Backlisted - The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

Susan Cooper's magical novel The Dark Is Rising (1973) is the subject of a bumper Christmas special episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this classic winter solstice read, and the four other books that make up the Dark Is Rising sequence, are writer Robert Macfarlane and writer and illustrator Jackie Morris, co-authors of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells and fellow Susan Cooper devotees. And because it is Christmas, John also talks about a beautiful ice-and-snow bound story from the Chuckchi people of the Bering Sea, When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu, and Andy reads The Tree Room, a poem from Caroline Bird's new collection The Air Year that seems to sum up the spirit of Christmas 2020. Wherever this podcast finds you in the world, Merry Christmas from us all. When the dark comes rising, six shall turn it back...Music in todays episode is:The Dark is Rising album by Handspan https://handspan.bandcamp.com/album/the-dark-is-risingHard Road by Johnny Flynn http://johnny-flynn.com/* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. The End Hello and welcome to a special Christmas Day edition of Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Merry Christmas!

Today you find us in a small village in the Thames Valley. It's Christmas morning. It's been snowing for days and shows no sign of letting up we've unwrapped our gifts and are gathered waiting for the tree presents a choir warbles ancient carols from the radio in the kitchen when unexpectedly there's a knock at the door i'm john mitchinson the publisher of unbound the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us for this festive edition, which is coming to you live, we're actually recording this on Christmas morning, are two new guests. Please welcome to Backlisted, Jackie Morris and

Robert McFarlane. Thank youay! Thank you, thank you. Nice to see you both. Hello, thanks for having us. And a happy Christmas to you too. Thank you very much. I always feel it sounds threatening when I say it. Everything sounds threatening when you say it, Jackie. Well done for making it through another year.

Yeah, and what a year, let's be honest. Robert McFarlane is the author of books about landscape, people and nature, including Underland, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and, with Jackie Morris, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He loves collaborating with musicians, including Johnny Flynn, Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwut, Julie Fowlis, and the band Underworld. His books and writing have been widely adapted for film, theatre, radio and TV. He's a fellow of Emanuel College, Cambridge,

where he's lucky enough to spend his days talking about ideas with brilliant young people. If he could be a bird, he'd be a curlew. He didn't tell me that. You intuited it, didn't you? Yeah, I just took a stab in the door. I was right, wasn't I? You were.

Zoom's amazing for this kind of thing, isn't it? Robert says if he could be any character from literature, he'd be either Lyra Balakwa or Will Stanton from The Dark is Rising, for reasons we shall explore in a moment. Now, I've got a question for you, Robert McFarlane. I was looking for some music for this episode today, and I was looking for Vaughan Williams' arrangement of the Gloucestershire Wassail, because I thought I might use it.

And I got off the shelf one of my CDs of Hodier, Vaughan Williams' Christmas Cantata. This is a version that came out in 1990. There it is. Can you see it there? Yeah. Now look at the cover. The cover is like a dark is rising.

What is it? Describe what you can see. Well, I'm peering down the lens, but I can see misty landscapes. It's a sort of Casper David Friedrich redrawn by Susan Cooper's imagination. We've got bull rushes. The snow has settled all over that landscape. Well, the reason why you're so familiar with that Robert might be because according to the credits here the front cover was drawn by Rob McFarlane

now is that your drawing that you did when you were about 14 it it is amazingly I was making a good living at that time as an artist and then i made the mistake of moving into words so um that is uncanny also uncanny if if i see it right is the fact that you are wearing a mcfarlane tartan tie there uh i actually am that cannot be possible can it it does look like the most appallingly obsequious gesture but but actually explain yourself okay so well just because we're all in the rooms on our own it is christmas so i've got a new tie for christmas i've got a nice green shirt and a red mostly red tartan tie for some christmas colors and i perhaps not as much as you robert but I am allowed to as a miller I'm allowed to

wear the Macfarlane tartan when you go to the Royal Mile and they they sub-clan stuff I was just going to say yeah so you're technically subordinate to to me is that I think I think there's no technicality involved well I'm very touched I'm very touched by that gesture and thank you for it yeah jackie is a multi-award winning author and illustrator she began her career in publishing illustrating for magazines and newspapers before moving into book illustration and then writing in 2005 the seal children won the tier nanog award for a children's book in an authentically welsh setting the first ever winner of this was the grey king by susan cooper the plot thickens jackie has illustrated more books than she can be bothered to count and written many too including most recently the unwinding published by unbound

yay her work with robert mcfarlane has been described as, quotes, a cultural phenomenon. She's currently working on The Book of Birds, written by Robert, The Space Between, a curious creature, part book, part leaf, funding via Unbound, and Mrs Noah's Song, to be illustrated by James Mayhew. If she were a bird... I've received no information from my spirit helper about what bird she would be.

Jackie, if you were a bird, what bird would you be? For now, I'll go for raven. Oh, good. We have many that fly above the house and quite partial to the intellect of a raven. Yeah. And that wicked eye. Wish me Merry Christmas again, because the cold hand of fear is running merry christmas one of my publishers did say to me um can you do us a merry christmas

message for social media and i said no you don't want that oh dear Jackie lives and works in a small cottage in Pembrokeshire garlanded with cats and dogs yes I do it's quite nice here it's very messy though it looks totally authentic I must say what a brilliant yeah I've got a proper backdrop here. You really have. My problem is that most of the mess contains books, and I go to tidy up, and then one just falls open, and then I start reading, and that's the day gone. So I never get further than about 10 minutes of tidying up.

Yeah, many of our listeners will relate to that. We should talk about the book that we're here to talk about, which is The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. First published in the UK by Chatham and Windus in 1973, and as a puffin in 1976. And it's the second book in the sequence, also called The Dark is Rising, which began with Oversea Under Stone in 1965, and then continued on with Greenwich, The Grey King,

and finally in 1977, Silver on the Tree. It's worth mentioning that the latest Puffin editions of this sequence have new introductions by a certain Robert Macfarlane and jacket illustrations not by Rob Macfarlane but by Joe McLaren, the brilliant Joe McLaren. But before we summon the wild hunt out of the cosmos, roaring towards us from the great dark thunderclouds this Christmas day, John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book that's full of snow.

