George MacDonald and Peace -Phantastes?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 06 Jan 2014, 01:33 · from 2014-January.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2014 17:33:35 -0800
Subject: (urth) George MacDonald and Peace -Phantastes?
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I would think that the most obvious MacDonald conneciton would be with
LILITH.


On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Well, as we all know, Peace references Lang's Green Fairy Book, Ludwig's
> biography of Napoleon, some of the fictional literature mentioned in
> Lovecraft like the Cultes des Goules, the Necronomicon, and Marvells of
> Science (Ambrose Bierce is involved there, too).  There is an additional
> mention of the tales of George MacDonald near Lang's book, and even though
> I am thorough, I wasn't about to read the collected works of MacDonald
> before finishing my Peace write up.  So the decision was to look over the
> more famous work and see if anything resonated.
>
> Maybe Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women does just a bit - it
> begins on the hero's 21st birthday when his room becomes a natural wood and
> he crosses into Fairy Land, and he is warned that the Ash Tree and the
> Alder Tree spirits seek to destroy him, spirits which can leave their
> trees.  Interestingly enough, the Ash tree is in the Olive tree family, and
> the Alder Tree is related to the elm.  He finds a statue by Pygmalion which
> flees from him, and eventually, he dies in fairy land to wake back up into
> the real world, thinking that he had been there 21 years when it was only
> 21 days.  While birthdays, deaths, and living statues are not necessarily
> anything unusual in fantasy, I felt that perhaps there was some, at the
> very least, riffing on some of these themes, what with the two trees in
> front of Mr. Tilly's house, a man becoming a living statue, though these
> are not precise linkages.
>
> The Princess and the Goblin didn't seem to fit too well thematically, save
> for the old "who will the princess marry?" connection - but that could
> be about half of all pre 20th century literature.
>
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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