up the mountains, lest the Brenin Llwyd should seize them…A resident in the North said that formerly the old guides among the Snowdon ranges were fond of telling stories about the Brenin Llwyd, who came stealthily and silently up through the ravines, or sat waiting among lonely peaks to imprison the unwary.” Marie Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales (London: E. Stock, 1909), 69 (emphasis added).
142.
Cooper, The Grey King, 639.
143.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 852 (emphasis added). The Welsh accent is also noticed numerous times in the text. Bran is described as having a “lilting Welsh voice,” while the Old One who reminds Merriman about the Welsh verses in the grail has “a deep beautiful Welsh voice, rich and smooth as velvet, speaking with a rhythm that gave it the lilt of singing.” Cooper, The Grey King, 904, 851. It is also worth noting that one of the reasons John Rowlands chooses in favour of the Light, allowing Bran to remain in the twentieth century rather than return to the time he was born, is that Bran’s sense of “belonging” is associated with the Welsh language. He says: “I am simply wondering how a boy can be said to belong to a time whose language he does not even speak.” Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1060.
144.
For an overview of changing perceptions of the Welsh language from “gibberish” to the “old language” of the Welsh national anthem see Prys Morgan, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 43–100.
145.
Cooper, The Grey King, 644.
146.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 922.
147.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 935.
148.
Cooper, The Grey King, 644.
149.
Cooper, The Grey King, 645, 644 (emphasis added).
150.
Cooper, The Grey King, 667. Bran refers here to the notorious Gwylliaid Cochion Mawddwy (“The red bandits of Mawddwy”) who lived in that area in the sixteenth century. Their activities were cause for local folklore associating villains with red hair, see Meic Stephens, ed., The New Companion to the Literature of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), 99. Iolo Goch, whom Cooper fictionalizes as Owain Glyndŵr’s bard (see above) was so named because of his red hair (see Johnston, “Iolo Goch,” 975), but in Silver on the Tree he is described as having “wisping white hair,” Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1028. For red hair being associated with the “Celts” see Chapters 3 and 5.
151.
Cooper, The Grey King, 666–7 (emphasis added).
152.
Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone, 124. The “four grey standing stones” are also depicted in the tapestries that Will is shown through which the Old Ones reveal “something of themselves.” Cooper, The Dark is Rising, 287.
153.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 841–2.
154.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 842.
155.
Another element of “Druidic” practice is alluded to in the title of Silver on the Tree: cutting the mistletoe from the great oak (see Chapters 2 and 4).
156.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 842.
157.
Butler, Four British Fantasists, 219.
158.
Characteristically, she points to a special female bond between herself and young Jane Drew, calling her “Jane, Jana, Juno, Jane” and noting that the two of them have something in common that distinguishes them “from all others concerned in this quest,” presumably their femaleness. Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 899. Tellingly, it is shortly after this incident, when Will and Bran are in the Lost Land, that they refer to Jane as “pretty,” signalling the awakening of romantic interest which – in Graves’s theories – is the sphere of control of the goddess. Indeed, the goddess wooed by two male deities is part of Graves’s schema (see Chapter 5), though of course there is only a very shadowy hint of this structure here.
159.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 910.
160.
Antone Minard, “flood legends,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. II, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 754.
161.
Bromwich, Triads, 391–2.
162.
Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore, 418.
163.
Thompson, “Interview with Susan Cooper,” 167.
164.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 939, 940.
165.
C.W. Sullivan III, Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1989), 67.
166.
Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore, 417, 416, 415.
167.
See Chapters 4 and 5.
168.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 970.
169.
Bromwich, Triads, 259.
170.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 947.
171.
It is worth mentioning that the “Thirteen Treasures” list also includes the “Hamper of Gwyddno Garanir,” a food-producing vessel, which brings to mind the magical weir he is portrayed as having in Hanes Taliesin. See Bromwich, Triads, 259.
172.
“Chaer Wydyr” (“Glass Fort”) appears in Preideu Annwfyn, see, Marged Haycock, ed. and trans., Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, Wales: CMCS, 2007), 446; therefore this sixteenth-century story associates the Thirteen Treasures with the Otherworld – on the otherworldly origin of Thirteen Treasures see also Chapter 4.
173.
Bromwich, Triads, cviii.
174.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 971.
175.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 988.
176.
A.O.H. Jarman, “The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy,” in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, edited by Rachel Bromwich et al (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 132–5.
177.
It is important to note that Graves’s version deviates significantly from the Irish text. For a close translation see John T. Koch, “Amairgen mac Míled,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. III, edited by John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 47.
178.
Graves, The White Goddess, 13.
179.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1011.
180.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 1002 (italics in the original).
181.
Graves, The White Goddess, 259.
182.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 991 (emphasis added).
183.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 909. This last find can be identified with the hoard of thirty-one gold nobles discovered in 1930 in Borth; see G.C. Brooke, “A find of gold nobles at Borth (Cardigan),” Archaeologia Cambrensis 86 (1931): 75–80.
184.
Cooper, Silver on the Tree, 998 (emphasis added).
185.
H. Godwin and L. Newton, “The Submerged Forest at Both and Ynys-las, Cardiganshire: Data for the Study of Post-Galacial History no.1, from the notes of F.N. Cambell James,” New Phytologist 37, no. 4 (1938): 339.
186.
As discussed above, the common “Celtic” heritage of the Welsh and the Irish that the Sequence takes for granted is expressed by considering the Welsh verse of Taliesin and the Irish “Song of Amergin” as belonging to the same cultural background. This view is also complemented by the grail, a “Romano-Celtic” artefact forged in Britain, but inscribed in ogam, the Irish script that Graves linked with the mystical teachings of the bards/Druids and the worship of the Goddess (see also Chapter 5). In fact, modern scholarship has established that the ogam writing system was clearly inspired by the Roman alphabet and there is certainly nothing mystical about the earliest ogam inscriptions extant, which tend to be very practical in nature, often marking territorial boundaries or graves; see Katherine Forsyth, “Ogam inscriptions and primitive Irish,” in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. IV, edited John T. Koch (Santa Barbara; Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2006), 1390.
187.
Susan Cooper, e-mail message to author, 26 February 2016.
188.
Cooper has referred to a few examples of fans who have written to let her know that the Sequence inspired them to study Welsh and the “Celtic harp,” Cooper, Dreams and Wishes, 135.

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Department of Humanities, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
Dimitra Fimi

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Fimi, D. (2017). Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence and the Arthur of the Welsh. In: Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55282-2_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55282-2_6
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