Posted on by TracyC

Greenwitch

The Dark is Rising Sequence

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper, 1974.

This is the third book in The Dark is Rising Sequence, and it brings together the two sets of characters who have already been established in the series: the three Drew children from the first book and Will Stanton and the Old Ones from the second book.

The story begins with the theft of the grail that the Drew children found in the first book with their Great-Uncle Merry, otherwise known as Merriman Lyon. The grail was stolen from the museum where it was being studied, and Merry wasn’t there because he was supposedly on an extended trip to Greece. However, when word of the theft spreads, Merry comes back to see the children. He is the only person other than the children who know that the thieves who took the grail were not ordinary thieves but agents of the Dark, the forces of evil. Merry say that he believes that they took the grail because it will lead them to something else that they’re seeking. He says that he will need the children’s help again and asks them to trust him. There will be danger, but he promises them protection. The children agree and accept Merry’s invitation to spend their holidays in Cornwall with him again.

Meanwhile, Will Stanton is bored because his older brothers and sister are off doing other things. Even though he is secretly one of the Old Ones and has great powers, he is also still the youngest in his family and feels left out of things that his older siblings are able to do. Then, a mysterious stranger arrives and introduces himself as Will’s Uncle Bill. Will was named after Bill, who is one of his father’s brothers and has been living in the United States for as long as Will can remember. Will’s parents are glad to see Bill, and Bill offers to take Will with him on a trip to Cornwall because a friend of his who is also staying there will have a couple of nephews about Will’s age staying with him. Will is eager to go, and his parents agree to let him.

Of course, the friend that Uncle Bill is talking about is Uncle Merry, and the nephews are Simon and Barney Drew, along with their sister Jane. At first, the Drew boys don’t like Will much because they think he’s going to interfere in their mission with their Uncle Merry, not knowing yet that Will has special powers and is directly involved in the fight against the Dark as their ally.

Shortly after they arrive in the village where the Drew children stayed in the first book, Will and Uncle Merry mention a pagan ceremony that is still being practiced in the area called the Greenwitch. Uncle Merry says that Jane may watch it, but not the boys because only women are allowed to attend the ritual. However, the dog Rufus that the children befriended on their last visit is kidnapped, and they are given the warning that the captain who owns him had better stay away from the Greenwitch if he wants him back. Unbeknownst to the children, the captain, who is the man who owns the house where they stayed last time, is another of the Old Ones.

Still, Mrs. Penhallow, the wife of a fisherman they met in the first book, invites Jane to come with her to see the Greenwitch being made. Jane doesn’t know what that means at first, but she goes to the ceremony anyway. Jane watches the local women weaving branches together to make a strange figure. It makes Jane uneasy because it doesn’t seem human but it has a kind of power. The women tell her that few people can sense its power but that people make wishes on it before tossing the Greenwitch into the sea for luck. Jane is given the opportunity to make a wish herself, and she finds herself wishing that the Greenwitch could be happy because she senses a loneliness about the figure. She feels a little silly for that wish after she realizes that she could have wished to find the grail again instead. One of the women there approves of the sentiment of Jane’s wish although she notes that it’s also a dangerous one because it’s difficult to know what might make someone happy. Some people find happiness in dark or dangerous things, but in this case, it might be a very good wish.

However, the forces of darkness are also targeting Barney. Barney has recently been developing artistic skills, like the children’s mother, and an artist who serves the Dark steals one of his drawings to gain control over him. The Dark needs Barney, at least for a short period, because he can do something that none of them can; Barney can look into the grail and tell them what he sees.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

There are even more pagan references in this story than in the previous two. The Greenwitch is a fictional ceremony, but it seems like it’s based on or inspired by a kind of folk magic. It might be that the local women who make the Greenwitch are meant to represent a coven performing magic. I’m not going to go too deep into the history pre-Christian traditions because this isn’t a real ritual that I can trace and the history of neo-paganism is complicated. If you’re curious, I recommend watching this documentary about the life of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca. I don’t really believe in Wicca myself, but I think Gerald Gardner is a delightful eccentric and fun to hear about. (Just don’t show the documentary to kids without watching it yourself. There are a couple of things in there that night not be suitable for young kids.)

It’s not all focused on the folklore of the British Isles, though. At one point in the story, the characters seek the help of Tethys, a figure from Greek mythology. The Greenwitch is meant as a tribute to her, so she has power over it, and the characters need something from the Greenwitch. This story introduces the idea that, although the stories are about the struggle between good and evil, Light and Dark, there are also some powerful, ancient forces that are not part of this struggle, including Tethys and the Greenwitch. These forces are neutral, and their neutrality requires that they neither help nor hinder either side in the struggle. Tethys and the Greewitch are among those neutral forces.

Part of this story also involves characters doing things they shouldn’t because they don’t have all of the information they really need to make better decisions. Ignorance and half-knowledge are annoying parts of stories like this, plot devices to allow characters to get into dangerous situations. It all works out for the best in the end, though.

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Over Sea, Under Stone

The Dark is Rising Sequence

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, 1965.

The Drew family is spending the summer in Cornwall with their Great-Uncle Merry. Professor Merriman “Merry” Lyon isn’t really a relative, but a very old family friend who teaches at a university and has a somewhat mysterious past. Of the three Drew children – Simon, Jane, and Barney – Barney is the one most looking forward to their time in Cornwall because he loves Arthurian stories, and he is fascinated by Cornwall’s connections with King Arthur. Simon is more interested in watching boats.

