George MacDonald

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. The Princess and the Goblin is a children's fantasy novel by George MacDonald. It was published in 1872. Eight-year-old Princess Irene lives a lonely life in a castle in a wild, desolate, mountainous kingdom, with only her nursemaid, Lootie, for company. Her father, the king, is normally absent, and her mother is dead. Unknown to her, the nearby mines are inhabited by a race of goblins, long banished from the kingdom and now anxious to take revenge on their human neighbours. One rainy day, the princess explores the castle and discovers a beautiful, mysterious lady, who identifies herself as Irene's namesake and great-great-grandmother. The next day, Princess Irene persuades her nursemaid to take her outside. After dark they are chased by goblins and rescued by the young miner, Curdie, whom Irene befriends. At work with the rest of the miners, Curdie overhears the goblins talking, and their conversation reveals to Curdie the secret weakness of goblin anatomy: they have very soft, vulnerable feet.

There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys. These mountains were full of hollow places underneath; huge caverns, and winding ways, some with water running through them, and some shining with all colors of the rainbow when a light was taken in. Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins. They were not ordinarily ugly, but either absolutely hideous, or ludicrously grotesque both in face and form. It will become pretty evident why the little princess had never seen the sky at night. They were much too afraid of the goblins to let her out of the house then, even in company with ever so many attendants; and they had good reason, as we shall see by-and-by.

On the wide road leading straight into the country, the wise old woman unfolds her cloak -- and releases from within its folds the Princess Rosamund. When the girl opens eyelids swollen from weeping, she sees nothing familiar. City and palace -- gone Soon she and the wise old woman arrive at a cottage, one that seems to have a mind of its own -- to the infinite displeasure of the spoiled young girl Master tale-spinner George MacDonald writes of the palaces and furze-covered hills of mystic old Scotland in his delightful novel of court and countryside, A Double Story. It is a story of two very spoiled girls, a princess and a peasant, who are kidnapped by a strange woman for a lesson in life. They may not emerge the same but will their parents be changed for the better too?

Written at the height of George MacDonald's literary career, the story centers around the life of a simple merchant's daughter. Mary Marston's unswerving commitment to love, God, and others is contrasted with a backdrop of an array of characters and a complex and sometimes mysterious plot. It is a story of a woman who loves a man, and teaches him to change. Not out of his love for her, but simply because it was the right thing to do. MacDonald allows the characters a range from delightful to devious. As such, they were intended to serve as models. His message is that all eventually must stand before God.

Curdie was the son of Peter the miner. He lived with his father and mother in a cottage built on a mountain, and he worked with his father inside the mountain. A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them-and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors. I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot, melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight-that is what it is.

It would be but stirring a muddy pool to inquire-not what motives induced, but what forces compelled sir Wilton Lestrange to marry a woman nobody knew. It is enough to say that these forces were mainly ignoble, as manifested by their intermittent character and final cessation. The mesalliance occasioned not a little surprise, and quite as much annoyance, among the county families,-failing, however, to remind any that certain of their own grandmothers had been no better known to the small world than lady Lestrange. It caused yet more surprise, though less annoyance, in the clubs to which sir Wilton had hitherto been indebted for help to forget his duties: they set him down as a greater idiot than his friends had hitherto imagined him. For had he not been dragged to the altar by a woman whose manners and breeding were hardly on the level of a villa in St. John's Wood?

This 1862 volume contains two of MacDonald's fairy stories. The fairy Peaseblossom and the goblin Toadstool set off on the oddest mission: to lure a girl and a boy to Faery, to bring before the Queen -- for her subjects in Fairyland are too well-behaved to be amusing. Can they find the right dreamers?

At the Back of the North Wind was a mid-Victorian blend of fantasy, reality and moralising by the Scottish author and Christian minister George MacDonald (1824-1905). The book tells of a young boy called Diamond who is visited by a personification of the North Wind. Eventually - after a series of digressions - it becomes clear that the wind is in fact Death, and the story deals with the boy's sweet acceptance, and embracing, of his own early demise. Many examples of Victorian fiction feature the dying 'good child', a poor but steadfast family, and respect for the order of things no matter how unjust they seem.

The Princess and the Goblin is an enduring children's fantasy novel by George MacDonald, published in 1872. Anne Thaxter Eaton wrote that the book and its sequel, The Princess and Curdie "quietly suggest in every incident ideas of courage and honor.

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is a fantasy novel written by George MacDonald. The story centers on the character Anodos and takes its inspiration from German Romanticism, particularly Novalis. It concerns a young man who is pulled into a dreamlike world and over there he hunts for his ideal of female beauty, embodied by the "Marble Lady". Anodos lives through many adventures and temptations while in the other world, until he is finally ready to give up his ideals.

In the dusk of the old-fashioned best room of a farm-house, in the faint glow of the buried sun through the sods of his July grave, sat two elderly persons, dimly visible, breathing the odor which roses unseen sent through the twilight and open window. One of the two was scarcely conscious of the odor, for she did not believe in roses; she believed mainly in mahogany, linen, and hams; to the other it brought too much sadness to be welcomed, for it seemed, like the sunlight, to issue from the grave of his vanished youth. He was not by nature a sad man; he was only one that had found the past more delightful than the present, and had not left his first loves. The twilight of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of moral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the eternal sort.

Here are two-books-in-one, George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin and its sequel The Princess and Curdie. You'll meet kings and counselors and obedient dogs and lowly miners and tap-tap-taping goblins in these two book-length fairy tales ... stories that are more than simply fairy tales. "I personally selected these two George MacDonald children's stories for addition to the growing line of Whirlygig Kids Books. These two princess-and-goblin tales should be on every young - or young at heart - person's reading list," says Hollis George, noted editor and anthologist.