LogFAQs > #927089464

WhiskeyDisk posted...

the Dark is Rising prophecy poem is pretty much burned into my memory as hard as the inscription on the One Ring to Rule Them All...

While I know this is relatively meaningless on the Internet, the following is more impressive if you believe me when I say I typed it entirely from memory, without online or offline reference of any kind:

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 from the candle-ring, Water from the thaw,
The 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 deep beneath the sea,
And all shall find the Light at last, Silver on the Tree.



I am, shall we say, somewhat invested in these books.

(The second poem is a little harder, though, because the first part doesn't really rhyme. I can do that one too, though.)

It's part of what made the fecal abortion so repugnant to me when I saw it. It wasn't merely bad, if was offensively bad. I feel like wars have been fought over lesser insults. To this day, I might classify it as the worst film the human race has ever produced - and that's saying something, because we've managed to shit out quite a number of hot turds over the last century or so.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

I didn't finish the series and honestly don't remember much of it. For whatever reason, I guess I was never that "into" it.

It was one of the series that, when Harry Potter first started hitting big, literate people were like "Oh yeah, The Dark is Rising is that series that JK Rowling stole a bunch of her ideas from." Unfortunately, because it's older and a bit more obscure, and because Harry Potter tripped over its dick into global fame, now annoying Harry Potter fans just accuse everything else of stealing ideas from Harry Potter - even stuff like The Dark is Rising or the Unseen University in Discworld that existed years (if not decades) before JK Rowling wrote a single line.

It will probably have less of an impact on an adult reading it for the first time in 2019 than it would on a 12-year old reading it in the mid-1980s, but it's got a similar "young boy discovers he's secretly been a wizard and the fate of the world is going to be in his hands" vibe, along with a "there's been a magical war being fought behind the scenes for all of human history, and humans have been kept ignorant of the details, but now crazy shit is about to go down and a handful of kids are pretty much going to determine the future of the entire world" sort of premise.

The books sort of alternate between protagonists - the first book has three relatively normal kid protagonists and sort of skirts the line on just how much actual supernatural shit is really going on, but the second book switches to the boy wizard archetype character and the series as a whole leaps off a cliff directly into "Oh, ALL of the supernatural shit is going on."

There's also heavy references to Arthurian myth, and the whole thing is very, very British (Cornwall and Wales are the setting of two books each, and the other book is set around the outskirts of London). Which may or may not make the book harder or easier for you to get into. As might the fact that the point-of-view characters are mostly British kids growing up in the 1960s/1970s. It might be harder to relate to them now, or it might not.
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