It's called When the Whales Leave by Uri Richtue. That's probably as good a pronunciation as I'm going to get. Yuri died in 2008. He was the son of a hunter and the grandson of a shaman. He lived or was born in a small town called Ulan on the Bering Sea. It's a little bit of Russia, Siberia that is nearly Alaska. So it comes from a sort of a hunter-gatherer culture. And this story is a beautiful kind of creation myth, a creation myth that he decided to create for his own culture. And it starts with a woman who becomes obsessed with whales. Her name is Now. And she comes from nowhere. She comes from the land.

And she becomes obsessed with a whale. She falls in love with a whale. In the end, the whale falls in love with her. And it's through the force of that love that the whale decides to leave the sea. And they become a couple. And they populate this sandy spit of land. And the book follows through the generations. Now, it would be fair to say, lives a prodigiously long time. Her first children are whales, her second children are humans. And the story really is a fable. It's a fable about how we lose touch with nature and how we lose touch with the sense of being part of nature because the descendants of now become more violent, more proud, without giving everything away. The denouement of the book is the killing of a whale.

That's a bit of a plot spoiler. It is a bit of a plot spoiler, but I'm running with it. It's one of the strongest things I've read in a long, long time and has a sort of an authenticity. There are two extraordinary things about it that I didn't know. The first is that it's translated from the Russian by Ilona Shavas, who I work with, who literally sits next to me at work. And she must have given me a copy of this book a year ago. And I did that thing that we should never do and just said, that looks great,

and then never looked at it again. And then the second thing is, I suddenly saw the notable writer and artist Jackie Morris saying that it was a masterpiece on Instagram. And so it proves. The curious thing for me was the way that I found it. Somebody had been drawing in the silent unwinding and put up a photograph on Twitter. And Bathsheba DeMuth said, how come I don't know this book? Because I love

this artist. So I went and stalked her on Twitter and about halfway down her feed, she'd reviewed this book. And I just fell in love with it. It's wild, it's beautiful, the poetry in it is amazing, the messages, it's that one about staying connected really. I love now. She does live an amazing time. She's very quietly wise and people ignore her at their peril. I'll read a little bit and you can sort of see why I think it fits on today's podcast. Hard they were those first days of winter. Ryu, that's

the man, dug out an earthen shelter propping up its walls with tree branches scavenged from the shore and roofing it over with a layer of sod and dried grass. He made a pike from a broken walrus bone and killed a wild deer, and Ryu and Nao laid the deerskin atop their bed to stave off the ancient cold of the earth. Their carefree summer days now seemed to her a bright dream, unreal. Sometimes looking at the endless white desert of the sea, riven with gigantic ice hummocks and shards, shining with a cold glow, now couldn't

believe that Riu had ever been a whale at all. The wind riffled up through the piles of upended ice flows, then clambered onto the shore, shrouding everything along its path in snow. It raged above the low earthen cave, trying to level it with the snow-covered plain, and it raged and howled all the more when each morning it discovered a freshly melted black opening steaming with human living breath. That's just a little taste of it. I mean, it's a perfect winter read.

Andy, what have you been reading? Regular listeners to Batlisted will know that we face a challenge whenever we talk about one of these books, which is we have to do it in five minutes. But I'm sticking to that today, and Bertius is going to help me by giving me a two-minute signal when we get to two-minute signal, right? So here we go.

No challenge. I've been reading a book called The Air Year by Caroline Bird. Caroline Bird, this is her fifth collection of poetry. I loved her last collection, which was published in 2017, called In the Days of Prohibition. And this new one, The Heir Year, has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection this year, and it's been shortlisted for the Costa,

alongside that book of poems by Martha Spracklin, John, that you talked about a few weeks ago. that book of poems by Martha Spracklin, John, that you talked about a few weeks ago. And a bit like when I was talking about Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Now, that's a book that took Susanna Clarke many years to write and somehow felt incredibly relevant to this particular strange year. And the same is true of The Air Year. It's actually a series of poems mostly about

a relationship, but there's something about the nature of the idea of time and flight and transition and suspension within that relationship that feels very relevant to 2020. Caroline Bird's that feels very relevant to 2020. Caroline Bird's poetry is passionate and clever and funny. This book is occasionally filthy, but it's also tremendously moving. I found it tremendously moving to read this book that has been published during this particular year and find it so resonant. And I wanted to read you a bit, but I wanted to get it right. So I decided what I'd do is I'd record it in advance.

I chose a poem called The Tree Room, which is a Christmas poem. It's a poem seemingly inspired by a particular place in this, in fact, I think a rehab clinic, a particular place in this, in fact, I think a rehab clinic, a particular place, particular Christmas. But when I read the poem, I was thinking, well, I think this has something to say about this particular Christmas this year and what Christmas represents to us and what it means wherever and however we're spending it this year

and whatever our year has been like and whatever is coming in the year ahead. So in the poem that you're about to hear, Caroline Bird incorporates lines from a song and not just a song, a record, in fact, a CD, a specific song. So here it is. The Tree Room. Splayed out like walruses on the carpet, we made Christmas decorations as Cat Stevens sang from the CD player kindly procured by the counsellor.

It was my first activity. I'd come straight from detox to the tree room where Carly handed me a pritt stick, two polystyrene balls and a strip of googly eye stickers. Scott was an advertising mogul for a famous soft drinks company. He made an angel. Oh baby baby, it's a wild world. Carly had three estranged children, was six weeks sober, bright-eyed and fit, wore neon sportswear all day and had long loud conversations in the telephone corner at night. She made an ambitious red-nosed reindeer with pipe cleaner antlers. I remember how warm it was in there. I painted the polystyrene balls with glue,

then wrapped them in cotton wool. None of us spoke. I looked at them both, foreheads furrowed, glitter pens busy, big legs tucked sideways beneath them. My snowman was implausibly fluffy and his eyes were too far apart, but Carly said, cute. I hung him on a plastic branch.

We sat and stared at our handiwork, knees pulled up to our chins. A lot of nice things turn bad out there. I know what happened after they left, the sad, violent details of their respective returns to the world. I know the storm I'm shaking with today. But then we didn't know. I'll always remember you like a child girl. We were sheltered, encased, forgiven, reduced to a communal hum in a room where our only purpose was to serve with childlike industry the beauty of a small fake tree. I can't recommend that book highly enough. I know I always say that. It's become one of my inadvertent catchphrases.

