I was reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence over most of the vacation, and specifically The Grey King, the day I went to see The Magic Flute. At first I was struck by the similarities: two boys on a quest, helped by a magic instrument; mazes leading to vast halls where men in robes sit in chairs and ask riddles. (OK, no riddles in TMF; but it feels like an omission.) One boy committed to abstractions, the other not. I could go on, but really the similarities are all archetypes, so (on further thought) they don't seem so striking. But the comparison did make me realize that Cooper's Papageno/Sancho Panza/Dr. Watson is not true to type: he's an orphan, an albino (much is made of his startling appearance), and a prickly character; everyone's slightly afraid of him at first. This means that when he complains that the quest entails too much suffering, his protests have an authority that the protests of the jollier sidekicks lack. (Or maybe not? Sancho Panza is a man of the world compared to Don Quixote, isn't he?) And Cooper allows her hero to be outrageously tactless — it's extraordinary that when faced with the forces of evil he knows exactly what to do and say, but is tone deaf to human grief. Or at least very clumsy. I thought it was well done.
Reading these books I remembered my childhood obsession with Old English and Welsh. There's actually a line of Old English in The Dark Is Rising, and now that I've taken a course in Old English, I can read it!