George MacDonald is often regarded as the founding father of modern fantasy writing, without whom we may not have had the work of Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkein. His first work in prose, Phantastes, draws from many sources including German and English Romantic poets and the religious poets of the Renaissance. The protagonist, Anodos, journeys through Fairy Land, which could be a psychological landscape, with its twists and turns, descents and ascents representing various aspects of Anodos’s own internal journey. At the end of the text, Anodos ‘awakens’ as though from a dream only to be told that he has been missing for twenty-one days. During that time he has matured from a child to an adult who takes responsibility for his actions. Just before he returns to his own world, Anodos sacrifices himself to save his beloved and her lover, a chivalric knight. He seems to be a changed person recognising that it is by loving others rather than by receiving love that a person is closest to God.
MacDonald’s work possesses an assertion of his belief system as well as an artistic agenda. One of his final works, Lilith (1895), reiterates the power of the unconscious mind. Where Phantastes is essentially a fairytale for adults, Lilith is probably MacDonald’s darkest work. It expresses his vision in its entirety and despite the sombreness, it is far from being a negative text. The main protagonist, Vane, journeys through the land of the Seven Dimensions until he can accept that he must lie down in Adam’s house with the dead. Lilith challenges notions of life and death, wakefulness and the unconscious. Ultimately everyone must sleep so that they may awaken, die so that they might live. Long before Freud and Jung began their studies, MacDonald was exploring the imagination, the power of dreams and the layers of the mind. From this arises MacDonald’s belief that God exists in the unconscious mind. If art is the expression of the imagination, and God exists in the imagination, then art is essentially the path to God. MacDonald told his son Greville that Lilith seemed to be ‘a mandate direct from God, for which he himself was to find form and clothing.’ Lilith is an experimental, radical text pushing the boundaries of what art can say. MacDonald’s work flouts a rationalist approach to the world and concentrates on the advocacy of the unconscious imagination as the source of truth.
In Lilith, the characters grow physically younger as they sleep in Adam’s house. This process reflects the internal journey of returning to innocence and the purity of the child that MacDonald emphasised was the path to God. This belief is inherent in MacDonald’s writings. In his earlier work, ‘The Golden Key’, MacDonald does not question if God exists, but instead reflects upon what kind of God exists? MacDonald is often portrayed as conservative, but within the spiritual elements there is radicalism.
The short story, ‘The Golden Key’ demonstrates a religion beyond dogma or creed. Through the journey of the two protagonists, Mossy and Tangle, the values of human existence are examined. The extremes of good and evil found in Fairy Land mean that MacDonald can ask the ‘big’ philosophical questions about humanity. The journey is to find out what door the golden key opens. There is only spiritual not material gain to be found by opening the door. The protagonists do not know where they are going or what they are looking for and this mirrors the journey that MacDonald believes everyone faces in life. MacDonald is an eclectic writer setting up allegory or philosophy with implications to be taken out of the text and applied to real life.
Despite the difference in form, the fantasies, children’s tales and the novels should not be limited by reading them in only one way. The novels contain many elements found in his more fantastical works. In addition, many of the children’s tales could be read as simplified versions of the novels themselves.
MacDonald’s first novel David Elginbrod was published in 1863 and was to be the first of around two dozen novels. The novels are often set wholly or partly in nineteenth century Scotland. In David Elginbrod, Hugh Sutherland, who works as a classical and mathematic tutor for a Scottish laird's family, is redeemed and finds his true connection with God with help and instruction from David Elginbrod, a humble cottar and his family, who also work for the laird. David is thought to be based on MacDonald’s father.
Another novel, Alec Forbes of Howglen, is also thought to be semi-autobiographical: MacDonald spent his boyhood at Upper Pirriesmill, the ‘Howglen’ of the novel. The familiarity of location is betrayed by MacDonald’s use of North-East Scots, the dialect of his youth. The novels tend towards strong moral messages but MacDonald emphasises that the road to enlightenment is not easy. Alec must leave behind a past that included gambling, drink and prostitutes in order to find God. The novels are representative of MacDonald’s belief in universal redemption, the very charge for which he was accused of heresy. It is easy for us now to overlook how radical MacDonald’s religious beliefs were in his time.
