The Princess and the Goblin

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

“One of MacDonald’s best and most satisfying books”—a Victorian-era fairy tale featuring a lonely princess and a miner’s son (Tor.com).
 
As editor of the magazine Good Words for the Young, MacDonald had a ready audience for “fairy tale” and “children’s” stories and produced some of his most famous titles during this period of his writing life. The third of his stories for the magazine, The Princess and the Goblin, published in 1872, is universally acclaimed as MacDonald’s best pure fairy tale, and has been enchanting readers for well over a century.
 
This story of princess Irene, her mysterious ageless namesake “grandmother,” and miner’s son Curdie surely provided inspiration for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. G.K. Chesterton wrote of it in 1924, “I can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which has helped me to see—a vision of things—so real. Of all the stories I have 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 it is by George MacDonald.” This edition for The Cullen Collection is unedited in any way.
 
“A little-known, girl-powered fairy tale that should be on your radar.”—Bustle
 
“A rich, vibrant tale.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795351907

George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Book preview

The Princess and

the Goblin

The Cullen Collection

George MacDonald

The Princess and the Goblin

Introductory material © 2018 by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5190-7

www.RosettaBooks.com

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

The Cullen Collection of the

Fiction of George MacDonald

1. Phantastes (1858)

2. David Elginbrod (1863)

3. The Portent (1864)

4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

7. Robert Falconer (1868)

8. Guild Court (1868)

9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

16. Malcolm (1875)

17. The Wise Woman (1875)

18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

23. Mary Marston (1881)

24. Castle Warlock (1881)

25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

27. Donal Grant (1883)

28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

29. Home Again (1887)

30. The Elect Lady (1888)

31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

32. There and Back (1891)

33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

34. Heather and Snow (1893)

35. Lilith (1895)

36. Salted With Fire (1897)

37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to The Princess and the Goblin

1.     Why the Princess Has a Story About Her

2.     The Princess Loses Herself

3.     The Princess and—We Shall See Who

4.     What the Nurse Thought of It

5.     The Princess Lets Well Alone

6.     The Little Miner

7.     The Mines

8.     The Goblins

9.     The Hall of the Goblin Palace

10.   The Princess’s King-Papa

11.   The Old Lady’s Bedroom

12.   A Short Chapter About Curdie

13.   The Cobs’ Creatures

14.   That Night Week

15.   Woven and Then Spun

16.   The Ring

17.   Springtime

18.   Curdie’s Clue

19.   Goblin Counsels

20.   Irene’s Clue

21.   The Escape

22.   The Old Lady and Curdie

23.   Curdie and His Mother

24.   Irene Behaves Like a Princess

25.   Curdie Comes to Grief

26.   The Goblin-Miners

27.   The Goblins in the King’s House

28.   Curdie’s Guide

29.   Masonwork

30.   The King and the Kiss

31.   The Subterranean Waters

32.   The Last Chapter

"Papa seems so quietly happy."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

"Papa does enjoy this place so much."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

"Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday."

—Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

"Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week I think."

—Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

FOREWORD

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds), Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

This series of new editions is an outgrowth and expansion of my series of edited MacDonald novels published by Bethany House in the 1980s. It includes many more titles and follows the same general priority of creating more readable editions that faithfully preserve the spirit, style, and flavor of MacDonald’s originals. Six of these newly added titles, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not, however, been edited, updated, or altered in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as first published. These six—Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, and are thus reproduced for The Cullen Collection with the same text by which they are generally known. *

Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that encompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

"The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters...the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine." *

Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald.

How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world. *

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2017

INTRODUCTION

Forerunner to Narnia

Those who have been reading the books of The Cullen Collection in order will know that the three so-called children’s novels published by George MacDonald in 1871 and 1872 were first written for the magazine Good Words for the Young. MacDonald was the magazine’s editor at the time, and thus had an eager audience for this genre of fiction after he had spent the 1860s mostly writing lengthy adult realistic novels. The first two of these stories for the magazine were At the Back of the North Wind and Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood. Next in 1872 came The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald’s first full book-length fairy tale. It is also almost universally considered his best of that genre.

Good Words for the Young, however, was not turning out to be the financial success its publisher and MacDonald’s friend Alexander Strahan had hoped.*

Writing to Louisa in early 1871 at Halloway House in Hastings while he was in London, though he was obviously enthusiastic about his own work, MacDonald explained: "I have a bit of bad news. The Magazine, which went up in the beginning of the volume, has fallen off very much since. Strahan thinks it is because there is too much of what he calls the fairy element. I have told him my story [The Princess and the Goblin] shall be finished in two months more…I know it is as good work of the kind as I can do, and I think will be the most complete thing I have done…Perhaps I could find a market for that kind of talent in America—I shouldn’t wonder." ¹

Though the magazine itself was ill-fated, it resulted in the publication of MacDonald’s most well-known full-length children’s tales. After only a year, MacDonald offered to continue the editorship of the magazine without pay. The Princess and the Goblin ran in Good Words for the Young from November 1870 to June 1871, and was then published in book form in December of 1871 or early 1872. Glancing briefly ahead, in 1872, now with another more realistic children’s story, Gutta Percha Willie appearing in the magazine, and by then readying for a trip to America, MacDonald resigned its editorship.