One day, while the children are bored because it’s raining, they start playing at being explorers inside the house where they’re staying and discover a secret passage to a hidden room. There, they find an old manuscript that seems to be some kind of treasure map! It seems like parts are written in Latin, but even Simon, who has studied Latin in school, can’t read it all. At first, they wonder if they should tell their parents about it, but they decide not to, at least not right away, because their parents would probably tell them not to touch it because it doesn’t belong to them. They feel like they just have to figure out what it means and what it might lead to.

The family makes the acquaintance of a yacht owner, Mr. Withers, and his sister, and the two of them invite the whole family to go for a ride on their yacht. Mrs. Drew is an artist and wants to spend the day painting, so she declines, and so does Jane. Jane says that she’s afraid of getting seasick, but really, the Witherses give her an uneasy feeling. Jane feels like there’s something that’s not right about them, and it’s strange that Miss Withers asks them if they’ve found any secret passages in the house just after they actually found one. None of the children confide anything in Miss Withers. Mr. Withers seems oddly interested in the books in the house.

The next day, while her father and brothers go out on the yacht with the Witherses, Jane studies the manuscript and tries to figure out what it means. When she also finds an old guidebook to the area in an old trunk, she realizes that the map on the manuscript shows the area where they are staying, but there’s something strange about the coastline. The coastline on the old map is a slightly different shape. Jane wonders if one of the two maps could be wrong or if the coastline has changed somehow over the years because the manuscript looks very old.

Since the guidebook was written by the local vicar, Jane decides to go see him and ask him about the coastline and whether it’s changed over the years. She takes along the guidebook but not the manuscript. However, the vicar she meets says he’s the new vicar, not the old one who wrote the book. She talks to him about the book and the coastline anyway, but he gives her a bad feeling, similar to the one that the Witherses give her. The vicar discounts the idea of the coastline changing, and he asks Jane uncomfortable questions about the books in the house, pressing her for answers that she doesn’t have and doesn’t want to give him.

When the boys come back from the yacht, and Jane tells them about the guidebook and the vicar, Simon is irritated that Jane tried to investigate the manuscript without them, and he doesn’t think she should have talked to the vicar. Jane says that she didn’t tell the vicar about the manuscript, only the guidebook, and Barney says that what Jane learned is important.

The next morning, they wake up to find that the house has been ransacked. Books have been tossed all over in the middle of the night by someone who was clearly hunting for something. The children are sure that their mysterious intruder was searching for the manuscript, which is safe because Jane had it hidden in her bed. But, who was it? Was it the vicar or the Witherses? All of them seemed interested in old books and manuscripts, and they all seem suspicious. What is the real significance of the manuscript anyway?

Still not wanting to tell their parents or the police who were called to investigate the break-in, the children confide in Great-Uncle Merry about the manuscript and their suspicions. Uncle Merry knows more about the manuscript than the children know, and he tells them about a lost grail, a copy of the original Holy Grail, inscribed with the true story of King Arthur and about an ancient struggle between good and evil, a struggle that the children have now joined.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book was once adapted as a tv mini-series, but apparently, no copies of it survive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

This book is the first in a series about the struggle between good and evil, known as the Light and the Dark, and all of the other books in the series also draw on Arthurian legends. Merry and the children appear in other books, although not always together. Merry (the children sometimes call him Gumerry, which is short for Great-Uncle Merry) isn’t quite what he appears to be, which is how he knows things that other adults don’t know. There are hints in this book about Merry’s real identity, but it isn’t explained in this book, although Barney has a feeling that his name is a clue.

When Merry explains about the battle between good and evil, he says that the struggle has been going on for ages, and neither side ever completely wins or completely loses. It’s like that in this story, too. At first, I wasn’t completely sure whether they would actually find the grail or if it would turn out to be a MacGuffin, only existing to drive the action without it being really important whether it was actually found or not. The heroes do actually find and successfully retrieve the grail, but they also lose the manuscripts they’ve found before they can completely study them. It’s a victory, but not a total victory, and the villains are still around and may reappear in the future. This story ends in a way that indicates that this could have been a standalone book, which it might have been originally, before the author decided to continue the series, but the ending is also open, making the continuation of the series natural.

There are references to old folklore traditions throughout the story. I’ve never seen The Wicker Man, but I saw a comment on a YouTube video where someone compares a public festival from this story to a scene in The Wicker Man, so there may be the implication that this is a more ancient form of celebration with more significance than the modern characters think. In fact, old traditions and folklore from the British Isles also appear in various forms throughout the series, and there are references to pagan beliefs.

I didn’t like the part where the kids were pretending to be explorers, and they were talking about acting out one of those scenes with “rude natives” (Simon’s words, and even he has to admit that he doesn’t quite know what it means when Barney asks him, although he’s aware that it’s a different sort of “rude” from the word meaning “impolite”) who want to make them gods and encountering cannibals. That type of scene always annoys me in books, and I’m sure that they’re referencing some of the vintage books I’ve read where that happens or ones very much like them. It’s really my only complaint about this story. Fortunately, that part doesn’t last very long because the kids find the manuscript and get on with the fantasy story.