Sophie is energised, listening to the BBC World Service and re-visiting fantasy… 

It is unsettling, this turning of the year. The evenings start to get light earlier. It’s a real sign that spring will come. Meanwhile mornings are still getting darker, relentless and wintry.

The trees are still bare, skeletons against a sky which maybe brilliant blue or a blanket of sullen grey. And the weather is co-o-old.

It’s like the god Janus, who gives his name to January, looking in two directions at once. You don’t know quite where you are. Worse, you don’t know where to look to orientate yourself. Floundering creatively maybe?

Turning of the Year Danger

In myths and legends the turning of the year is a time of feasting and celebration. In our northern latitude that pretty much boils down to: gather round the fire and don’t look behind you.

It’s understandable. Without shelter, fuel and food gathered ready, the unprepared would be prey to hungry beasts in the short daylight hours and liable to die of cold and hunger.

By the Middle Ages, the feasting took place in the Lord’s hall with the doors locked against weather and predators alike. But an unknown visitor had the right to demand shelter and hospitality.

And those who are safe and warm and feasting have the obligation to honour it.

He is the essence of turning of the year danger.

Gawain and the Green Knight

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a classic Turning of the Year tale. He is challenged at the end of one year and returns to honour the summons the next.

He leaves Camelot on All Saints Day, November 1st. (Gawain is late 14th century, part of the Arthurian cycle, and Christianity is now firmly entrenched though it has not banished magic from chivalric romance.) He arrives at the Green Knight’s Castle on Christmas Eve and answers the Challenge on New Year’s day. His task is completed and his lesson learned.

In his case, that lesson is that you need to be honest at all times, in even small matters, even when seriously embarrassed. Gawain hadn’t admitted to the Green Knight that his host’s wife had given him an enchanted girdle which she promised would save his life. As a result he gets a small nick in his neck from the Green Knight. Who laughs about it.

This is a bit of a let down to be honest. I bet there was something much colder and darker in the source stories; as there is, indeed, in Harrison Birtwhistle’s impressively creepy opera based on the story.

The Threatening Stranger and the Hero

The Challenger comes in many guises. Nearly always he brings a mortal challenge. And we know that it is not entirely of this world, possibly symbolic, possibly magical.

Whichever it is, the hero who takes up the challenge is definitely the underdog, in the dark about what’s going on. He may blunder several times before he gets it right. For instance, he often gets lost or thoughtlessly gives in to some apparently trivial but forbidden impulse.

And though he may have a mentor and/or helpers, the challenging task is his alone.

The Turning of the Year Challenge?

So why am I thinking about the Turning of the Year Challenge in this way?

Well, initially it was because one of the truly admirable charities that I support sent me a cheery Christmas message “inviting” me to take part in “this year’s challenge” – a half marathon, somewhere around Easter time, I think.

Well after the hollow laughter, I thought, that’s not a Challenge. Not frightening enough.

Yes, I would find it painful, embarrassing and unpleasant. But there’s no existential risk involved. No witches luring me to the dark side. No warlocks throwing their powers against my blundering good intentions. And it wouldn’t do anybody any good, except possibly me.

But then I saw a post in passing on Facebook. The BBC World Service had put their production of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising onto the iPlayer. A group had agreed to listen to an episode a day over this time. Because the action of the book takes place over exactly that time.

I didn’t think I had the time or head space to take part myself. I’ve loved the book since I first read it when I was at school. But it’s edge-of-the-seat scary, heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. And I was busy with practical preparations and, well, feasting.

I didn’t remember who had written the original post and couldn’t find it again, either. But I could find the World Service programme. And the idea wouldn’t quite go away. So in the end, I gave in and listened.

The Dark is Rising

All my life I’ve been reading myth and fairy stories and fantasy interchangeably. As a child I read and loved Kipling, bits that I understood of The Golden Bough, E Nesbit’s Psammead who made all the children’s wishes go wrong, and The Sword in the Stone. All equally.

When I first read Susan Cooper, I was still coming out of The Lord of the Rings, breathless with wonder and a deep sadness that I sort of recognised without understanding.

Astonishingly, I got exactly the same hit from The Dark is Rising. Only this was the book that introduced me to the gradations of fear — from uneasiness, through dread, to freezing terror and despair. It locked onto my subconscious and has stayed there ever since.

And this BBC adaptation is a marvel.

It’s all there, the big stuff of Light and Dark, their battle over the centuries and the great powers of each. Yet the story is also threaded through with a sense of steadiness, the strength of the small, comfortable kindnesses of a loving family and good neighbours.

We hear all this through an authorial voice and also the clear eyes of a boy, who is at the same time both a child reaching his eleventh birthday and the youngest of a loved and loving family and an old Old One, the destined champion of the hour. Miraculously, both aspects are totally believable, in this adaptation as they are in the book. Bliss!

Susan Cooper

Of course, I couldn’t leave it there. I had read the other four books in the series. But I now find that she has written other books, not least a novel drawing on her childhood during the War, which I want to read at once.

On her own website, Susan Cooper writes with wonderful clarity about her life and her writing.

There is also a marvellous video of her in 2023 at the British Library where she is interviewed by the fabulous Natalie Haynes about The Dark is Rising. The creators of the BBC programme join them! I found it a truly inspiring insight into all three — well four, including Haynes — creatives, as we are now supposed to call them, all at the top of their game. Well worth the time to listen.

But there is another video which I love, partly because Cooper talks about her views on Fantasy in general and how, at its best, it makes an impact by which the reader recognises truth with what she calls “a catch of the breath”.

I’m also much struck by her description of the difference between American and British contributions to the genre. She thinks Americans, like Le Guin write new worlds while Brits, like herself, Alan Garner and Phillip Pullman, set their magic in a recognisably English landscape and society, both with a long history. I’m still pondering.

This is Susan Cooper’s Tolkien lecture, delivered in 2017.

She was at Oxford in the fifties, when Tolkien was still a power in the university. He didn’t tutor her, but she did go to his lectures. He mumbled. Except that he would start with a loud Anglo-Saxon expletive, “Hwaet!” It electrified his audience into stunned silence.

And no, she doesn’t think The Lord of the Rings influenced her very much. (I agree.) But Tolkien undoubtedly did, she says dryly, because he’d commandeered control of the English literature syllabus. So he made sure that students read lots of the stuff that he liked i.e. Old English, Middle English, Mallory and Geoffrey of Monmouth. And he stopped all other studies dead at 1832. So she missed out on Dickens and Tennyson and Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins, let alone Thomas Hardy and the War poets. But she and her contemporaries got to read all the Arthurian chivalric romances, of which Gawain is a comparatively late example.

She made me hoot. I could just imagine it!

The Year is Still Turning

As the year is still turning, I still have that unsettled, anything could happen feeling. It’s not comfortable. But it is energising. And after The Dark is Rising it has a context.

It won’t last, of course. Maybe a couple more days, and then the dark will start shrinking at both ends of the day.

But I think these last few days have kicked me into a state of awareness that I had forgotten about for too long. It is very welcome.

Sophie