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So I've stopped with my Girly Book and for the past week I was looking for a new book. Saturday I took a trip to the bookstore and ended up purchasing The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. I'd read this book once when I was about ten years old and I remembered enjoying it.


George MacDonald

I'm something of a bibliophile. The smell of yellow pulp pages is better than a perfume to me. My favorite sorts of books are those with illustrations. (I'm going to do a post on that someday.) This edition of The Princess and the Goblin had very lovely illustrations.



I fished it the same day I bought it. It is truly a beautiful piece of fiction. Here's just a sampling of his lovely prose:

The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast. Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue. Those eyes you would have thought must have known they came from there, so often were they turned up in that direction.

After finishing The Princess and the Goblin I remembered that I owned another book by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.



In the first chapter, I found this gem of a description:

What was the most strange was that away from her head streamed out her black hair in every direction, so that the darkness in the hay-loft looked as if it were made of her, hair but as Diamond gazed at her in speechless amazement, mingled with confidence -- for the boy was entranced with her mighty beauty -- her hair began to gather itself out of the darkness, and fell down all about her again, till her face looked out of the midst of it like a moon out of a cloud.

George MacDonald himself, is a very interesting figure. He was a pastor for many years and many of his stories were written to instruct children in the scriptures and teach them Christian truths. However his stories never read as contrived moral parables and are always true to themseleves.

He was a great influence on C.S. Lewis, and in The Great Divorce Lewis went so far as to include him as a main character. Lewis wrote the following about MacDonald:

I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. . . . In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.

One notable theme in MacDonald's stories is powerful, wise women. In The Princess and the Goblin the princess Irene is guided and delivered from danger by her Great-Great Grandmother, who, though very old, is also vividly described as possessing agless beauty and seems to possess great supernatural powers. In At the Back of the North Wind the North Wind (described in the quote above) is female and also powerful and beautiful. At the very least, MacDonald seemed to have a very high opinion of women.

As for me, I'm extremely excited to have discovered such a wonderful author and brother in Christ to inspire me. It's one thing to purchase a pretty book, it's another to find a true author. It's like making a friend.

As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God...the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.

~ George MacDonald