The Following is an excerpt from my biography of George MacDonald. For those who aren't aware let me explain that MacDonald was a Scottish writer from the 19th Century. He started out wanting to be a theologian and obtained the pastorate of a small church (64-people including pastor and wife), but he was much too honest and had too much integrity to bow to the fundamentalist and Calvinist views of his day and so he was dismissed from the pulpit. He instead went on to become one of the great writers of his time. He never lost his pastor's sensitivity though; his great love for metaphysical and theological studies along with his Mystical connection to God and the people around him, made its way into nearly all of his writing. Some people consider his fantasy novels: Phantastes, and Lilith, to be two of the greatest novels in the English language. He had a profound impact on CS Lewis who once stated that he considered MacDonald to be his "master"; and on GK Chesterton, another writer who would go on to influence Lewis in a large way. MacDonald may have been the most sensible Christian who ever wore the faith. Lewis loved MacDonald's work so much that he wrote, George MacDonald: An Anthology in 1947.

In Defense of Fairyland

Exploring the Fantasy Worlds of George MacDonald

By Charles Seper

Chapter One

The Sunny Land of Common Sense

Do you know where the word phantasm comes from? It comes from Plato's name, and his notion, that there was such a thing as objective reality, but that the five senses of the body didn't pick it up correctly so, reality he thought, was a somewhat hazy world for all people. Reality is fuzzy.

William Shakespeare in The Tempest said:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. [1]

Do we even know when we're asleep or when we're truly awake? Could the reality we experience when we're asleep be made of the same stuff we experience when we're awake? Are the two somehow tied together by a fabric of consciousness that we intuit, yet don't quite understand? Is this world of sleep and dreams the spirit world that religions speak of? And are there just the two worlds? Could there be more, perhaps many? Are these other worlds just parallel dimensions of the one we experience when awake but running on their own separate, yet connected, time lines, like a many faceted diamond?

It’s a profound mystery. There are those who have spent most of their lives trying to comprehend this mystery, would-be magicians for instance, who think they can pull on the puppet-master's strings and change the world to their liking. The Magician first seeks out a way to access the spirit world, to glimpse it's inner workings and hopefully to converse with those who reside there. He then goes out in search of relationships between these two worlds, and therein lies what he believes to be magical correspondences and the ability to control them, while he, often so wrapped in his own lust for power, never for a moment considers that perhaps these are things he was never meant to understand, let alone control.

From Ronald Taylor's translation of The Devil’s Elixirs by E.T.A. Hoffman:

“I came to feel that what we call simply dream and imagination might represent the secret thread that runs through our lives and links its varied facets; and that the man who thinks that, because he has perceived this, he has acquired the power to break the thread and challenge that mysterious force which rules us, is to be given up as lost.”[2]

There are also those like, Abraham or Daniel of the bible, whom the world has found it reasonable to refer to as the Mystic, that is: someone who has had direct contact with the divine, yet, not through their own initiation, but rather, because the divinity drew them in. And like the Magician, the Mystic also walks in two worlds, following a trail of breadcrumbs, never knowing for sure where it will lead. But unlike the Magician, the Mystic never went out in search of breadcrumbs. The trail came looking for him. And that trail, Abraham and others like him, referred to as: The Word Of The Lord.

We can't of course, know what the ancients meant by that phrase. We do know that, like many spiritual words and phraseology we find in the bible, that, the earliest known use of them came from the Sumerians, who were in all likelihood the forefathers of Abraham's family. But in searching out the Sumerian writings we still don't get any solid notion of what was meant when they referred to, the word of the Lord. Sometimes it may seem the Jews and the Sumerians both meant something akin to an actual voice discernable to the ears. Other times they seem to be talking about a kind of intuition—an inner knowledge. And still other times they seem to be recounting a dreamlike vision full of things that they don't quite understand. The language of the angels would seem to be that of symbolism and metaphor. This is most often the language of dreams and... the language spoken in the land between the worlds; that place known to Romantic authors as the land of Fairy [or Faerie]. And when writers try to communicate the knowledge of this enchanted land they often communicate it in the same form in which they received it. Perhaps they do this because they simply know no other way of communicating that which they themselves never fully comprehend.