But I can't recommend it highly enough. It's called The Air Year, and it's by Caroline Bird. Brilliant. ¶¶ ¶¶ Thank you. That is the theme from The Dark Is Rising by Handspan, a guy called Rob Colling, who's recorded a whole album of imaginary music from a BBC 70s adaptation of The Dark Is Rising, inspired by the Radiophonic Workshop and by Paddy Kingsland's music for The Changes.

Great. And it's absolutely wonderful. The whole thing is wonderful. We're going to hear a couple of other bits during the course of the show. You can buy it on Bandcamp. Just search for The Dark is Rising and Handspan. And when I mentioned this to you, Robert,

you said this was partly inspired by The Dark is Rising and Handspan. And when I mentioned this to you, Robert, you said this was partly inspired by The Dark is Reading, the big Twitter read-along that happened. When did that happen? I think it was three years ago. I mean, that music is amazing. And we should be clear, shouldn't we, that the 1970s adaptation of The Dark is Rising never existed. Never happened.

Just before everyone starts searching avidly for the for that brilliant lost bbc adaptation it doesn't it doesn't exist so the music is to an imaginary thing it's funny i i'm listening to it i had a big smile on my face but i also had a shiver down my spine that that the kind of undersong of the crows there that that that becomes such crucial birds in The Dark is Rising. But it's so it's like a synth version of a medieval heraldic entry song. And then the Echotron gets it going. And it's a wonderful mashup.

So, yes, I think it was partly sort of boosted on by this huge readathon that we did on Twitter and sort of in real time, as it it were keeping to the the calendar of the dark is rising through through the midwinter and then on through Christmas day and we had so many people involved I think this read-along is an annual event now when does the action of the book take place when can when do people um start reading it and when do they stop reading it well it's so I wasn't the first to to do this I mean this this is a wonderful thing is that people do read this book in real time. Some of them read it annually. Many of your listeners will be partway through this process again. And I think there was an annual readathon already organized by someone on the West Coast of America, which I was blithely unaware of.

So we began to start our own and it came up this fabulous hashtag, the dark is reading, and listeners can still search for that, and this absolute blizzard of content pops up. Will Stanton, our hero, is about to have his 11th birthday on midwinter eve when his life will change. And so we begin the book a little bit before solstice, and then we read on really day by day. But of course, though the calendar ticks on, the landscape through which we're moving

and which we're inhabiting changes drastically. So there is a sort of calendrical time, but then we enter mythic time, and then we end at some point in Advent. Jackie, can you remember when you first read Susan Cooper? I can, partly because I wasn't much of a reader when I was a child, because we didn't have many books in the house. But I remember watching Jackanory. And on Jackanory, they had this Oversea Under Stone story. And I got so caught up in it that I didn't want to wait

till the next day. This is in the days when you had to do that. You couldn't just binge on box sets. So I got pocket money and I went to WH Smiths, which is where we got books at Evesham and I found a copy of Oversea Understone. And I think it must have been out for a while because I managed then to work my way through all of them as they came out. And I don't know why, whether it's just that the book is so strong, but I think it was a summer holiday as well

when I was reading it in Devon, not Cornwall. But, you know it's it it threads close doesn't it all the time little bits of it snag at your life I think that that Jackanory Jackie is one of the ones that they used live they did a bit of live reconstruction with with with actors in it because I have a I have a very dim memory. I think it was in 69, something like that. So I would only have been eight. Yeah.

And Rob was not even a twinkle. I'd never read Oversea Understone before we started preparing for this episode, and it doesn't have a brilliant reputation. I mean, I think Susan Cooper thinks it's slightly silly or undercooked maybe, or she'd learnt more by the time she wrote The Dark is Rising eight years later. But I thought on its own terms it works really well as a kind of five-go-to and have a wicker man adventure it's

pretty uh it's it's pretty unimpeachable really i loved it um robert let me ask you when um when and where were you when you first read the dark is rising or susan or encounter susan cooper for the first time all of them all of them in the summer of 1989 i mentioned this in the introductions to these these Puffin editions, this wonderful Joe McCarran covers. Yeah, I was absolutely terrified by nuclear war. I mean, I know we all were. I'm not claiming special status for that,

but I would come downstairs weeping. The fallout was the end of the world, but not the end of life because you had to live through it. And then 1989 happened, and my dad brought back a little bit of the Berlin Wall, I think, some point later that year, and just this sense that maybe the world wouldn't get blown away. And I would be able to play squash, you know, the Wednesday after next. Oh, God. Yeah, that was what I was really focused on was that was nuclear war's biggest threat to me was it was the end of squash but and

i read them and i did read them partly under the covers and i had a little mini mag light torch and if you remember those which you could sort of unscrew and they would become a candle and i would hold that in my teeth not good for my my incisors and then I and shine the light on the pages and they just I just gulp them down Jackie did you was there a there must have been a bit of a gap then between reading the first one and then moving on to the the later ones yeah there must have been I mean it's that's there doesn't seem to be though But when I reread them this time, I still loved Oversea Understone. But goodness me, when you go into the next one, there is a gear shift, isn't there? Yeah.

And it just settles into your soul so much sweeter, really. I mean, I think it's because of the fact that it's that run-up to Christmas. I mean, I think for a lot of people, I read it in 1974, I suppose. I had the Chateau book. I got it from the school library. I think it's Alan Korber is the illustrator who did that. Oh, they're amazing, amazing covers. I just remember there was a dark

face which you can see like and i i have a feeling i can't remember in my head whether i this was before or after i'd read lord of the rings i really can't but i read it and it was and i think this is going to be the thing that everybody of a certain age says is will stanton was just you wanted to be will stanton i wanted to be will stanton i wanted to be an old one i wanted to have these powers but the way that the family christmas is represented it was important to me that it wasn't a farm so you know we weren't we didn't have a farm either i really wished i lived lived on a farm, but we didn't. We had guinea pigs and they've got rabbits. So it was all my sort of suppressed rural fantasies.

