George MacDonald and Peace -Phantastes?

David Stockhoff · 06 Jan 2014, 02:32 · from 2014-January.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2014 21:32:42 -0500
Subject: (urth) George MacDonald and Peace -Phantastes?
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Phantastes seems to fit Sorcerer's House in some ways too.

On 1/5/2014 8:44 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> I think you are right from the synopsis I just glanced at,  ghost of 
> the librarian as a raven, life, death, salvation, sleeping until the 
> end of the world, finding true life in death ... Sounds about right.
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jan 5, 2014, at 6:33 PM, "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com 
> <mailto:danldo at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>> 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 
>> <mailto: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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