George MacDonald, known best today for his fairy tales, both for children and adults, said:

The Greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself....[3]

He goes on to say that Nature rouses that something which is, "...deeper than the understanding—the power that underlies thought...."[4]

Friedrich Hollander saw fairy stories as nothing more than an escape from reality, which in all likelihood is probably the way most people see them, especially those who haven't yet discovered MacDonald. Hollander said in Munchhausen, "Truth is hard and tough as nails. That's why we need fairy tales."[5]

Hollander had a great sense of humor, but frankly, he just didn't get it. But someone who did get it was one of the most prolific writers since Aristotle—GK Chesterton. From his book, Orthodoxy he says:

My first and last philosophy,... I learnt in the nursery. ... The things I believed then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. ... They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. ... Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth;... I knew the magic beanstalk before I tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.[6]

One of those fairy tales meant more to him than all the rest. It was to have a lasting impact on every part of his life. He spoke of it in the introduction to Greville MacDonald's biography of his father, George:

...in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I ever read... it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald... And when he comes to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will be when people discover the possibility of collecting jewels scattered in a rather irregular setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather important turning point in the history of Christendom, as representing the particular Christian nation of the Scots. As protestants speak of the morning stars of the reformation, we may be allowed to note such names here and there as morning stars of the reunion.[7]

George MacDonald had a profound effect on his readers. Oddly, while he is best remembered today for his fantasy tales, materialism had a terrible, strong hold on the inhabitants of the 19th century, and so, it was his novels that made him popular in his own day. But even in his novels the reader will find a strong touch of the metaphysical that so dominated his thoughts. MacDonald drew an enjoyment from reading books even as a young boy that encompassed all the typical poetic elements of mystery that so engage the mystical minded. By his late teens, as a student at King's College at Aberdeen, young George was already reading Shelley, Coleridge, James Hogg, and Tom Moore while also finding time to write poetry of his own. He had a powerful intellect, winning 3rd prize in Chemistry and 4th in Natural Philosophy, subjects he would lecture on years later at a Ladies' College to earn some much needed money. For a time he seriously considered going into medicine but lack of funds forced him to retire the notion and instead he devoted his energy to literature and languages. In time, having graduating with his Master of Arts, but still having no clear cut career choice, he decided to enter Highbury College where he would try his hand at theology. After two years there he finally set upon what would seem to be his rightful course in life, that of a church minister.

It must be said that the majority of the people in his congregations took to the young preacher. However, his conscience would never allow him to speak anything he believed to be untrue, especially regarding God, the bible, or the faith, and so, he found himself at odds with clergymen and deacons nearly everywhere he tried to preach in these early days mainly because of his anti-Calvinistic stance and what some thought to be at least a somewhat Universalistic outlook. MacDonald only lasted around two years as a fulltime preacher. During this period however, he had his first book published. Within and Without, a book length poem appeared in 1855. George MacDonald was thirty one. And while it may seem that all his years of schooling had failed to bring him a substantial income, it was at least becoming clear what the future had in mind for him. In 1857 he had a second book of poetry published, but in 1858 his groundbreaking fairytale for adults—Phantastes—met with great success and finally put him on the map as a fiction writer. It was the map that would never be the same.


[1] From William Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, Act IV, scene 1
[2] E.T.A. Hoffman, The Devil’s Elixirs, the Introduction, (Ronald Taylor's translation)
[3] From GMD's essay, The Fantastic Imagination. As of this writing, the only place I know to find this essay is in a collection of Fairytales by GMD called, The Gifts of the Christ Child & Other Stories and Fairy Tales, where it serves as something akin to a preface for the book which was put together and edited by Glen Edward Sadler.
[4] Ibid
[5] From Friedrich Hollander's cabaret, Munchhausen
[6] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Doubleday, New York, N.Y., 1959, pp. 46-7.
[7] From Greville MacDonald's biography of GMD, George MacDonald and his Wife, the Introduction (written by G.K. Chesterton)