![]() ![]() MacDonald’s fantasy was a natural extension of his theology, as he explained: Tolkien ( The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy). MacDonald’s Christian imagination paved the way for the faith-informed fantasies of C. Barrie) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (by American Frank Baum in 1900), MacDonald opened the floodgates for modern adult fantasy, as he admitted, “For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” īeyond making fantasy serious business for adults (and the reason that his fantasies were taken so seriously), MacDonald’s works uniquely combined his Christian faith and the Romanticism of the nineteenth century to produce soul-gripping worlds and tales. While children’s fantasies continued to be written in the twentieth century, such as Peter Pan (1906, by fellow Scotsman J. But MacDonald’s unique contribution to the writing of fantasy was to make it relevant to the serious adult reader. Rider Haggard joined the American Abraham Merritt in pioneering the lost world fantasy genre. The Irish Lord Dunsany and English Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. Wells ( The Wonderful Visit, 1895), though it was in the twentieth century that the fantasy genre became widely popular. ![]() Other late nineteenth century authors joined MacDonald, such as John Ruskin ( King of the Golden River, 1841), William Morris ( The Well at the World’s End, 1896), and H. It was MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872) which are considered to have launched the modern era of fantasy intended for adults. White, Frank Baum, Peter Beagle, Neil Gaiman and Madeleine L’Engle among others. MacDonald was a mentor to Lewis Carroll, and it was the enthusiasm of MacDonald’s children for Lewis’s Adventures of Alice in Wonderland which encouraged Carroll to publish it in 1865. MacDonald’s influence is easily seen, as he has been lauded by fantasy writers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, in our Christmas tradition of relating to popular culture in a timely way, we consider how MacDonald might have construed the music of Eddie Van Halen, whose passing in October 2020 was a momentous cultural event. Tolkien will then be revisited to examine their debt to MacDonald and provide us the means to critique the magical realists. MacDonald’s influence on Christian apologists and fantasy writers C.S. Contemporary writers in the magical realist vein, such as Gabriel Marquez (Colombia) and Haruki Murakami (Japan) among others (including the filmmaker Martin Scorsese) can be shown to owe their own debt to the adult fantasy of George MacDonald. The Christian faith guided MacDonald through the literary and philosophical currents of his day (Romanticism and Idealism) and can critique the fantastic aspects of magical realism today. This essay will examine MacDonald’s place in the historical development of fantasy, including the current fantasy-related genre of Magical Realism. George MacDonald is widely considered to be instrumental in launching the modern genre of fantasy intended for adult audiences. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism ![]() While reading Phantastes I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. Novalis, cited in George MacDonald, Phantastes The whole of Nature must be wondrously blended with the whole world of Spirit. In a genuine fairy-story, everything must be miraculous, mysterious, and interrelated everything must be alive, each in its way. ![]()
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