George MacDonald

This volume offers essays on a variety of aspects of the inter-related topics of “hiddenness” and “discovery”: literary, biographical, philosophical, and source study. The Inklings that are examined in this anthology are C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield, with two of their literary predecessors and influences that are included under the term “Inklings” in this anthology: G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Readers will find new territory for further exploration of C. S. Lewis and the Inklings in the areas of 1) creative collaboration among the Inklings; 2) genres (for example, the penny dreadful, Christian liturgical poetry); 3) literary influences (H. G. Wells, Dante); 4) linguistics (Tolkien’s “web of words”); and 5) the convergence of literature and theology. Other areas, which readers would find interesting, are medieval cosmology, classical mythology and Nordic mythology in Lewis’s and Tolkien’s works (the pagan mythology of the Greeks and Romans, and the Nordic myth of Ragnarök). Consequently, Lewis’s A Discarded Image was studied by several contributors to substantiate his knowledge on the medieval cosmos.

Three fantasy novels that use the shadow in coming-of-age tales are George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), and J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911). In each of these works, a young protagonist interacts with his shadow-self at a critical junction in life. Two are successful in transitioning toward maturity. Peter Pan is famously “the boy who wouldn’t grow up”. Although all three works feature a manifested shadow, each differs on the shadow’s meaning and the best way to cope with it, reflecting each author’s own ideas about the nature of our inner monsters and their role in reaching maturity.

In the fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials, by CS Lewis and Philip Pullman respectively, the authors use symbols and themes from Paradise Lost. Each author's narrative choice uses his view of cosmic order to persuade readers that ...

This is a unique collection of two of the Inklings and their literary associates’ views on the negative impacts of technology in various areas of life and the resolution of these impacts through fellowship with others and faith in the Creator. Some of these essays offer suggestions on how ensnarement by social media and surrender to modern technology can be countered by surrender to God. Other essays also demonstrate how the significant literary craft of these authors can enchant readers and invite them into fairylands from which they return empowered and with a keener spiritual vision to tackle universal and present concerns.

Además de caracterizarse por numerosos progresos científicos y tecnológicos, la época victoriana fue también un momento de injusticias y desigualdades sociales. Ante la opresión y el exceso de confianza en la razón como única forma de interpretar el mundo, muchos autores recurrieron a la fantasía como medio a través del cual relacionarse con esta realidad convulsa y cambiante. La comparación de las obras de George MacDonald (Lilith y Phantastes), y Christina Rossetti (‘Goblin Market’), permitirá ilustrar dos diferentes usos sociales de lo fantástico victoriano: la instrucción moral y la crítica social, por un lado, y la subversión, por otro. A través de estos dos ejemplos se mostrará cómo, lejos de constituir un modo de escapismo, la literatura fantástica victoriana adquiere un carácter subversivo (en el sentido en que lo han interpretado autoras como Irene Bessiere y Rosemary Jackson), y llega a ser empleada como crítica social. Se observará cómo ambos autores recurren a la liminalidad de lo fantástico, que apunta al carácter fronterizo y marginal del género. Al servicio de esta liminalidad se encuentran motivos como el espejo y la puerta, que, gracias a su poderosa simbología, desarrollan una larga tradición en la literatura fantástica. Esta comparación, finalmente, ayudará a demostrar cómo en muchas ocasiones los diferentes usos subversivos de lo fantástico se nutren de las mismas estrategias literarias.

In recent years, many of George MacDonald’s narrative, poetic, critical and theological works have been made available in digital formats — which has opened up new possibilities for investigating these works. The aim of the present paper is to explore some of the new possibilities by approaching George MacDonald’s literary works using a quantitative method of stylistic research that has recently been termed “corpus stylistics”.

While the rise in interdisciplinary studies has facilitated an overdue reassessment of the writings of Victorian author George MacDonald, the spiritual potential of bereavement and grief in MacDonald’s stories is scarcely discussed. This paper will explore two of MacDonald’s short stories from a theological framework, using a literary analysis of the motif of the embrace of the dead infant to explore how the stories present a sacramental theology of grief.

The Corpus-stylistic Approach: Ways and Means In recent years, many of George MacDonald’s narrative, poetic, critical and theological works have been made available in digital formats —which has opened up new possibilities for investigating these works. The aim of the present paper is to explore some of the new possibilities by approaching George MacDonald’s literary works using a quantitative method of stylistic research that has recently been termed “corpus stylistics” (Sinclair 2007; Mahlberg 2007b). This paper’s main inspiration is drawn from examples such as Stubbs’s (2005) and Mahlberg’s (2007a) corpus-stylistic analyses of works by Joseph Conrad and Charles Dickens, respectively. Corpus stylistics itself is a relatively young discipline that is based on the analysis of literature and literary style by means of tools originally developed by linguists for empirical language research. The most important of these tools are large collections of texts or parts of texts in computer-...

