While time displacement and animated toys aer significantly more prominent in fantasy for children, secondary-world fantasy is less original and shows more similarities with the mainstream. After Tolkine’s The hobbit(1937),published as a children’s book,and C.S.Lewis’s Naeria novels (see Chapter 5), which closely follow the Romantic tradition of the innocent chosen child, the most consistent secondary world addressed to a young audience appears in the American Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles(1964-8). Based on the mrdieval Welsh myth collection The Mabinogion,the series features the archetypal hero of unknown parentage destined to save the world from evil. The ending is similar to Tolkien’s epic, as the magic forces abandon the world, leaving it to humans to attend to their matters. The hero is given the choice of remaining or fellow wizards.
The construction of the alternative world is still more subtle in Susan Cooper’s series The Dark is Rising (1965-77). Their sources in the Arthurian legends, the five quest novels both bring magic into the everyday and contain parallel worlsd and times with boundaries barely tangible. An ordinary eleven-year-old boy discovering on his eleventh birthday that he si a powerful magician is a distinct forerunner to Harry Potter. Will Stanton, however,is involed both in the struggle against evil in the world of magic and in protecting the real world from drak forces. The threat of evil magic penetrating into the everyday is a token of later fantasy for children (cf.the discussion of Alan Garner’s works in Chapter 20). Cooper’s Seaward (1983) presents the alternative world as an inner landscape, a mindscape, all the more elaborate as it is shared by the two protagonists, a boy and a girl, adding the gender-related experience of the fantasy world ostensibly based on the diverse male/female initiation and maturation patterns.