But Will Stanton was exactly that. It's a very kind of small town or village, early 70s Christmas, you know, with the sort of radio and the TV and the tree. So there's a huge amount of nostalgia, I think, around the book and the build-up to the book before the gear change when it suddenly goes wham. I think it's a tribute to Susan Cooper's skill as a writer, actually.

I don't know what you all felt, but rereading them or reading them for this, she manages to make those three children from the first book from undersea oversea understone they're recognizably the same three children in the later books even though they've been parachuted in from a different genre but actually that works really well it's one of the ways in which the five books talk to one another and and and you know i think if you spent all your time in will's company for all five books that would probably be too much too narrow right

my my now eight-year-old is called will um not entirely uncoincidentally and uh i read him uh uh obviously understone and um and it really gripped him so it's still doing i think that's the thing we must sort of say very early on about these books is they just they grip with such force and they millions and millions of readers across what nearly uh 40 40 years 50 years now a year on year they meet it whatever age they are, whatever, growing up in a climate change crisis, in a nuclear crisis, in a Trumpian crisis, whatever your dark, the dark is always rising. And it speaks to them. Let's listen to a clip now.

This is a clip of Susan Cooper herself, which was recorded at a lecture she gave at Pembroke College, Oxford in 2017. And I thought this was really interesting. Here she is talking about how she felt writing the first book and then The Dark is Rising. And we have to remember that when The Dark is Rising was published, there weren't many books around like The Dark is Rising. And I wrote a fantasy that was eventually published by another publisher as Oversea Under Stone. Ten years later, after writing a bunch of other things,

I realised that it was the first in a five-book sequence. And I wrote the next one, and then the next three. This second book was titled The Gift of Grammarie ddwy hwn yn ei enw, Gwth o'r Grameri. Grameri, fel y gwelwch chi, yn ddweud y gwaith oedd yn ddewr. Ond roedd fy edrych yn meddwl bod pobl yn meddwl ei fod yn llyfr am gramera. Felly roeddem yn ei enwi'n ymwneud â'r Ddyfn yn Gwth. Ar y pryd, roedd

nid oedd llawer o ffantasi'n cael ei gyhoeddi, ond pan wnes i'r ysgrifenni, y llyfr, fe wnes i ysgrifennu, There was so little fantasy being published that when I sent the editor the manuscript, I wrote, Dear Margaret, I'm afraid this is a very peculiar book. Well, it is too, I suppose. But as with most fantasy, it depends who's reading it. I gave the manuscript to my husband, who was a professor of metallurgy at MIT. And he said, This is a very good book until that horse starts to fly. That is such a great line.

But I think what I felt was interesting about that, Jackie, is perhaps a flying, you would think it wouldn't be a problem, would you, in 1975, a flying horse? We're much more used to flying horses here in 2020 than perhaps we were in the 1970s. I don't know. No, I don't know. I mean, I can't go back to what I was reading before, really.

The only other books I remember strongly from my childhood are Tarka the Otter and, oh, Alan Garner. Yeah. And then The Call of the Wild. So I can't compare it to anything else like this. And what were the things that you remembered before you reread? You know, if I said to you the dark is rising sequence what were the what are the images what are the characters what's the thing the feeling

of the of the books that you that you retained i'm of an age now where memory is so useful as to be almost absent. So what was really lovely, reading them all again, I thought, shall I just read the one? No, I need to read all of them. I have to have them all. And reading them all again, I have to be honest and say with Oversea Understone, it woke memories that were gone, including how hot summers were then. And they seemed to go on forever.

I lived for the bits in between the end of school and then the start of it, which was disappointing that it happened again for another year. And the one overwhelming image for me is Hearn the Hunter because I fell deeply in love with that character. I didn't want to be Will. I wanted to be Hearn. I wanted to ride with the wild hunts.

I wanted that pack of hounds. I wanted that white horse. And boy, did I covet those antlers. Yeah. And I still do. It's interesting, isn't it robert your backdrop which people can't see is hearn the hunter on the cover of the i suppose the most famous cover really yes the dark is rising michael has not cover yeah he did the 1970s puffin covers and the dark is

rising i mean they're all they're all, but The Dark is Rising is one of, I think it's one of the greatest children's book covers ever designed. Undoubtedly. If you ever meet Max Porte, author of Lanny and Grief is the Thing, if you want to just freeze him, you just hold up that cover or even just mention it and he instantly, his whole body begins to kind of shiver and tremble it's what it's one of the eeriest images i i know full stop and for one of the eeriest novels i know full stop and and the two together we should say it so there's this sort of antlered figure with an owl face i mean all the

his top covers do this wonderful superimposition they they sort of collage work. And then there's a sort of floating ultraviolet crosshair just in the middle of this snowy landscape. This figure is riding towards you out of the cover, out of the winter landscape, out of Christmas. And of course, you can't call Hearn. Hearn isn't evil and Hearn isn't good. Hearn is a force that stands outside the Manichean struggle that preoccupies all five of these books.

That's Jackie coming to wish you happy Christmas. Do not open the door. Robert, let me ask you, we've talked about Will Stanton and we talked about Hearn. And one of the things I think Susan Cooper does in these books, which is so interesting, is the relationship between characters that live on the page and archetypes. Or she would not say myth.

I don't know if she would say myth. I'm not sure. But what is she doing there? What is the relationship between, you know, capturing the child with the fictional character and drawing on a kind of tradition of British mythology and history? Well, I don't know if you mean Merriman particularly, who sort of is and isn't Merlin. I mean, everything flickers in these books. I think that's part of their eeriness, is they look as though they're locked into Manichaeanism, into a sort of opposition, but they never are. Nothing resolves easily. There are forces opposed to one another,

but there is no victory. These are not rewritings of myth, transplantings of Arthurianism, though they've been read as such. And so that eeriness that we keep talking about, I think has to do with this refusal of things to settle. So it goes back, actually, we all sort of laughed, and they laughed in the lecture when Cooper said that, you know, they think it was a book about grammar. But it is a book about grammar. And the fact that grammar and grammary are from the same root

language is magic yeah grammar is magic it has power uh we we utter it for good or for ill grammar sediments and controls uh it is utterance that executes action in the world. And these books are full of grammar in that sense, the magical powers of language spoken, language read. So yes, there is myth here, but there's also this mobile, momentary flicker of the world that's always ongoing in it. Far be it from a man wearing a McFarlane tartan tie to deny the power of the unconscious. to deny the power of the unconscious um but i i want to pick up on on what you just said robert here's susan cooper talking about the relationship between fantasy the genre of fantasy and the unconscious those of us who write fantasy we're not quite normal we see things that aren't there.