George MacDonald’s "The Light Princess" details representation of the female coming-of-age body, mature body, and aging, menopausal body to reveal how his modern fairy tale both utilizes and exposes long-standing social codes imposed on female’s reproductive capacity. Furthermore, in his depiction of Makemnoit—the bitter and aged woman who wreaks havoc on the kingdom’s water supply—MacDonald’s narrative illustrates cultural fears surrounding menopausal or reproductively atypical women. Utilizing the frightening female archetype, MacDonald’s fairy tale highlights long-standing cultural fears within society while noting the pressures placed upon Victorian females to fulfill stereotypically ideological gender roles.

Nesta breve apresentação do livro "George Macdonald and His Wife", de Greville Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton consegue, em poucas linhas, (a) dar seu testemunho pessoal do papel decisivo exercido por Macdonald em sua própria formação; (b) traçar em linhas gerais as características da obra do escritor escocês; (c) enfatizar a importância mística e histórica de George Macdonald em contraste com o ambiente puritano; (d) fala da imaginação sacramental levada a cabo pelo autor de "A princesa e o goblin".

Table of Contents
Preface by Emily E. Auger
In Memoriam: Nancy-Lou Patterson by Janet Brennan Croft
Editorial Notes

The Descent: Models, Motifs, and Milieus
1. The Chthonic in Women's Spirituality
2. Kore Motifs in The Princess and the Goblin
3. Archetypes of the Mother in the Fantasies of George MacDonald
4. Death by Landscape

The Others: Celts, Dragons, Psychopomps, and a Whatsit
5. "Bright-Eyed Beauty": Celtic Elements in Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis
6. The Dragons of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis by Nancy-Lou Patterson [with additions by Emily E. Auger]
7. "Homo Monstrosus": Lloyd Alexander's Gurgi and the Shadow Figures of Fantastic Literature
8. Angel and Psychopomp in Madeleine L'Engle's "Wind" Trilogy

The Mythopoeic: Art, Classroom, and Exhibition
9. Emily Carr's Forest
10. J.R.R. Tolkien: Art and Literature from Middle-earth ["Lord of the Rings" by A.M. MacQuarrie and "J.R.R. Tolkien by Nancy-Lou Patterson]
11. Art in the English Classroom: An Interdisciplinary Approach
12. Tree and Leaf: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Visual Image
13. An Appreciation of Pauline Baynes
14. Magic Realism in Canada

Nancy-Lou Patterson's Mythopoeic Drawings: A Compilation by Emily E. Auger and Janet Brennan Croft with commentary and annotations selected by Emily E. Auger

George MacDonald’s Lilith was first published in 1895, towards the end of the Victorian era in England, and the novel’s entangled fictional worlds and unconventional narration has since drawn the attention of common readers and scholars alike. This essay strives to show how Lilith’s subversive use of first-person narration, which defies the life/death binary, fractures the literary illusion of the narrator as an independent voice. The essay further maintains that this textual subversion is the fundamental rupture in the consistency of the plot, which essentially sends the reader on a quest to find other authority figures in order to fill this void. By employing the terminology of Ronald Barthes and Michel Foucault, the essay argues that the death of the narrator compels the reader to rethink the death of the author.

Scottish novelist George MacDonald, known today predominantly for his fantasy writings, was a significant figure in Victorian literary, theological, and urban-reform circles. He portrayed Aberdeen, London, Manchester, and various fantastic cities in his works, making the case for communal, Christ-inspired relationships among city inhabitants as a solution to urban misery, alienation, and social problems.

MacDonald wrote nearly 40 novels for adults and children, six books of poetry, and five collections of sermons, as well as critical studies and collections of essays of literary criticism. While MacDonald’s innovative fantasies, including Phantastes (1858), The Light Princess (1864, in Adela Cathcart), The Golden Key (1867, in Dealings with the Fairies), At the Back of the North Wind (1871a), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The Princess and Curdie (dated 1883), and Lilith (1895), have garnered the largest share of critical attention, many of MacDonald’s three-volume novels are undervalued and would amply repay the interest of scholars writing on literature and the city. Aberdeen and London figure significantly in MacDonald’s writing and Manchester, where MacDonald lived from 1853 to 1856, also influenced his work.

