Tolkien's 'Smith of Wootton Major' & George MacDonald's 'Phantastes': A Comparison - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

littlemanpoet · 11-21-2006, 05:22 PM

It's my thread and I can double post if I want to! la lee la lee la!

Okay, seriously. I love the beginning of Phantastes because it so packed with Faery. The monsters are terrible and terrorizing, and the rescuers are true hearted and wondrous. Faery itself is a rich trove of delightful creativity. I can even put up with the flower fairies, forgiving MacDonald his 1850s time frame.

It's when the story takes its turn into spiritual allegory that I begin to dislike it. This starts in the Troll-woman's house, when the shadow runs up the corridor and attaches itself to him the moment he directly disobeys the command. So unsubtley a recapitulation of the Fall that it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief, let alone achieve secondary belief (there is a difference).

I loved the Prague story but didn't really like his vague wanderings through the castle. His attempts to rescue the marble beauty are again good, and the "you should not have touched me" is perfect. MacDonald's goblins are ridiculous; on one hand they mock him roundly, but the moment he confesses his sin and his undeserving of anything better than what they're giving him, they become proper churchmen who having succeeded in getting him to confess his sin, let him move on. Pfaugh.

And of course there's all the mothering of our rugged hero.

The story of Anodos with the two brothers who will challenge the three giants is again really good; but then it slips back to morality tale when he gets all prideful and vain about his knighthood.

Oh, there's the obviously Freudian thing with the girl with the globe; she prizes it and plays with it, and lets him play with it a bit, but then he grabs it from her and squeezes it until is breaks; this is so obviously a representation of her virginity and loss thereof, and Anodos' culpability in breaking it. That she returns later with a voice for singing actually works pretty well on the whole, but the allegory is still predominant.

Lastly, George MacDonald was a universalist, and therefore he couldn't stomach his own evil depictions. The Ash is as evil as anything gets, and it is the most true evil in the book; but it is only a tree. The giants ransack villages, and are evil also, and die for their crimes. But MacDonald's universalism seems, to me, to remove the guts from the story. ... always excepting when he actually let the story be what it wanted to be, instead of the preachy morality tale he kept forcing it to be.

How that has to do with dying in Faery and coming back to life in the real world I'm not sure, except perhaps for this: because the story is so strongly allegorical, the reader is forced to see this dying and coming to life in Christian terms, which limits its power to just one type, a moral/spiritual.

A well written Faery tale will have so many resonances all over the place by comparison.

Take Smith of Wootton Major for example. Well, maybe in another post..... (this one's long enough).

11-21-2006, 05:22 PM	#11
littlemanpoet Itinerant Songster Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Edge of Faerie Posts: 7,066	It's my thread and I can double post if I want to! la lee la lee la! Okay, seriously. I love the beginning of Phantastes because it so packed with Faery. The monsters are terrible and terrorizing, and the rescuers are true hearted and wondrous. Faery itself is a rich trove of delightful creativity. I can even put up with the flower fairies, forgiving MacDonald his 1850s time frame. It's when the story takes its turn into spiritual allegory that I begin to dislike it. This starts in the Troll-woman's house, when the shadow runs up the corridor and attaches itself to him the moment he directly disobeys the command. So unsubtley a recapitulation of the Fall that it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief, let alone achieve secondary belief (there is a difference). I loved the Prague story but didn't really like his vague wanderings through the castle. His attempts to rescue the marble beauty are again good, and the "you should not have touched me" is perfect. MacDonald's goblins are ridiculous; on one hand they mock him roundly, but the moment he confesses his sin and his undeserving of anything better than what they're giving him, they become proper churchmen who having succeeded in getting him to confess his sin, let him move on. Pfaugh. And of course there's all the mothering of our rugged hero. The story of Anodos with the two brothers who will challenge the three giants is again really good; but then it slips back to morality tale when he gets all prideful and vain about his knighthood. Oh, there's the obviously Freudian thing with the girl with the globe; she prizes it and plays with it, and lets him play with it a bit, but then he grabs it from her and squeezes it until is breaks; this is so obviously a representation of her virginity and loss thereof, and Anodos' culpability in breaking it. That she returns later with a voice for singing actually works pretty well on the whole, but the allegory is still predominant. Lastly, George MacDonald was a universalist, and therefore he couldn't stomach his own evil depictions. The Ash is as evil as anything gets, and it is the most true evil in the book; but it is only a tree. The giants ransack villages, and are evil also, and die for their crimes. But MacDonald's universalism seems, to me, to remove the guts from the story. ... always excepting when he actually let the story be what it wanted to be, instead of the preachy morality tale he kept forcing it to be. How that has to do with dying in Faery and coming back to life in the real world I'm not sure, except perhaps for this: because the story is so strongly allegorical, the reader is forced to see this dying and coming to life in Christian terms, which limits its power to just one type, a moral/spiritual. A well written Faery tale will have so many resonances all over the place by comparison. Take Smith of Wootton Major for example. Well, maybe in another post..... (this one's long enough).