We write stories about an ordinary world in which extraordinary things happen. And we don't altogether know what we're doing. It's the hauntings in the unconscious mind of the fantasy writer, not understood or even recognised, that lead him or her to choose fantasy as a medium. It's really not a conscious choice. I've realised over the past 50 years that I seem to be incapable of writing fiction that doesn't express itself through fantasy. It hardly ever works when I try it.

The unconscious is in charge. And it's the unconscious mind of the reader that determines whether or not he or she responds to fantasy. So let me ask you both, first Jackie and then Robert, if you had to categorise The Dark is Rising, is it a children's book? Is it a fantasy book? Is it something else? What is it? It's a book and one of the things that

I find in my work is um it's a curious thing how booksellers like to categorize books and build borders around them as someone who works in the children's book industry I've had writers say are you ever going to write a grown-up book? As if, you know, this is your ambition. You start off as a child and then you grow up, or most of us do. Some of us don't bother. So if you start off writing for children, then you kind of, you get better at writing and then you can write for grown-ups. But actually, these books hold my attention at 59, as they did when I was, I don't know, 8 or 9 or 11. Yeah.

And that might be the most miraculous thing about them. Yeah. I think if you're going to write a book that will talk to so many different ages, that will talk to so many different ages. It's so much harder. The prose that she uses, it's very spare. There's no word wasted. I don't know how edited they were.

It would be lovely to talk to her about the process of it. It's a craftsmanship that she has that is just beautiful. I think that's why I love them. Now I keep thinking, what would I put on the cover? Because it's a strange cover, the Hearn cover. Yes, it is. Because he's so small, he's so slight in the pages, in the written pages, but so strong in the pages in the written pages but so strong in the mythology yeah yeah robert you in your introduction you you've a lovely phrase you say uh these aren't books for children

they're books for people well jackie morris taught me that phrase um so there really should be a footnote to to her um it's wonderful it's a wonderful phrase yeah they're books for people um i i also noticed in the introduction that when you meet a kind of fellow sort of Kuperian or whatever we would be, or a fellow Dark is Risingist, there's almost like the Masonic handshake. You know, you begin a phrase and you say, you know, tonight will be bad. And if they repeat back, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.

You know, when the dark comes rising, six, she'll turn it back three from the circle three. So it absolutely speaks to, to, to, to people. And I think it is, there's this very clear running prose that Jackie spoke of very, very clear watered. I could read, I mean, maybe I could read one of the clearest brightest sections of the book

yes please which really is a Christmas I mean it's a midwinter day section but I think anyone listening on Christmas day and this is the gear shift that Jackie talked about the moment when everything goes strange everything flickers and goes eerie

so Will wakes up on midwinter day in the first shining moment he saw the whole strange familiar world glistening white the roof of the outbuildings mounded into square towers of snow and beyond them all the fields and hedges buried, merged into one great flat expanse, unbroken white to the horizon's brim. Will drew in a long, happy breath, silently rejoicing. Then, very faintly, he heard the music again. The same phrase.

He swung round, vainly searching for it in the air, as if he might see it somewhere, like a flickering light. Where are you? It had gone again. And when he looked back through the window, he saw that his own world had gone with it. In that flash, everything had changed. The snow was there as it had been a moment before, but not piled now on roofs or stretching flat over lawns and fields. There were no roofs. Wild now on roofs or stretching flat over lawns and fields. There were no roofs. There were no fields.

There were only trees. Will was looking over a great white forest, a forest of massive trees, sturdy as towers and ancient as rock. They were bare of leaves, clad only in the deep snow that lay untouched along every branch, each smallest twig. They were everywhere. They began so close to the house that he was looking out through the topmost branches of the nearest tree, could have reached out and shaken them if he dared to open the window. All around him the trees stretched to the flat horizon of the valley. The only break in that

white world of branches was a way over to the south where the Thames ran. You could see the bend in the river, marked like a single still wave in this white ocean of forest, and the shape of it looked as though the river were wider than it should have been. so Now that's another track from Hans Band's imagined soundtrack to The Dark is Rising, and that track is called I Do Not Dance, which if you're familiar with this novel, you'll probably know where that fits. Landscape, Robert.

The bit you read so beautifully, that's to do with landscape. My feeling reading these novels was Susan Cooper uses the relationship with different parts of the British Isles in a way that I, I mean, really only, we've mentioned it before, but really only I can think of Alan Garner doing the same thing. Yeah, I mean, she summons a wildwood there. Suddenly the time slip is absolute, instant. Suddenly the roofs and the fields are gone.

There are no fields because deforestation hasn't happened. There's a white forest of snow-bearing oak stretching all the way to the horizon. The only thing that breaks them is the river. We've gone back 8,000 years to an impossible forest. I think she's part of a great tradition of landscape writers, as I think of them, who are also writers of fantasy. And that is Ellen Garner. It's Susan Cooper. It's Robert Holdstock, who's probably one of the lesser known of these. If you ever want to do a Lavondis or a Mythago wood on here, I'd be very interested to talk about that. And actually, I think Philip Pullman is part of it as well, because Oxford is a landscape. And the ability to use a subtle knife and slice time open, as Susan Cooper does there, and then just step through it. What I didn't read, of course, is that Will, as one does,

if the snow falls and you wake up first and you see that brightness around the curtains, you rush to wake up your brother or your sister or your mother or your father, but no one will wake in Will's house. Yes, that's really elemental, I felt in my reading. I don't know what you thought, Jackie. The way, certainly in The Darkest Rising and in The Late Knowles, the way in which parents and family and friends can be suspended or removed leaving you with just your wits to rely on i mean i found that i think i would have found that scary as a as a child i don't know

yeah but how many times would you love to be able to do that as an adult. What, turn people off? Suspend them? That's enough of you now. That's one of the things I loved about these was that slipping through time. I so wanted to be able to do that. I would love to see Britain as it used to be many years ago. But I'd like to come back to some central heating,

so I want to move between the two. British fantasy writers tend instead to have a very strong sense of time and place. This is Susan Cooper talking about exactly this, about the relationship between place and time. Added to that compost heap that feeds the imagination. We're given it by these islands that are so soaked in their centuries of human occupation. Robert McFarlane writes about it beautifully. When I was growing up, the past was all around me.