This thesis analyzes George MacDonald’s realist novels. It looks at how David Elginbrod, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Lilith engage with scientific discourse and epistemological concerns of the period. These scientific and epistemological dealings include a positive evaluation of evolution, a resistance to pseudoscience and Calvinism, an endorsement of non-dualism, and an analysis of scientific models and methods. The generic classification of Lilith as a realist novel with fantastical elements is discussed.

Charles Dodgson had a close and long-standing friendship with the family of George MacDonald.  When they first met in 1859, they already had several mutual friends and were both influenced by the thinking of F. D.  Maurice.
When Lewis Carroll wrote down Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the MacDonald children were the first audience to hear the manuscript read aloud. They responded enthusiastically and MacDonald encouraged Carroll not only to publish but to lengthen the narrative.
This paper is written with two aims. The first is to examine how the friendship of these two very different men developed to the extent that Dodgson was absorbed into the MacDonald family as ‘Uncle Dodgson’. The second is to briefly investigate the resulting cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences, which found their way into the writing of both authors, through parallels, parodies and the exploration of dawning self-knowledge as their protagonists journey towards maturity.

This essay compares Andrew Lang's and J.R.R. Tolkien's opinions regarding primary belief (religious belief) and secondary belief (literary belief--Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" [Biographia Literaria]) and points out points of overlap. In "On Fairy-stories," which was first given as the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Tolkien attempts to set right a misunderstanding held by many nineteenth-century writers, including Andrew Lang, about the type of faith early creators of fantasy had in their own marvelous stories. Lang had written that early fantasy creators must have believed in the possibility of the marvels they recounted because they were "were much like children in their minds" (Green Fairy Book Preface). Tolkien demurred. Despite this disagreement, a closer analysis of the two men's works shows that both men were peculiarly concerned with the distinction between primary and secondary belief. Andrew Lang's actual beliefs about fairy tales' literary value, children's responses to fairy stories, and contemporary understandings of miracle were closer to Tolkien's than Tolkien knew. When Tolkien reacted negatively to Lang's apparent views of child fairy-story readers and childish credulity in secondary world marvels, as described in Lang's fairy-book prefaces, Tolkien was responding to Lang at his most hasty and inconsistent. Using archival and recently digitized sources on Andrew Lang alongside Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson's Tolkien on Fairy-stories, which includes the manuscripts of Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories," this essay contextualizes Andrew Lang's work, details the extent of his influence on Tolkien, and explains the ways in which Tolkien misinterpreted Lang. However, this essay also points out that this misinterpretation of Lang may only interest Victorianists: as far as the later reception history of the fairy story and the romance goes, Lang's perceived views have been more important than his actual views. For both Lang and Tolkien, however, despite Tolkien's carefulness (in "On Fairy-stories") in working out these questions of genre, and Lang's occasional carelessness, the distinction between primary and secondary belief would remain a lasting challenge.

A collaborative concert at Chichester Council Assembly Rooms, staged on 2nd November 2017 by the University of Chichester Departments of Music, and English & Creative Writing, under the auspices of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, as part of the “Arthur Rackham in Sussex” 150th Birthday celebrations – in conjunction with exhibitions held at Bateman’s (National Trust, East Sussex).

UNDINE PERFORMANCE:
1pm on Saturday 16 September
Assembly Rooms, 82 North Street, Chichester PO19 1LQ.

ABSTRACT

‘Of all fairy tales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful’ - George MacDonald

This one-off musical performance of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine follows the story of the romance between a water-sprite Undine and the Knight Huldbrand. The tale had a profound influence on the 19th century, inspiring operas, ballets and adaptations, including Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and Dvořák’s Rusalka, as well the imagination of Arthur Rackham.

This performance will retell the narrative of Undine, interspersed with some of the most iconic musical versions of the story, all set against Arthur Rackham’s definitive illustrations. This multimedia concert is led and co-ordinated by Victoria Leslie with composer Jonathan Little, and collates various musical treatments of the Undine story interspersed with Rackham's illustrations of Undine and with spoken word.

A University research symposium and musical performance hosted in Chichester on Saturday 16 September will continue the celebrations with a focus on Rackham’s legacy. The day-long event, which starts at 9:30am, will feature fairy tale and folklore scholars examining Rackham’s work and legacy.