It may be that the magazine itself wasn’t the problem, or, as Strahan had apparently told MacDonald, that there was too much of the fairy element in it, but simply that at long last Strahan could no longer forestall what basically amounted to the collapse of his publishing empire.

Patricia Srebrnik writes: "At various times Strahan’s long-suffering creditors insisted on taking part in the management of his company. In 1872, they seized Good Words and the Sunday Magazine and forced Strahan to retire from the business. In dire need of cash to continue the Contemporary Review, Strahan made the mistake of turning to English associates whose religious and political views were very different from his own. When the inevitable conflicts developed…Strahan found himself heavily in debt to his new partners…" ²

Srebrnik also quotes Isabella Fyvie Mayo’s characterization of Strahan’s general lavishness, and W.G. Blaikie’s comment that it was Strahan’s ‘phenomenal’ generosity to authors, ‘joined to a lack of financial insight, that led him into difficulty.’ ³

She goes on to cite MacDonald’s affection for Strahan, and both MacLeod’s and MacDonald’s attempts to help Strahan through his financial crisis by working without pay, concluding, however, Their sacrifices would not be enough to save Strahan from disaster. Perhaps it was inevitable…that Strahan would sooner or later depart in circumstances of disgrace. But he managed to hang on for a time, and to uninformed readers of the periodicals, it must have seemed that Strahan and Company was a flourishing concern. ⁴

One of the discordant factors that has become perhaps more prevalent than helpful in MacDonald studies is the hyper-analytical lens through which many of his fantasies are read. From this faulty foundation, more nonsense per square inch has been written and published about this aspect of MacDonald’s work than any other. MacDonald’s primary vision was a spiritual one. His brilliant use of many diverse imaginative literary vehicles was always toward this ultimate end. All other ends—and there were many, and they are worthy of note and discussion when they can be helpful, but not when they become an end unto themselves—were secondary to this overriding purpose and vision.

His fairy tales can thus be over-analyzed. In the process they can be spoiled of their essential magic.

At the apex of MacDonald’s fairy tales, the best of his pure children’s stories according to many is The Princess and the Goblin. Its delight and magic is simply itself. It cannot be analyzed, quantified, and imbued with Jungian and Freudian mumbo-jumbo, with MacDonald as its author laid out on the psychologist’s table and dissected in the process, without ruining it.

I simply read it as a pure fairy tale—magical, replete with symbols and themes, some familiar from previous MacDonald stories (the prototypical wise-woman grandmother fulfilling the imageries of those who have come before). I accept the story and its symbols and metaphors and allegories without analysis, allowing their magic and power and hidden meanings to fill me with pleasure. I read it as I read Narnia—with wonder, not analysis.

This was one of the first MacDonald books I ever read—it may have been the first, but North Wind and Gibbie are intermingled with Goblin as coming almost simultaneously in late 1971 as I entered a world that would change my life. Indeed, almost immediately upon its completion I set about writing my own cave-and-mountain, seeing-and-unseeing fairy tale directly modeled after The Princess and the Goblin. (It was called The Cave, not a very imaginative title, and was a shamelessly copycat attempt—but all authors have to learn somehow!—was never published, and, truth be told, probably deserved that fate—my own version of Seekers and Finders.)

Judy and I had already read Narnia and had been drawn into the power of such imaginary worlds. So no bombs went off in my brain to quite the same extent as I entered MacDonald’s fairy-tale world. What I did not yet realize at the time was that in The Princess and the Goblin I was actually entering the literary birthplace of Narnia itself. In the same way that MacDonald’s two princess stories had inspired my own feeble attempt at a similar fairy tale, they had done exactly the same thing with C.S. Lewis. (He was better at it than I was!)

In his anthology of MacDonald, C.S. Lewis says, "I am a don, and ‘source-hunting’ (Quellenforschung) is in my marrow." ⁵ It is in mine too. I want to know where things come from, and why.

I find the origins of Narnia particularly fascinating. Recognizing from my study of both men for forty years how much in C.S. Lewis’s writings (fiction and non-fiction) comes straight from MacDonald (for much of which it puzzles me somewhat that Lewis does not adequately acknowledge MacDonald as it seems he would beyond his master statement). I trace Narnia’s origins straight to the opening passages of Phantastes and Lilith (the magical wardrobe-entry into an alternate world), and then, once inside that world of fanciful beings and a young girl who sees what others cannot, to The Princess and the Goblin.

This book is Narnia’s birth-home.

The forerunner to Narnia’s Lucy is eight-year-old Princess Irene. She lives in a castle with her father and mother, the king and queen. Curdie, son of one of the miners, works inside the mountain beneath the castle. Near where Curdie and his father work lives a colony of kobolds or goblins—ugly devilish beings who are constantly trying to thwart the miners. In the highest part of the castle, Irene discovers a mysterious old lady who calls herself Irene’s great-great-grandmother of the same name. Like North Wind, she acts the part of a benevolent angel, and brings both Irene and Curdie into her plans.