I could see Windsor Castle from my bedroom window. On my way to school, I passed a hummock that was an Iron Age fort. One day, a local farmer who was ploughing a pasture found himself digging up a Roman pavement. All over Britain, our cities and our buildings and our countryside are full of echoes. over Britain, our cities and our buildings and our countryside are full of echoes. And along with the imaginative awareness of time goes this strong sense of place, especially where Alan Garner and I are concerned. Alan's work is rooted in the part of Cheshire which produced generations of his family and where he still lives. And the Dark is Rising sequence belongs to the part of Buckinghamshire

where I grew up and to the piece of Gwynedd in Wales where my grandmother was born and where my parents spent the last 20 years of their lives. These were my places, etched into my imagination from childhood. And it made no difference that I was writing about them from the other side of the Atlantic, having by then married an American and moved to New England. I was writing out of what the Welsh call here a yearning homesickness that never goes away. a yearning homesickness that never goes away.

Remarkable. That is precisely what I responded to in this sequence more than almost anything else because we emigrated to New Zealand in 1976. So all my puffins have got little, you can see they've got little New Zealand dollar signs on. So these books were my connection, vital connection with that sense of Englishness and of place. I'm sure like you, Jackie, each year there would be a new one. And I mean, it was the thing that I looked forward to more than anything else.

And hearing you read that snow passage, Robertbert it is it's one of the it's one of the great passages i think in 20th century uh children's literature is it's people's literature as we call it on backlisted literature yeah you can get that uh sense of her right as well for the pages of the book. I think it is when you rediscover these books and realise that they speak to you as much now as they did when you were to the child that's still inside you. That kind of ache to be back in the pages of them, that's her right as well. It's really interesting thinking of her as an exile writer yes actually um you know we think she's thought of as such an english writer but actually she's an she's an exile writer and you're an exile in space john but we're all exiles from our

childhoods that's that's the one exile that's the one journey we all make and so we're looking back into to that that you know the country we we can't cross the border into. And Will Stanton, he's the go-between. He can make that journey for us. There's a wonderful phrase from early 20th century archaeology, shadow sites. And this was when archaeology was starting to get broken open by the technological dream vision of aerial photography. So suddenly you could look down onto the landscape from above. You could see the pattern in the carpet. You could see the hill fort that you can't walk up because you're too close to it at six feet above it. But when you're 600 feet above it, you can see the shape in the land. Shadow sites were so-called because when the light was low in winter, midwinter light, nice low light, it set the shadows long across even low patterns in the landscape.

And so archaeology became a way of sort of seeing shadow sites. And that was the time travel which perspective made possible. And I think she does, she shows us the shadow sites in this book. And suddenly we move back into the Neolithic, back into realms we've back into the and into realms we've never even seen before um i'm gonna read you what i think must be k webb from puffin k webb's blurb for the dark is rising from the 70s puffin edition not from the back cover because they've simplified it but i just want to

i just want to share this with you because whenever we've done one of these books on backlisted we found that those do you remember john when we did a long way from verona by jane garden uh one of the things that k webb had written is this book is suitable for girls and sensitive boys over the age of 12. We were those soldiers. We were those soldiers. So this is what Kay Webb wrote. And then, Jackie, I think we'll then come to your reading.

Four days to Christmas. So why couldn't Will feel happy, especially as the snow he always wanted on his midwinter birthday was really coming this time. But things seemed out of key this midwinter's eve, as if someone was trying to tell him something in a language he couldn't understand. Animals seemed afraid when he came near them, and there was even something frightening about the snow-filled sky. And whatever made that tramp take one look at him and scuttle off in such terror?

Even his friend Mr Dawson the farmer made things worse, staring as if he could see something in him that Will didn't know about, and earnestly pressing that queer iron talisman on him, as if it might save him from some deadly peril. It's a horrible day, said Will suddenly. It's creepy. And he was right. This was no ordinary snow and no ordinary Christmas. Later, he began to understand the strange otherworldly fate that had destined him from birth, seventh son of a seventh son as he was, to be an old one, a more than human link in the fight between light and the ever-invading forces of darkness in the world. Who's ever had his blurb written as well as that

for any of their books? Not me, that's for sure. Absolutely brilliant. First class. It's a nice one. It's a chime child, isn't it? A seventh son of a seventh son. Is it?

I like a chime. Jackie, have you chosen a passage you'd like to read for us? I did. And this is from The Darkest Rising and is the betrayal chapter, The Dark is Rising and is the betrayal chapter, which doesn't begin with betrayal and has much about it that is what I feel when I read books. I'm always fascinated by how people read and how these little symbols translate into stories.

So, Will was never able afterwards to tell how long he spent with the book of Grammarie. So much went into him from its pages and changed him that the reading might have taken a year, yet so totally did it absorb his mind that when he came to an end, he felt that he had only that moment begun. It was indeed not a book like other books. There were simple enough titles of each page, of flying, of challenge, of words of power, of resistance, of time through doors. But instead of presenting him with a story or instruction, the book would give simply a snatch of verse or a bright image which somehow had him instantly in the midst of whatever experience was involved he might read no more than one line i have journeyed

as an eagle and he was soaring suddenly aloft as if winged learning through feeling feeling the way of resting on the wind and tilting around the rising column of air of sweeping and soaring looking down at patchwork green hills kept with dark trees and a winding glinting river between and he knew as he flew that the eagle was one of the only five birds who could see the dark and instantly he knew the other four and in turn he was each of them and 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 guanabi and will was up on that bare crag of a rock above the world resting without fear on a grey black glittering shelf of granite, and his

right side leaned against a soft gold-feathered leg and a folded wing, and his hand rested beside a cruel steel-hard claw, while in his ear a harsh voice whispered the words that would control wind and storm, sky and air, cloud and rain, and snow and hail, and everything in the sky save the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars. Yeah. Oh, don't stop. So great. Brilliant.