The concert performance, with composer Jonathan Little from the University’s Department of Music, retells the narrative of Frederic de la Motte Fouque’s Undine which was illustrated by Rackham.

Researched, compiled and produced by Victoria Leslie and Jonathan David Little.

BIOGRAPHIES

Victoria Leslie’s PhD research explores how early water women narratives, including Friedrich de la Motte Fouque's Undine (later made popular by Arthur Rackham's illustrations) were used by writers at the fin de siècle to discuss women's sexual and political freedom. Her thesis is cross-disciplinary, collaborating with other academics and creative practitioners who are similarly interested in the cross-fertilisation of literature, art and music. Her previous writing has been short-listed for a number of awards, included the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award, and she was awarded fellowships at Hawthornden and the Saari Institute in Finland to research Nordic water myths. Victoria's fiction has accrued many awards and nominations and her debut novel, Bodies of Water is available from Salt Publishing.

Jonathan David Little is Professor of Musical Composition / Music History at the University of Chichester. His atmospheric and evocative music is notable for its mystical beauty, intensity and richness of material. Little was the first Australian-born composer to be awarded the John Clementi Collard Fellowship (2011), one of the most prestigious awards of the City of London’s ancient Worshipful Company of Musicians. His two-volume study of musical and literary orientalism won a Royal Literary Fund Award and he is currently working on further volumes in the series and a major text on musical composition. In 2017 he received “Special Distinction” in the ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize (USA) – one of the concert music world’s most esteemed awards.

George MacDonald’s Phantastes has long been recognized as an enthusiastically adaptive text, both

of medieval literature and Victorian medievalism. Colin Manlove speculated that William Morris was

the source of MacDonald’s tendency towards adaptive medievalism, and critics such as Giorgio Spina

and John Dorchety have discussed MacDonald’s most celebrated adult fairy tale, Phantastes, and

its use of medieval Arthurian romance, especially Thomas Malory and the Renaissance medievalist,

Edmund Spenser. However, scholars of George MacDonald have not engaged the philosophical

tradition common to Malory and Spenser and its synergistic impact upon MacDonald, namely that

stemming from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. As Maureen Fries, Russell Peck and others have

noted, Arthurian romance had both direct and indirect influence from Boethian philosophy, and this

relationship is one which I propose that George MacDonald has made explicit in Phantastes.

In the manner of a Boethian prosimetrum, the novel is written with interchanging prose and poetry,

and the narrator of Phantastes, Anados, much like the narrator of the Consolation, is seen in the first

pages of the work dealing with an intense experience of grief. In the Consolation, we are told that

Boethius, who, “weeping, coerced, enter the grief-ridden mode,” is approached by Lady Philosophy,

whose “height was of a measure hard to fix. For at one time she would keep herself within common

mortal limits, but at another she would seem to strike at the heavens with the crown of the top of her

head” (Boethius 1.1.1-2). Her dress is noted as having on its hem “the Greek letter pi” and “at the top

a theta” (1.1.2-3). Similarly, the narrator of Phantastes, awakes with the grief of his father’s death, and

meets amongst his father’s old possessions a fairy, who has “a tiny woman form, as perfect in shape as

if she had been a small Greek statuette roused to life and motion. Her dress was of a kind that could

never grow old-fashioned, because it was simply natural” (MacDonald 16-17). As with Lady Philosophy,

the fairy woman offers Anados her help, but he asks, “How can such a very little creature as you grant

or refuse anything?” Reprimanding him with the question, “Is that all the philosophy you have gained

in one-and-twenty years?”, the fairy woman proceeds to grow in height: “So saying, she leapt from the

desk upon the floor, where she stood a tall, gracious lady” (17). After a brief dialogue, the lady proceeds

to send Anados into fairy land, where he will meet Parcival, a knight of King Arthur’s court, and become

his squire. This choice amongst Arthur’s knights is no coincidence, for Wolfram von Eschenbach’s

Parzival is an allegorically informed Arthurian romance, concerned with the Boethian notion of fortune

(Eschenbach 3). Boethian philosophy and Arthurian romance are adapted by MacDonald to create in the

narrator an allegorical protrepsis, an experience of Boethian mental ascent, but one achieved through

fairy tales and knightly adventure, rather than debate.

Pre-abstract note to readers: I recommend downloading the attached PDF as there are a few compositor errors in this paper as published at The Journal of Scottish Thought special issue on George MacDonald's Scotland. (However, here is the link to the full special issue: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/content-images/JST12.pdf.) I have annotated the errors in the uploaded PDF. Some text is misplaced on pages 42–43, and the chart at the end has one error: somehow the dates for Salted with Fire (1897) were also listed for Heather and Snow (Jan. 1893). The correct dates for Heather and Snow are still listed on the chart, but two conflicting dates appear.

