The Margaret A. Edwards Award is new to me. It honours an author for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature” and is organised by the young adult division of the American Library Association. The 2012 winner is Susan Cooper for The Dark Is Rising series: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark Is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; and Silver on the Tree. I wonder if Susan Cooper drew any inspiration from Rosemary Sutcliff’s work? I have not read the stories; but the press release said that the stories “evoke Celtic and Arthurian mythology” as they recount the adventures of Will Stanton , the last of the ‘immortal Old Ones’, who acquires the ‘Things of Power’ for the ‘Light’ in its battle with the ‘Dark’. Not my sort of book …. but maybe someone who reads this blog has read the stories and can comment?
I think the comments (above) are very much to the point regarding Cooper and Sutcliff and their childhood experience of war.
It is worth noting that Cooper was taught by both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis while at university.
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[…] https://rosemarysutcliff.com/2012/01/26/susan-cooper-wins-edwards-award-did-she-read-rosemary-sutclif… […]
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Keep posting before I’ve finished 🙂
I don’t think we can underestimate the effect of living with war as children on authors like Cooper and Sutcliff. The imagery of light/good and dark/evil seen in their work are clearly metaphors for this experience (Tolkien ‘s work was also much influenced by both the rise of evil in the growth of the Nazi movement and the subsequent war). War is particularly disempowering and confusing for children, and it’s not surprising that both Cooper and Sutcliff turned for inspiration to the heroic Arthurian archetype mentioned by Sutcliff in Anthony’s earlier post, and that their work gives young people an empowering role in combating the forces of darkness.
https://rosemarysutcliff.com/2012/01/22/does-the-arthurian-legend-hold-essential-truth-for-difficult-times-yes-said-rosemary-sutcliff-in-1991/
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Cooper’s drew upon Arthurian legend and Celtic and Norse mythology for her “Dark is Rising” sequence. “The series was written between 1965-1977, so contemporary with the work of authors like Rosemary Sutcliff and Alan Garner who also drew on Celtic mythology for inspiration.
The battle between light and dark which is central to the “Dark is Rising” series is certainly also central to Rosemary Sutcliff’s work. Like Sutcliff, Cooper was profoundly influenced by her experiences as a child during World War II and by the concept of universal heroic myth as proposed by Joseph Campbell in his “Hero With a Thousand Faces”.
Tolkien was a major inspiration for Cooper, and though It’s a long time since I read them, I remember the feel of Cooper’s novels being much more Tolkien in style than Sutcliff. I would say rather than Cooper being influenced by Sutcliff, that they were both shaped by similiar reading tastes and experiences.
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