She quotes in that lecture Tolkien saying, and I love this, it's so simple, but it's so exactly what that passage shows. She puts the reader into the writer's dream. And I think that sense of being completely convincing that she quotes the American librarian as well, Lillian Smith, about creative imagination saying, it's more than mere invention. It is that power that creates out of abstractions life. It goes to the heart of the unseen and puts that which is so mysteriously hidden from ordinary mortals into the clear light of their understanding, or at least of their partial understanding. think that's so i think that's so exactly what she does and it's interesting isn't it you get this idea that that you know

you're saying andy that there weren't many fantasy novels at that time but that that group of people around at the same time alan garner should mention penelope lively should mention diana win jones and then as as robert, going on to Pullman. The thing that is fascinating to me when you think about manichaeism and light and dark is that they were all children of the Second World War. So they'd all grown up with this unstable, threatening, you know, real jeopardy. Beyond that, the jeopardy that most children feel. We had something else with mythic overtones too, a very strong sense of good and evil,

and that came from a more direct source than books. It was all around us because we were living through World War II, which began when I was five years old. Our world was noisy and dangerous, things that we took for granted because children know nothing but the life that surrounds them. My family's house was 25 miles outside London, between the A40 and the main railway line to the west.

This was an area so attractive to German bombers that an anti-aircraft post had been set up at the end of our road, which of course attracted the bombers even more. Our air raid shelter was in the back lawn. At the beginning of the war, everybody's dad had lifted up the grass, dug a big hole, lined it with the curved sheets of corrugated iron issued by the government, and put the earth and the grass back on top. So into this cave we dived when the air raid siren wailed and the bombers

came rumbling overhead. Generally it was at night, and our mother read stories to my brother yn ymgysylltu o'i llaw. Yn gyffredinol roedd yn y nos ac roedd ein mam yn darllen storïau i'r ffrind a fi gan ffynu llythyr a chynnydd y llythyr yn llythyr bob tro bod bomb wedi cwmio. Os byddwch yn byw fel hyn fel blant ac os oes gennych ddychmyg pwerfod, mae'n ymwneud â'r ffordd y byddwch yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eich bod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael eichod yn cael e It's a fair bet that you will be unwittingly haunted forever by the threat of those bombs. So they become an image of them against us, evil against good, dark versus the light. Imagine how many children there are in this situation today in the Middle East. in the middle east yeah well i i mean she's such a she's a story a storyteller of storytelling isn't she that was a story about stories um i i was lucky enough to hear her i met her um last year you know back in the the old world. And she came to hear her. We've been corresponding for years now.

It's one of the great privileges and joys of my life. And she came to a reading I was doing. And at the end, I sort of looked across this slightly clearing room and I saw this figure at the back of the room. And she just, she is an old one. I mean, she just, is an old one i mean she just there's just she just it couldn't have been anyone other than than susan cooper who is at least eight you know has lived eight eight eight centuries and eight lives and seen seen many worlds and and we we

had dinner that night with kate her daughter and friends and she told me that story and she did this amazing thing with her finger her finger became the candle flame that was shivering. And as the bombs fell, they would boom, boom. Her finger would quiver. And then she said, you know, as the bombs came nearer, the flame quivered more. This was a sense of absolute proximate closing in, rising and yeah it's it puts a shiver down my spine just to remember her telling that well we talked about how can you how can we're all in exile from

our childhoods and reading is one way we can find our way back but another way is of course music from television series we may have seen at an impressionable moment Thank you. Ooh, there's a lot of radiophonic workshop on this show. Which is a callback to our Doctor Who episode and forward to our first episode next year, but we can't say what it is yet, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Robert, do you want to tell us, you requested that. Well, it's The Box of Delights,

and John Macefield's great Christmas novel, another that's reread by many, many people annually, and it's from the classic BBC adaptation. And Macefield is the beginning, really, the early 20th century beginning of the tradition that we spoke about earlier. And he grew up in a Herefordshire of travelling mummers' plays and eerie stories brought to the village by outsiders we spoke about earlier and he was he was grew up in a herefordshire of traveling mama's plays and

and sort of eerie stories brought to the village by outsiders and told briefly before they move on and it's all there it's all there in the box delights and wolves and snow and landscape shifting yeah cooper cooper is in that tradition too i i found it very interesting watching the box of delights again certainly cooper is yeah there's's, I don't say there's a debt owed. I think she would acknowledge that debt, but the links between The Box of Delights and The Dark is Rising seem pretty, like the snow, it's a winter look. Jackie, one of the things about The Dark is Rising,

it's a great story of winter and Christmas. Are there other books that have the same feel as this one? I have three that I love very much by Susan Price. And I can never remember which order they come in. It's Ghost Dance, Ghost Song and Ghost Drum, which are out of print. And I have no idea why. They're wrapped around Nordic and Russian myths and the iron tree and shamanism,

and they are just beautiful. And then more recently, I started reading a book a couple of years ago now, I think, called Bear and the Nightingale, which wasn't packaged as a children's book. It's fantastic. It's beautiful, snowy, Russian folklore and fairy tale. It's deeply sexy and rather gorgeous.

What more could you want from it? and rather gorgeous. What more could you want, really? And, Robert, the idea of this as a winter book, the fact that it isn't just a straightforward Christmas book, you know, it manages to encompass traditions which are Christian and otherwise. Are there other books other than The Box of Delights that do that?

Well, I think it's worth distinguishing, as I do every year. I hate Christmas. I despise Christmas. Loads of it. Odious festival. But the solstice, the winter solstice, now that is the date. The day of shortest light and longest dark, the hinge of the year. For me, it is every year the most hopeful day because you know that the dark is no longer rising.

The light grows from that point on until that hideous moment in June, Midsummer Eve, when it all tilts back in the other direction. For me, this isn't a Christmas book at all. This is a solstice book. This is a solstice book. This is a midwinter book. I feel the same, but in reverse. I dread the coming of summer. So I love this bit. This is the dark.

I do love the dark as well. I live in a place with no streetlights. And when I moved here, it was the first time I really understood moon shadows and seeing that coming and going of the moon and how the Milky Way becomes brighter. the Milky Way becomes brighter. And the one uneasiness, I guess, for books like this is when the birds are the kind of bad omens and the wild woods are not places to go and you mustn't step off the path into the wild woods because that's when the bad gets you. But it's been really strange rereading them since meeting Robert because I didn't realise that your whole working life

was quite so shaped by these books, really. Yeah. With The Old Ways. The Old Ways, for sure. Yeah, and the spell books with the words spoken. I love that. Grammar and Grammarie. I mean, yeah, The Old Ways Lane, The Hallowed Track, The Hollow Ways. the words spoken i love that grammar and grammar i mean yeah the old old ways lane the hallowed the

hallowed track the hollow ways it's all i mean these books just they they they created my the landscape of much of my young imagination and mind yeah this is why i think we have to be so careful as people who write for children, for people, because we shape readers of the future, really. You know, if we can hook younger minds into reading, if we can give them books that are full of light and help them to question their being and their ways, I think that's good because, you know,

you look at how these have built your world. It's amazing. When I began, children's literature wasn't literature. It was assumed to be books for kiddy winks. The stranger was likely to say, oh, you write children's books? What fun. Do you draw your own pictures?

Today the stereotype has changed. A great many adults came across Harry Potter and the Hunger Games and the Twilight series and the successful films made out of them. So crossover reading set in

and the publisher's estimate of the upper limit of young adults has risen now from 18 years old to 25. The popular opinion of the children's author has become a little less dismissive because so many grown-ups have discovered us. Because so many grown-ups have discovered us. Well, I'd like you to pick up on that, you know, because so many adults have discovered us. You know, what this book means in 2020 is perhaps both the same and very different from what it meant when it was published. You know, communal read-alongs

and changes, sociological changes that Susan Cooper was just talking about there. What does this book, Jackie, let me ask you first, you've reread all these books in this particular year. What do they have to offer us in 2020? have to offer us in 2020? I think we're living through incredibly challenging times. Can I answer by reading that I've got this passage here from The Grey King? Yeah.

Yes, please. So, Will picked up a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him it shone bright yellow in his grubby hands people are very complicated he said sadly so they are john roland said his voice deepened a little louder and clearer than it had been but when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it's all so complicated and I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world, our world.

He whistles softly. Tell him I'm pen, tip. Carefully, he picked up his loop of barbed wire, and with the dogs following, he walked away beside the fence and over the hill. And I think it is a hard world. My daughter is at the moment living in Germany and facing very different circumstances

than she might have been facing um it's where she's chosen to live for now she's a world wanderer and uh I would so love worlds without borders books without borders as well so no classifications. Robert, 2020. Did revisiting this book, these books in 2020 feel different? Hugely, hugely. Two ways. I mean, the book narrows down to a house around which the storm is scurrying, the snow is building, the dark is scrabbling to get in.

We have all been pitched back into our dwellings and we know there's an enemy prowling out there and we can't see it and we don't know its ways and it's trying to get in and get us. Everything has become suspicious. The air has become suspicious. We can't share air any longer without mistrusting those we meet. Anyone can be a Maggie because anyone might be a bearer.

And the second thing is that the landscape changed. There's that line that I read. When he looked back through the window, he saw that his own world had gone with it. In that flash, everything had changed. That's what we all woke up to. Every landscape was changed. Everything we knew was different.

All the landmarks had shifted. A snow had fallen and the world was changed. Everything we knew was different. All the landmarks had shifted. The snow had fallen, and the world was different. So, happy Christmas, everybody. Happy Christmas. Well, folks, as we like to say on Backlisted, when the dark comes rising, five shall turn it back. But now the hour has come for us to say farewell to the lands of men for another year and move beyond time. But first, a heartfelt thank you to Jackie and Robert

for the spells they've woven, to Nicky for joining all five of us as one, and to Unbound for being the first to hang silver on our tree. I hope everybody's noticed all the bells in this episode. Church bells at the beginning and then some

radiophonic bells there, courtesy of Handspan again. Handspan, it's on Bandcamp. It's so great. I've been playing it all week. You can download all 126 previous episodes of Backlisted plus follow links, clips and suggestions

for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We aim to survive without paid-for advertising.

Your generosity helps us do that. All patrons get to hear Backlisted at episodes early. And for much less than the price of a puffin box set, they get two extra lock listed a month that enchanted circle where we three go to listen watch read and tell tales in the old tongue we'd like to wish all our listeners a very happy christmas and thank you for the incredible support financial and otherwise thank you that you have shown Backlisted during this most difficult of years. We wouldn't be here without you.

Jackie, I'm going to ask you to wish everybody listening to this a very Merry Christmas. Very happy Christmas to all of you. We're going to play out with a song that Robert suggested. Robert, would you like to say something about this before we cue it up? Well, if the BBC ever does get into making an adaptation of The Dark is Rising in the series, which it really should, commissioning editors, yes, voices are raised in song here,

then I think I would love Johnny Flynn to write the music for it, possibly with me collaborating on the words. But anyway, that's... You heard it here first, folks. What a musician he is. And here is, I think, one of his most Cooper-ish songs from his last album, Silly, and it's called Hard Road. This was recorded, as Robert referred to, the old times.

This was recorded in 2017 at the Roundhouse in Camden in front of a big room full of people. And so we thought we'd share this version with you. Merry Christmas wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whoever you're with, and thank you for listening. Merry Christmas. Yeah, Merry Christmas, everybody. On road under the night sky Keep on traveling, very well

On road under the night sky Keep on traveling Fare thee well, my love On road, under the night sky Keep on traveling Fare thee well When the dark comes rising, six shall turn it back. Three from the circle, three from the track. Wood, bronze, iron, water, fire, stone. Five will return, and one go alone. Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long.

Wood from the burning, stone out of song. Fire in the candle ring, water from the burning Stone out of song Fire in the candle ring Water from the thaw Six signs the circle And the grail gone before Fire on the mountain Shall find the harp of gold Played to wake the sleepers

Oldest of the old Power from the green witch Lost beneath the sea All shall find the light at last, Silver on the tree.