I have additionally added via annotation other Glasgow Weekly Mail MacDonald serializations that I have found since this article's publication. Researchers should also know about Richard I. Johnson's "A Checklist of Prose Works by George MacDonald in the 2019 North Wind" (journal), which lists several of these serializations (as well as serializations in England and abroad), and which I did not see before this article went to press (https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/northwind/vol38/iss1/11/).

Abstract:

Mid-nineteenth-century Scottish writers have sometimes been criticized for leaving Scotland for London. This article discusses Scottish literary and publishing networks in nineteenth-century London, with particular focus on Margaret Oliphant and George MacDonald. Oliphant was instrumental in the publication of MacDonald's first successful novel, David Elginbrod, after he had failed with numerous other publishers, including Blackwood. Once published, Oliphant repeatedly tried (and ultimately failed) to persuade William Blackwood III to let her review the novel in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. None of MacDonald's novels, Scottish or otherwise, were published in Scotland (though many were published by Scots in London); however, several of MacDonald's novels were serialized in Scotland before their London book publication. The essay also discusses Scottish (and MacDonald) influences on Oliphant's novel Salem Chapel and the affinities between MacDonald's and her work in her novella "A Beleaguered City."

Fairy Tales predate the institution of Sacraments in the Catholic Church by thousands of years.  Fairy Tales are often associated with children, but they universally contain the intricacies of ancient beliefs.  Fairy Tales allow us to isolate, suspend and consider particular realities in order to further explore the mysteries of our origin, meaning, and destiny.  In their timelessness, Fairy Tales dazzle us with the supernatural potential deeply embedded in the human soul – an ancient reality that need only be reawakened in us.

The Sacraments in the Catholic Church convey this timeless reality while bringing us into the immediate living reality of union with the Supernatural.  Each of the Seven Sacraments restore a particular mystery of man’s unique identity, bringing him into full participation with his origin, meaning, and end: Communion and Divine Reality.

Fairy Tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular, attempted to recapture the imaginations of Christians, and the whole world, within the message of the Scripture and the Gospels.  This course explores Fairy Tales and beliefs across ancient cultures.  It is also an intensive study of the works of George MacDonald, author of The Princess and the Goblin, and the primary source of inspiration for the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.  Reinvigorating a study of the Church’s Sacraments, students will be left with a lasting impression of how they can more deeply enter into the realities and mysteries of Heaven through the study of Eschatology.

The Hobbit, much like its predecessors Through the Looking-Glass and The Marvellous Land of Snergs, and (more subtly) Winnie-the-Pooh and The Princess and the Goblin, subverts ordinary forms of politeness for humorous effect.  This paper will consider several etiquette-laced interactions in Hobbit, along with their apparent analogues or precedents in the earlier works, in order to discern a deeper purpose underlying Tolkien’s etiquette-based humor.

The essay appears as the fifth chapter of "Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour in and around the Works of JRR Tolkien" (Walking Tree Publishers, 2016).

Maureen Mann, one of the co-editors, has established a social media discussion group for the book: https://www.facebook.com/groups/324159177970965/

In April 2016, Walking Tree Publishers  made my chapter and two others available on their website as pre-publication offprints.  In July 2016, they reposted it and added two more.  As of December 2016, you may still visit the link (http://www.walking-tree.org/news_archive.php?item=122) to access the pre-publication offprint of the chapter on the publisher's website.  However, the final, published version includes a few additional edits and thus is slightly different.

(De)Monstration documents and explains the peculiarly high incidence of monsters in English children’s literature, where monsters are understood in the term’s full etymological and critical sense as things which demonstrate through disturbance. In this context, monsters are frequently young people themselves; the youthful protagonists of children’s literature. Their demonstrative operation typically functions not only as a tool by which to educate children’s literature’s implied child audience, but also as a wider indicator (or demonstrator) of adult appreciations of children and arguments over how they should be permitted to grow. In this latter role especially, children become truly monstrous as alienated and problematic tokens in adult cultural arguments. (De)Monstration's chronological range is the eighteenth century to date. It examines texts by Thomas Day, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Martha Sherwood, Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling. The theoretical notions of monsters and monstrosity that it uses to discuss these texts are drawn principally from writings on the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the uncanny by Sigmund Freud, and the fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov.